It can't just be random chance, too many coincidences...

[borrofburi]

...it must have meaning, even if *some* things don't happen for a reason, this is just too unlikely....

You are not so smart:

When you desire meaning, when you want things to line up, you forget about stochasticity. You are lulled by the signal. You forget about noise. With meaning, you overlook randomness, but meaning is a human construction.

You have just committed the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

The fallacy gets its name from imagining a cowboy shooting at a barn. Over time, the side of the barn becomes riddled with holes. In some places there are lots of them, in others there are few. If the cowboy later paints a bullseye over a spot where his bullet holes clustered together it looks like he is pretty good with a gun.

By painting a bullseye over a bullet hole the cowboy places artificial order over natural random chance.

If you have a human brain, you do this all of the time. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predictable malfunction of normal human logic.

If hindsight bias and confirmation bias had a baby, it would be the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

When reality shows are filmed, the producers have hundreds of hours of footage. When they condense that footage into an hour, they paint a bullseye around a cluster of holes. They find a narrative in all the mundane moments, extracting the good bits and tossing aside the rest. This means they can create any orderly story they wish from their reserves of chaos.

Anywhere people are searching for meaning, you will see the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. For many, the world loses luster when you accept the idea random mutations can lead to eyeballs or random burn patterns on toast can look like a person's face.

If you were to shuffle a deck and draw out 10 cards, the chances of the sequence you drew coming up are in the trillions, no matter what they are. If you drew out an ordered suit, it would be astonishing, but the chances are the same as any other set of 10 cards. The meaning is a human construct.

To admit the messy slog of chaos, disorder and random chance rules your life, rules the universe itself, is a painful conceit. You commit the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy when you need a pattern to provide meaning, to console you, to lay blame.

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/09/11/the-texas-sharpshooter-fallacy/

 

[RedYellow]

That's a very good way of putting it. And this is the overriding problem with much theistic arguing: People allow human perspective to interfere with their thinking. They look for coincidences and single them out, then assume that those coincidences must be specifically for their benefit.

 

[lrkun]

Pattern recognition leads to food, protects you from harm. You are born looking for clusters where chance events have built up like sand into dunes. You are able to read these words because your ancestors recognized patterns and changed their behavior to better acquire food and avoiding becoming it.

Carl Sagan said in the vastness of space and the immensity of time it was a joy to share a planet and epoch with his wife. Even though he knew fate didn't put them together, it didn't take away the wonder he felt when he was with her.

You see patterns everywhere, but some of them are formed by chance and mean nothing. Against the noisy background of probability things are bound to line up from time to time for no reason at all. It's just how the math works out. Recognizing this is an important part of ignoring coincidences when they don't matter and realizing what has real meaning for you on this planet, in this epoch.

Don't you think the best solution is to ignore patterns? If yes, why? If no why?

What if we don't ignore the patterns? what will happen? Is it a good? if yes, why? if no why?

Summary:

Knowing which patterns happen for a reason and knowing that which is not important to you is likewise implied by the conclusion of the article. It is not expressly stated, but it is there.

 

[DepricatedZero]

Don't you think the best solution is to ignore patterns? If yes, why? If no why?

What if we don't ignore the patterns? what will happen? Is it a good? if yes, why? if no why?

Summary:

Knowing which patterns happen for a reason and knowing that which is not important to you is likewise implied by the conclusion of the article. It is not expressly stated, but it is there.

Pattern recognition is a tool of learning, defining raw data and categorizing it in patterns. Humans are creatures of pattern, look at the symmetry around you. Ignoring patterns is dangerous, and puts the ultimate stop to learning and understanding.

It's just important that we rationally apply what we know to what we perceive, so that we don't assume a pattern has meaning.

As an example, I noticed an interesting pattern playing Mega Man over the weekend.

I played through the first 4 games of the classic series, and noted that every time when I defeated Wily, I was wearing a gray suit. That's a pattern. However, it doesn't have meaning. Or it may, though there's no mention of it anywhere - but it certainly doesn't indicate that Wily is vulnerable to the color gray. I recognize the pattern, and I know that while (because it is man made) there may be some meaning, the meaning is unlikely to be what I prescribe to it.

 

[Anachronous Rex]

Don't you think the best solution is to ignore patterns? If yes, why? If no why?

What if we don't ignore the patterns? what will happen? Is it a good? if yes, why? if no why?

Summary:

Knowing which patterns happen for a reason and knowing that which is not important to you is likewise implied by the conclusion of the article. It is not expressly stated, but it is there.

Pattern recognition is a tool of learning, defining raw data and categorizing it in patterns. Humans are creatures of pattern, look at the symmetry around you. Ignoring patterns is dangerous, and puts the ultimate stop to learning and understanding.

It's just important that we rationally apply what we know to what we perceive, so that we don't assume a pattern has meaning.

As an example, I noticed an interesting pattern playing Mega Man over the weekend.

I played through the first 4 games of the classic series, and noted that every time when I defeated Wily, I was wearing a gray suit. That's a pattern. However, it doesn't have meaning. Or it may, though there's no mention of it anywhere - but it certainly doesn't indicate that Wily is vulnerable to the color gray. I recognize the pattern, and I know that while (because it is man made) there may be some meaning, the meaning is unlikely to be what I prescribe to it.

Gray wily...

White whale...

Free willy...

It's a Moby Dick reference!*


*case in point

 

[lrkun]

Gray wily...

White whale...

Free willy...

It's a Moby Dick reference!*


*case in point

You must have encountered both in order to see the connection, because I don't get it. Hehehe. Well, on the other hand you won't get this reference either if you have not been exposed to it.

Ex. Timotei, timotei, timoteiiii.

^^. *uniliver reference.

In being logical, the author talks about the topic of patterns in the case of history repeating itself. According to him, it's best to look at it as if it's something new and not a reoccuring pattern. It may only look similar, but it is actually different. - paraphrasing McInery.

 

[TerminalHamster]

As Ray Kurtzweil loooooves to point out, pattern recognition pretty much is the only thing going for our brains that computers can't quite manage yet.

So yeah, seeing patterns in things is neat, but it's also seeing patterns in things, and at the expense/discarding of things we didn't see the patterns in.

Unfortunately importance and interpretation of any found patterns is often relative to the person who notices them. And us humans aren't exactly the most straightforward bunch.

Sooo I'll just take notice of the trend that noticing trends is a natural thing we do, reading more into patterns or trends in a non methodical manner is just gonna lead ya to finding more odd trends and doing the same again and again.

Who knows where the interpretations will stop if you don't stop to understand HOW the patterns are formed.

I'm also noticing the trend that people paying an awful lot of attention to patterns either test them for consistency and try to figure out why, or attribute an all powerful sky man.

*shrug*

 

[Joanna]

Hy, I see that you are talking about Pattern Recognition.
Take a look at this link: http://www.intechopen.com/search/?q=Books:%20Pattern%20recognition
Here you can find several books about it. The present books are intended to collect representative researches around the globe focusing on low-level vision, filter design, features and image descriptors, data mining and analysis, and biologically inspired algorithms.
Books are free to download