The soul of a bar bet is a proposition that is easy to judge in its presentation, but has a hidden twist that completely distorts its probability. Take, for example, a wager to see if a patron can throw a flat paper match into the air and make it land on its thin side. Looking at the match, you would claim that it cannot be done, or at least the probability was so low that it is safe to bet against it. That is until the patron bends the match before tossing it in the air. Our grasp on life is like a big bar bet; we see the probabilities that are apparent, but we don't realize that we're missing all the evidence.
One of the starkly apparent weaknesses of human thought is the ability to perceive basic probability. Looking at the universe and our existence on a probability scale is a deceiving process. For you to exist, an immeasurable number of events had to have taken place, each helping to create the condition that allowed the next to occur. Explosions, star formations, collisions, entropy, nitrogen becoming life, organisms evolving, surviving cataclysms of weather, walking, running, hunting, fighting, winning, loving; all over the course of billions of years, just so you can be here to read this. There you sit, like a hand of cards dealt from the galactic deck; what are the odds? Consider the game of Bridge, where any hand of 13 cards has a less than 1 in 600 billion chance to end up in your possession. With odds like that, it is a wonder why every hand isn't a winner. Like any card game, some hands have more potential than others and no matter how the game is played, the losing hands are forgotten despite their equally probable existence. That is to say that you, my reader, were inevitable.
The active agents in our misconception of probabilities are the unseen manifestations of all the other possibilities. A praying crew saved from a sinking ship does not a miracle make. What of all the praying crews who drowned? Who tells their story? As for the probability of surviving, does it not make sense that eventually, there had to be at least one ship to make it? Throw enough ships into a storm and eventually one will stay afloat. Despite the odds that Las Vegas gives to a professional basketball team at the beginning of its season, there really is only a 1 in 30 chance that it will win the championship. The real point is that no matter who becomes the champion that year, there will always be a least (usually only) one. This dispassionate view grates against the epic struggle against adversity that the stories of sports commentary lead us to follow, but emotions are the enablers of misconceptions. There's no supreme luck in picking a single M&M out of a bag of 30. Of course, what about all the things that had to happen in order for the players to grow up with such height and skill to get noticed by professional scouts, drafted into the league and avoid injury well enough to take it to the top? If the Fight Club narrator understands that on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everything drops to zero, why not apply the same concept to success?
The same blindness that makes us think we're special also distorts the history that we found all of our understandings on. I've talked before about the narratives that we assign to history to help us give meanings to our present. What happens when we get those narratives wrong? Then we have to come up with new explanations. At what point do we realize that we're only seeing what we want to see? When do we realize that we just make up stories to fit what is apparent to us? The past that we see is filled with hidden contrary facts that make it a foolish proposition to form any real conclusions from it. The ancient Phoenicians, credited as being the inventors of the alphabet, are not known for any literature that came of it. Instead, historians believed they used it for bookkeeping purposes, dubbing them the "merchant" race. This was a fantastic rope to hang one's self with because in time it was eventually realized that the Phoenicians were a very artistic society with a large amount of literature. They just used biodegradable papyrus.
Basic evidence of our perception of probabilities being more emotionally driven than anything lies in our predictions of events based on hopes and fears. The same person who will play the lottery, may refuse to step on an airplane. Automobile fatalities shot up in the months following 9/11, but all we saw was an increase in airline security. Then, when probabilities for failure are highest, we use blinded history to placate our worries. To counter concerns about the fragile state of our economy, we look into the past and see a nation that survived the Great Depression. Surely, if we can brush that off, a recession is only a scratch. This is where we forget to see all the other nations who failed under even lighter circumstances. This is where we smugly turn our chin up, because we are obviously blessed.
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