Maggie's Farm

It was clear to me that the point Michael Crichton made in his speech we linked was that linear thinking does not accurately describe the world, or predict events.

Indeed it does not. Linear thinking is the domain of dangerous oversimplification and distortion - if not superstitious and magical thinking - most of the time. And especially when organisms are involved.

I am referring to linear thinking of the type that A leads to B. As an example that Crichton might have used, I recently read a medical piece about the illusion that germs cause disease. We know they don't -germs tend to be a necessary but not sufficient cause for infection. It requires the alignment of many stars to get a lung infection with pneumococcus, a germ which is everywhere. Thus the "fallacy of the single cause."

We love simplicity so we don't blow up our brains' hard drives, but simplicity (linearity) renders us vulnerable to all sorts of irrationality, such as the temptations of the fallacy of the single cause, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, and, everyone's favorite,  post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking.

The Global Warming fans are especially prone to the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, probably because they know nothing about statistics and graph-creation - leaving them also subject to the ipse dixit fallacy. The Cherry Picking fallacy is another one prefered by those who are more agenda-driven than fact-driven. All of this is boob bait, like that Polar Bear photo.

As we quoted Edward Murrow last week, "Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation."

Update: Working on those links that don't work - a bug in the system.