What we need to know is what would happen if we took a group of similarly endangered sea captains and had one half randomly selected to pray and the other half randomly selected not to pray. If the ones p. 132 who prayed survived and the ones who did not pray did not survive, then we might be able to conclude that prayer worked.
Until such a study is done, we might be better off and much safer if we followed the standard procedures for safety at sea: Batten down the hatches. Head into the wind and quarter into the waves. Slow to the minimal speed to maintain steering way, put on life jackets, lower the life boats, call for assistance, and so forth. These reality-based techniques, which have been proven effective by numerous studies, are more likely to foster survival than prayer.
Candidates for a sea captain’s license or a master’s certificate would flunk the required Coast Guard examination if, when asked about what should be done during an emergency at sea, they said, “Pray to the Virgin Mary.”
Religious mania is frequently associated with post hoc errors.
The ancient Mayans believed that their great god Chaac controlled the rain. The Mayans recognized how dependent on rain the corn crop was. Repeated observations showed when there was little rain, there was little corn. When there was no rain, there was no corn.
What’s the solution? How can we get rain when it doesn’t rain? That’s the question.
The real solution was to pump water from underground. That solution was beyond Mayan capabilities at the time. They were too busy thinking about something else, a fake solution that didn’t work. The Mayan fake solution was called human sacrifice. Eventually, they did stumble on a solution that worked for them. The real solution was to move elsewhere, where it does rain. That is what the Mayans did to finally solve the rain problem. But until they arrived at that solution, the priests experimented with human sacrifice. Whenever a drought took hold, volunteers were drowned in the cenotes at Uxmal and Chichén Itzá and elsewhere throughout the Mayan kingdom. Besides humans, many valuable objects were thrown into the cenote. The idea was to appease Chaac and to get Chaac to have his maidens, those of the heavens, pour water down on those beneath using their special water jars.
We know this was the motivation behind the sacrifices because the hieroglyphics written in stone left by the priests as well as the sacred Mayan books tell us it was. The evidence recovered from the cenotes, including human skeletons adorned with gems, confirms the sacrifices.
So what happened?
p. 133 After some sacrifices, it rained. Conclusion: Sacrifice worked. Action indicated: When it doesn’t rain, kill people.
All this sounds pretty stupid. But the point is that it happened. A whole civilization went haywire because it assumed that when one event follows another, the two must be related as cause and effect. There was no rain, so they threw people into the cenote. Eventually, it rained. Therefore, the Mayans induced the general principle: For drought, kill people.
Once the erroneous general principle had been accepted, there was no stopping the Mayan theocracy from finding lots of other reasons to sacrifice people for lots of other gods and goddesses and any special purpose that they could think of. In fact, a reasonable theory of the destruction of Mayan civilization is based on the decimation of the population by the need for sacrificial victims. We know that toward the end of the Mayan classical period, wars were organized mainly to obtain humans for sacrifice. Think about all those young men and women killed for post hoc, propter hoc. Think about them and weep.
In 1692, the Salem witch trials were judicial proceedings and therefore were recorded verbatim. Read those over if you have a chance. See how many errors of post hoc, propter hoc you can find.
Because a farmer’s cart lost a wheel three miles down the road after passing the home of some eccentric old woman, the court assumed the woman was a witch. The court assumed that she had somehow made the cart lose its wheel. Since she was three miles away when she did this, she had to have used witching powers to remove the wheel. If she used witching powers, she must be a witch. Therefore, the court sentenced her to death. She and eighteen other “witches” were hanged.
The story is fascinating. It all started in May 1692 with accusations by a few young girls (who believed they were possessed by the devil) against the older women in the community. Special court was convened; trials quickly grew into mass hysteria implicating even Governor William Phip’s wife. Fortunately, Increase Mather and his son Cotton were influential in ending the witchcraft trials at Salem in 1692. Both men believed in witches, but they were convinced that the trial evidence was unreliable. Both men disliked the post hoc, propter hoc evidence, especially when it assumed the form of a specter, an imaginary being resembling the accused. Under the conditions of these trials, the accused was responsible not only for events that happened beyond her control (like the loss of the cart wheel) but also for acts committed by her specter, over which she had no control whatsoever. Modern psychip. 134atry now recognizes the specter as a hallucination of the witness, which, incidentally, it was.
Public opinion first stopped then condemned the trials. The legislature adopted a resolution for repentance (December 17, 1696), including a fast day on which one of the three judges, Samuel Sewell, admitted his mistakes, mistakes mainly in appraisal of evidence. The jailed women were released. Reparations were paid to them and their families. The correction of the errors came too late for the “witches” who were hanged. They were beyond compensation. They were beyond the beyond. They were dead.
If you can’t read the original proceedings of the Salem witch trials, take a look at Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which is based on the transcript of the trials. Take a look and weep. Weep for all the innocent people sacrificed to the post hoc, propter hoc error in thinking.
Doctors and politicians sometimes benefit from and are sometimes excoriated by post hoc errors in thinking.
