The illusion of intelligent design

Judging by popular topics, the average person in Chabrovsk is constantly looking for work, changing LED lights and learning English. In his wallet, if we take the average values, about a third of Bitcoin, several thousand dollars and fifteen rubles. This is mainly a white middle-aged man with a higher technical education. For one millionth part of this person I am. That's just me ...

I am not a typical habrovets. I am a refugee from Flibusta. I am not a programmer and generally a writer - another field is a berry.
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And now I would like to consider what the average reader of Habr on the other side of the barricade looks like. What cognitive distortions are inherent to programmers - a little more, perhaps, than to us, the writers. A thought about this arose in me after reading the comments on my articles - in which Habr's readers reacted to the text differently from my other readers.

Of course, I'm not going to be serious - after all, we have Friday on the nose. But I do not consider it an empty joke.

I'll start with a joke:

The electric kettle broke at the peasant. Plastic with a button. Somewhere the wiring is burned out. The guy sat at the kitchen table, disassembled. I found a breakdown, corrected, assembled ... However, a small hitch appeared: a spare part remained on the table - metal wire, 20 centimeters long, elastic, curved in a semicircle, insulation on the tips. The kettle works normally: it turns on, the water boils. But somehow it turned out carelessly, will you agree?

So the man decided so. He sighed heavily, disassembled the teapot and let's attach the wire. Procrastination doesn't fit anywhere. Again collected - the kettle works. But the wire remained! Disassembled again. And so the whole evening: sits silently, puffs, says nothing to anyone.

Tired, spat, folded the teapot with an incomprehensible spare part and dragged it to work for the electricians - they will definitely figure it out. No matter how wrong! Electricians poked around and surrendered too. Carry, they say, in the service of life, in repair - there, perhaps, faced with such a device. The man did not carry - he says, I can handle it. He himself was already ashamed: what, it turns out he can’t come up with a nonsense, with an electric kettle, to cope with it? I decided once again to sort out the kettle in order to understand where to attach this mysterious part.

Disassembled, laid out the details on the table, sits and looks. Illumination awaits. And then, fortunately, his wife passed by. She comes up to the table, takes the spare part and starts to insert it into her bra. While asking our hero:

- Where is the bone from the bra found? I have been looking for her for two days - gone without a trace. But I remember, I put it on the table ...

Omit the veil of pity over the finale of this scene. Married and so they know, and the unmarried will not understand. But it will be a little about something else - that the man, by default, believed that he had to put all the details in the teapot. This is a fairly common type of behavior - even described more than once (Mikhail Weller. Mauser Papanina - also about this).

In the case of a kettle, this may be justified. But life is more complicated than a kettle.
Express myself differently. Kettle - a product of reasonable design. Human life is not. In the life of a person there is a place for two other factors - chance and error. Life is not a mathematical mystery.

Do you understand?

Aunt Nura baked 14 pancakes. Vova ate half of the pancakes and one more. Maxim ate half the remaining pancakes and one more. Nikita ate half the remaining pancakes. How much is left on the plate?

And not at all. The dog came running and pulled the last pancake, while no one saw. In life it happens, but in problems there. Therefore, it is impossible to apply the method of solving problems from a mathematical textbook to situations from real life. We do not have natives who always lie and natives who always speak the truth. With us - everything is always this way and that.

That is why, by the way, the deductive method does not work. He is good at TV shows and books, not in real life. It’s convenient, you know, to catch the killer in hot pursuit, if he is a one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed dwarf that walks everywhere with a diarrhea monkey.

And you try to catch a criminal who does not stand out from the crowd. Who was pushed to the crime not by greed, desire for revenge or lust, but a second impulse, a surge of desire, because he lives without a king in his head and does what he wants. And who, even being fully exposed, will weep in court, cursing the policemen and claiming that he was slandered. At the same time, it is so reliable that you begin to doubt yourself. I know, I saw it personally.

I approximately understand, from where legs grow at this cognitive distortion - experience of readers Habr, probably, slightly more bookish, than average on hospital. I myself am this way - so I have to constantly pull myself up when I notice something like that behind me.

The second important point is the illusion of the possibility of a solution from the available data.

Any task from the problem book has a solution. As a rule, this solution is beautiful. It explains all the incomprehensible places in the problem and having found it, you almost immediately realize that this is it. It can be found on the basis of the conditions of the problem. In real life, alas, with this worse. In real life, from the conditions of the problem, you can always add up several answers and the correct answer, not only is it ugly, it also requires you to attract an external entity.

A dog from pancake puzzles, you know?

Let me explain with a funny example. Not so long ago watched the TV series: Counterpart. The series is gorgeous, the play of actors is impeccable ... but, but the plot, no, not that terrible is strange to madness. There are two parallel worlds whose history diverges a little, and there are spy games around it all. And there are insanely strange details, getting out of the rut - the spy organization is managed through heavy suitcases-radio receivers - the next floor is the source of the transmission, and the quality of the connection is like calling from Mars. In the series, no one spies with a cell phone. In the series, space was punctured in Berlin, and negotiations with a parallel world are taking place in Königsberg.

