The Case of the Imaginary Air Crashes
An example of pseudoscience was provided in a recent
television programme by parapsychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman.
The TV programme gave details of several seemingly impossible coincidences
that had occurred to viewers. Dr Wiseman then gave his explanation of these
"impossible" coincidences. Many events, he said, appear to us to be
extremely improbable. But this is because we have a tendency to overestimate the
rarity of such coincidences.
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For example, he said, someone might have a dream of an air disaster in some
foreign country, even seeing the crashed aircraft surrounded by dead bodies. The
next day, the dreamer anxiously scans the newspapers and TV and discovers to
their amazement that just such an air disaster has occurred. The dreamer
believes that he or she has had a premonition and by some paranormal means
foresaw the future in detail.
However, Dr Wiseman explained, the real facts are that air travel has become
so widespread and there are now so many airlines around the world that air crashes
are occurring practically all the time. Thus what seems an improbable coincidence is
in fact very probable. Any time you dream of an air crash one is overwhelmingly
likely to follow soon after and be misidentified as a coincidence.
This explanation is a very persuasive one and also very powerful because it
seems intuitively to apply to many other similar cases of
"premonition", "telepathy", "clairvoyance" and the
like, and seems to show both how fallible we are as observers of our own
behaviour and how likely we are to be misled by the simplest facts if we haven’t
studied them -- as scientists have.
Why is this pseudoscience?
The very frequent air crashes that Dr Wiseman blames for this
'apparent' precognition
simply don't exist, except in his imagination.
According to air crash expert Todd
Curtis, in the first six
months of 1999 there were three fatal air crashes around the world
involving passenger airliners -- one in the US, one in Italy and one in China.
In the whole of the previous year, 1998, the score was a
little higher but still only 38 fatal crashes. That's 38 in the whole
world, including Britain (where there has not been a fatal air crash for some
years) and including the United States..
To put this into the context of Dr Wiseman's argument, in
non-holiday times of year, anyone who dreams of an air crash might have to wait two or
even three months for such a crash to occur -- hardly the stuff of premonitions
or significant
coincidences.
When an aircraft from a major airline does crash (as at Lockerbie) it is, as
intuition leads us to expect, a rare event, usually caused by something very
exceptional such as terrorist bombs.
We are not wrong to estimate air crashes as rare --
our intuitions are perfectly correct.