Doctors as well as politicians find the fallacy of post hoc, propter hoc flattering to their reputations. Doctors make a diagnosis, prescribe a course of treatment, and the patient’s symptoms disappear. The mere fact that some medicine was taken and a cure ensued proves nothing except that one thing followed the other. The medicine might easily have been utterly useless and the recovery due to natural forces. Most illnesses recover by themselves. If they did not, the human race wouldn’t be here. History teaches us that in many cases not only were highly regarded medical treatments ineffective, but also they were downright harmful. Mercury and arsenic salts, for instance, not only did not work, they also poisoned the person who took them. Abraham Lincoln thought the little blue pills he took were making him sicker, so he stopped them. They were mercury salts. We now know that they were poisonous and of no therapeutic value for Lincoln’s depression. In fact, they made Lincoln feel lousy. Lucky he stopped them. Otherwise we might have had a presidential suicide.
George Washington died of quinsy (abscess of the throat). His demise was probably helped along by the repeated bleedings he received as a treatment. Bleeding was considered excellent medical care in those days. The doctors who did it were considered orthodox mainstream healers. Those who did not do bleeding were considered marginal at best. Now we know that a severe throat infection like quinsy not only would not be helped by bleeding but also would be made worse. p. 135 Bleeding might have actually hurt Washington’s resistance to the bacterium that causes the disease. At the present time, the medical profession looks down on bleeding as a treatment for infection. Which would you rather have for your sore throat—blood letting or antibiotics?
There was a time when the British Medical Society opposed vaccination for smallpox. The medical establishment was wrong on that issue, too. And not too long ago, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician, lost his hospital privileges by suggesting that it was the doctors who were responsible for puerperal sepsis (childbed fever) because they didn’t wash their hands! The medical establishment was wrong on the hand-washing issue, too.
The lesso
n is clear: Watch out for medical claims. Unless supported by reams and reams of data, such claims might be bogus. Even the so-called standard of care, accepted treatments, operations, and procedures might be questionable and possibly harmful.
Of course, post hoc, propter hoc works both ways. The fallacy could increase the doctor’s reputation by ascribing cures to him that he did not effectuate. On the other hand, the fallacy could offend the doctor’s reputation by ascribing misadventures to him that he had no part in doing.
Recently, doctors have had a terrible time with the post hoc fallacy in malpractice suits. A doctor gives a medicine, and the patient dies. Doesn’t that raise the presumption that the medicine caused the death?
Of course not.
It might seem to raise that presumption in the popular mind. But it raises no such presumption to those of us who know how to think correctly. Unfortunately, it does raise that presumption in the minds of some (unscrupulous) plaintiff attorneys. That should not surprise us. Attorneys as a group are people who like to twist the truth and make things seem real that are not. They are advocates. Bending the truth is part of their business.
Just as a treatment can’t be assumed to have helped a person recover who recovered, so also a treatment can’t be assumed to have hurt a person who did not recover. Whether the treatment helped or harmed must be established by other evidence than the mere fact that one event followed another.
And don’t forget, there was a reason the patient got the medicine. That reason may have had more to do with the poor outcome than the treatment.
All people treated for cancer die. Most people treated for cancer die p. 136 of their cancer. It’s a pity, but it’s a fact: The cause of the death in patients who have cancer is most often the cancer, not the treatment. Most so-called medical misadventures or medical malpractice were merely events preceding a problem. Disease, old age, accident, bad luck, and misfortune provide a more convincing explanation of the death of a patient than do more remote contingencies of willful misconduct of medical personnel.
By the same token, a politician who wishes to gain the credit for some measure his party has inaugurated must show that the improvements that he maintains have followed its introduction would not have taken place anyway. About receiving credit and taking blame politicians can be duplicitous. They always seem to claim the credit and pass the blame. So if a period of prosperity occurs during their administration, they say they caused it. On the other hand, they are often very ready to point out that economic depressions that occur during their tenure are due to the adverse balance of world trade, supply side economics, high interest rates set by the Federal Reserve Board, fuel cost gouging by the Saudis—any scapegoat they can think of—anything else they can reasonably claim to have had no connection whatever with their own policy or administration.
History is full of post hoc errors.
Historians fall into the same error. The prosperity of America in the twentieth century is frequently ascribed to free trade or the firm establishment of capitalism (not specifically defined). Prosperity did follow free trade and did certainly seem to follow capitalism. Prosperity did certainly not follow capitalism’s opposite, communism. But in a larger sense, the connection remains unproved. We already know that there are no simple answers to complex questions. So we already know that it would be highly unlikely that the prosperity of the whole nation would or could depend on just one or two things.
More likely, multiple complex factors played a role, including the productivity of immigrant people who came here with the drive to succeed, the railroads and excellent roads, the great navy and army that, by victories in the great wars, made the imperial market for American goods, the remarkable inventiveness of the American inventors, and so forth.
My point is that the fallacy of post hoc, propter hoc often coincides with the mistake of historians who overgeneralize from selected instances of public policy or a small number of selected items or events that present only a partial picture of what really happened. Capitalism p. 137 may have been the cause, or one of the causes, of prosperity, but this is not proved by showing that prosperity followed capitalism. That one followed the other could have been mere coincidence.