This is all explained simply - but outside the framework of the series. This is a trivial remake of the spy story about the Cold War into fiction. Huge radios are needed, because the leadership sits in Moscow. Cellular no, because it is not invented. And all the other oddities make sense.

But not in the series. Within the framework of the series, it is pointless to search for them.

Therefore, if you can not find the answer, do not hesitate to attract external entities. You are not in the problem book. You see not a part of the picture, which is guaranteed to solve the mystery, but just a part. Selected at random.

Let's try to apply a new method to the puzzle of the death of the Dyatlov group. All the theories that I read have one defect. Their authors are trying to explain everything. Every detail, every button and daermmazuaya must be interpreted.

Take your wife's purse and shake it out. And try to come up with a theory that would logically explain the presence of each item in the bag. If there is no wife, you can skip the paragraph, you still will not understand anything.

The best theory I've heard was that a woman, fleeing a bear that was chasing her, would throw one thing out of the bag, and the bear would be distracted by sniffing. Yes, this theory explains everything. But how realistic is this theory?

That's it. If you want to find out what really happened to Dyatlov's group, try to throw out all the minor things from the theory. You do not explain everything in one story. You can throw away anything.

Can not explain why dyatlovtsy ran out of the tent barefoot? Drop it. This is the fifties. Mansi tourists will not be offended. But also to pass by footwear lying on snow ... Well, not absolutely, of course, on snow ... As they say, “Let me take off my felt boots. We still have to attack "- if you know what I mean. Why is a tent cut? “What if there is still alive there? However, it is necessary to help, ”thought the Mansi, hung with acquired shoes. But the entrance to the tent was covered with snow ...

Not so long ago I had a discussion about this. There, one of my colleague stated that the theory of the death of dyatlovtsy, based on mass insanity, which one of the members of the group infected the rest, is untenable.

“Yes, such an infection happens,” he agreed, “a charismatic leader can infect others with his super-idea.” But in such a crowd there are always people who are not influential. And they cool the heat, stopping the slide into madness.

What can I say about this? Let's assign hundreds of tourists random numbers, from one to ten according to the degree of suggestibility, where 10 is absolutely suggestible, and zero is cold-blooded.

Then, we randomly divide them into groups of nine people. Is the probability that zero in at least one group will be only suggested tourists with numbers of eight and above equal to zero? Is the probability that a newbie who is prone to panic infects with psychosis is equal to zero?

Yes, this is not the most likely event. But incredible events happen. However, I do not claim that it was so. As it was - we will never know. Including because we cannot distinguish the correct answer from the wrong ones close to it.

Night, total darkness. A frozen Chinese flashlight with a frozen battery, a wind on which a torch cannot be lit, conflicts in a group where two leaders are fighting for influence and a terrible frost drinking life in seconds.

It all kills. And does it really matter in which particular combination? To establish, relying on investigative actions, which were conducted not in order to establish the truth, but in order to reassure Moscow and at the same time not substitute anyone, this is still impossible.

This is an ugly answer. He will not suit you. But it is about this article.

In the picture to attract attention: Owl teaches cats to catch mice. Painting the Lombard School, 1700s. In it, I see an allegory of our current conversation - some readers are happy, some ask "and why it is on Habré ...".

Well, in order to reward readers who have read this before, I propose a book novelty. And which one! Gorgeous, deep, cult romance. In terms of the impact on the American reader, this book is comparable to the Trick 22 of Joseph Heller who plowed up the Western reader and which is almost unknown in Russia.



Yes, yes, I'm talking about the novel “The Endless Joke” by David Foster Wallace, brilliantly translated by amateurs - Sergey Karpov and Alexei Polyarinov. The translation is great. You read as if you were talking to an intelligent interlocutor.

Yes, the book is not lucky with annotations. “In the near future, patients of the Ennethaus rehabilitation clinic and students of the Enfield Tennis Academy, as well as government agents and members of the terrorist cell are looking for a master copy of Endless Joke, a film that is rumored to be so dangerous that anyone who looks at it dies from bliss.

Yes, the book is about that too, but that’s not the main thing. The book is not crazy nonsense. This logical and coherent narrative, during which the author, distracting himself to various trifles, of course, shows us a string of human images that are frightening in their realism. This is a slice of society and a freak show at the same time. Reading this is both fun and interesting, and this is entertainment, not hard work. In one abstract, lying: This book is absolutely not to put next to the "Ulysses" of James Joyce. Because her place is about Schweik.

The author carries with him, exploring various aspects of obsession. This, I think, will be interesting to Habr's readers. And yes - the book is monstrous, unimaginably thick. This is a huge Talmud, which can enjoy long weeks. Also, habrovchane will find in the novel a very warm, lamp-cartridge world of the nineties, extrapolated to the future of the author - and our present.