Unless we have other evidence to demonstrate the necessary connection existing between capitalism and prosperity, we are bound not to believe the connection causal.
A man walks under a ladder. Two years later he dies. Does this prove that walking under the ladder is unlucky? Provided we ignore the fact that he died by crashing his boat while drunk. Provided we forget that he had walked under a ladder numerous times before without dying. And provided we never consider the extraordinary improbability of the alleged cause of death (how could the ladder have anything to do with a boat crash?), it is possible to believe such nonsense.
All superstitions are nonsense.
Yes, that’s a platitude: Superstitions by definition are unfounded and are, therefore, all nonsense. They are stupid, too. Because they are stupid, we have a right to call them stupidstitions. But why are they bad?
Superstitions are bad because they work to divert our minds from reality. They waste our time considering something fake when we should be concerned with what is real. Refusing to walk under a ladder probably had its origin in the perceived danger that objects might fall on your head while you were there under the ladder. That is a real danger, but that’s not what we are talking about here. Here we are talking about the superstition that walking under a ladder has some kind of remote effect on your life and luck. That a ladder could exert an adverse remote effect on you or your destiny is complete and utter bunk.
Fear of Friday the thirteenth makes no sense either. Nor does carrying a rabbit’s foot for luck. No doubt some people carrying a rabbit’s foot will get lucky. But it won’t have anything to do with the foot. Tying tin cans to the car of newlyweds probably originated in the notion that noise would frighten away evil spirits. The same may be said of New Year’s fireworks and noisemakers. Avoidance of black cats has a religious origin. During the Middle Ages, it was believed that witches could turn themselves into black cats. Thus, when such a cat was seen, it was considered to be a witch in disguise.
Principle: Superstitions are bunk.
From which follows:
p. 138 Lesson: Superstitions? Forget them. They are a waste of time.
Closely related to superstition is the belief in miracles. Belief in miracles is common enough and is sometimes based on the post hoc, propter hoc fallacy. A miracle can be (merely) something considered good or remarkable that accidentally happened at the right time, in the right place, to the right person.
Some miracles sound plausible enough until examined under the cold light of reason. Usually, a simple natural phenomenon will explain the so-called miracle.
I remember reading Saint Teresa’s autobiography wherein she was ascending the staircase with a lighted candle in her hand. A cold blast of air, a cat’s paw, came along and blew the candle out. But within seconds the candle relit again. Saint Teresa knew that the dimming of the light was the work of the devil, who she felt was trying to prevent her from reaching her room to pray. The devil blew out the candle. But by a miracle, Jesus restarted the flame.
More likely the devil had nothing to do the candle’s apparent extinction; nor did Jesus light it up again. The wind just seemed to blow out the candle. The candle just seemed to come on again. The same has happened to me many times without the special intervention of the devil or of Jesus. Perhaps the same thing has happened to you.
By the way, where does a flame go when it goes out?
Alice wonders about that in her adventure in wonderland. Where, exactly, does it go? Do we know? The pre-Socratics enjoyed that problem. But as far as I know they did not come up with a satisfactory answer. To say that the flame goes nowhere seems to beg the question but actually doesn’t. The flame that goes out doesn’t go anywhere. Our thoughts on the matter are simply being preconditioned (channeled) in t
he wrong direction by the words of the metaphor that describe the extinction of the flame. Some language, as the case here, comes to us with implied commitments, commitments so deeply ingrained that it is easy to overlook them or be fooled by them. Overlooking implied elements in language may lead to a simple-minded or (as in this case) a wrong view of nature. The problem of the flame is one of those pseudo-problems that arise, as Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, when language goes on holiday. If we had just said, “the flame became extinct” or “ceases” or “ceased,” there would be no further discussion or conclup. 139sion, for put this way, the question doesn’t get off the ground. So when you are asked next, “Where does a flame go when it goes out?” reply that the flame goes nowhere. It joins the null set, the class of non-existing things that includes secular churches, square circles, four-sided triangles, and whales that fly.
The real test for the flame problem and the other problems of that ilk is to ask whether the disagreement would be resolved by changing the terminology. For instance, no one could reasonably oppose the above resolution of the flame pseudo-problem by objecting that expressions like “the flame ceased” leave out relevant facts captured by “the flame went out.” With the case of the flame, there is no substantive fact under dispute, as became clear when the linguistic confusion was pointed out. On the other hand, a problem that cannot be resolved by changing its language or the angle in which it is viewed is not a purely semantic difficulty and must be resolved by examination of relevant and adequate evidence.
Because a person goes to some shrine and leaves his crutches there does not mean that a miracle has taken place. As a physician, I have cured many patients with placebos. I have actually gotten them out of a wheelchair after years of so-called paralysis. The problem was in the secret workings of the human unconscious mind and the will to remain disabled. Once that will is broken by a belief in the placebo, or the faith in the physician or the Virgin Mary or Saint Anne or whomever, the disability disappears.
Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference Page 16