Dead Worshipers Tell No Tales

[caption id="attachment_1371" align="aligncenter" width="355"] Cicero, Roman philosopher and statesman.[/caption]

Cicero recounted the following story:

A non-believer named Diagoras was shown painted tablets depicting some worshipers who had prayed and then survived a shipwreck.

Diagoras was not impressed. He wondered about the portraits of those worshipers who had prayed but still drowned.

Apparently, drowned worshipers told no tales.

Think of this story the next time

• you think the supermarket queue you join always moves slowly. Is it because you tend not to remember the times when queues move fast?


• someone tells you that dropping out of university is a smart career move ever since Bill Gates left Harvard to found Microsoft. People and the media do not seem to talk a lot about university dropouts who end up with mediocre careers


• an astrological prediction seems to come true


• you meet a rude person


• you read the story of how the self-exiled New Castle mining magnate Nathan Tinkler literally punted his house on a risky mining venture and amassed a fortune within the span of a few years

Meaning of Life and Color of Jealousy

[caption id="attachment_1350" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Richard Dawkins, biologist, author and atheist.[/caption]

Who has not quested and pondered on the meaning of life?

My own misguided, adolescent quest for the meaning of life led me to the ashram of a yogi, the sermons of J. Krishnamurti, the glib utterances of the charlatan Osho Rajneesh, a university course in Shada Darshana (the Six Schools of Indian Philosophy), and the popular works of Bertrand Russell and other Western thinkers.

One of these thinkers was an eccentric Austrian named Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had become a cult figure by the time he died in Cambridge, England at the age of 62 in 1951.

When Wittgenstein first came to Cambridge in 1911 to study the foundations of mathematics with Russell, his lordship could not decide if Wittgenstein was a crank or a genius but eventually settled for the latter.

In 1929, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge for a Ph D, occasioning the economist Keynes’ letter to his wife in which he noted: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.”

Wittgenstein’s philosophy of logical positivism inspired a group of thinkers called the Vienna Circle. Its central tenet was distilled in the aphorism “The meaning of a sentence is its method of verification.”

According to this "method of verification", a sentence had to satisfy one of the following conditions to be valid:

1. True by definition. “A triangle has three sides.”
2. Empirically verifiable: “Mt. Everest is taller than Mt. Druit.”

Conversely, the following sentences are not valid as they are neither true by definition nor empirically verifiable:

1. A thing of beauty is a joy forever
2. Jesus was born of immaculate conception
3. God is great
4. In my End is my Beginning

Logical positivism had a grand ambition: To smash metaphysics and, with it, all the “ultimate” questions. It ran into a familiar epistemological hurdle: itself.

By the yardstick of logical positivism itself, the sentence “The meaning of a sentence is its method of verification” is a nonsense. Perhaps, this is why, despite Wittgenstein’s modest belief that he had solved all philosophical problems by analysing language, we keep asking the ultimate questions.

Fast forward to 2012 and an epiphany of sorts!

A recent ABC TV’s Q & A panel discussion pitted Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, against the British evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins.

At one point, Dawkins, arguing that life has no meaning beyond itself, said that just because you can ask a question does not mean it is a valid question.

“What is the color of jealousy?” is one such invalid question, according to the renowned biologist and author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.

Dawkins’ argument resonated deeply with me. I wish I had come across such an insight during my adolescent meanderings. Then, perchance, if not abandon my futile search for the miraculous, I might at least not have given up the study of calculus in favor of canard.

More Dog Whistling TV Programs, Please!

Who says prime time current affair programs on free-to-air TV channels are rubbish? I propose that they can be edifying.

In a recently aired one such TV program, a colleague apparently heard the phrase "ethnic enclaves" for the first time. In a low, conspiratorial whisper to another colleague, my colleague gingerly pronounced the word "enclaves" a few times like a jittery rugby fullback juggling a high ball before gathering it safely into his arms.

It was apparent that my thirty something colleague had never come across this phrase before, but thanks to the current affair program, my colleague had finally learned a new phrase and, with it, a new category of evils lurking in the suburbs.

This got me thinking. If my colleague had never heard the phrase "ethnic enclaves" before, what about associated words and phrases such as "ethnic cleansing", "pogroms", "dog whistling", "xenophobia", "yellow peril", "Asian horde", "concentration camps", "Lebensraum" and so on? Surely, the Balkan wars took place within the living memory of my colleague’s generation?

Please, explain!

To sum up, we need more dog-whistling current affair TV programs advocating ethnic cleansings, pogroms and concentration camps so that the suburbs can be ridden of undesirable ethnic enclaves and this fair Continent of carefree surfers and cricketers shielded from the imminent dangers posed by the yellow peril and swarthy hordes.

Ambushed by Outlier

On Saturday morning, I reached a radiology in a neighbouring suburb for a dental x-ray at 9:30, hoping to wrap up the visit in 15 minutes. I ended up waiting for an hour - twice punctuated by my inquiries about expected waiting time  - before an amiable, bespectacled radiologist materialised and led me to the x-ray room.

When asked why I had to wait so long when this type of x-ray should be a fairly short affair, he only murmured, "I don't know. It was a misunderstanding."

Back at the main waiting room, I handed the slip of paper that the radiologist had asked me to hand in to the reception, repeating to one of the receptionists what the radiologist had told me, that I had waited an hour as a result of a "misunderstanding".

The receptionist conferred with a colleague to her right and said something like, "You'd to wait as long as you did because the x-ray room has another machine that was being used by another patient for a procedure that takes time."

"You're unlucky," she added as she apologized and wished me a great day.

***

To begin with, what us lay folks call being "unlucky", experts from quantitative disciplines such as economics, social sciences and statistics may call being victims of "outliers", which are nothing but rare, out-of-the-ordinary events.

Examples of outliers include winning a lottery, the volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD that buried Pompeii, air crashes in developed nations, Australia's national rugby team Wallabies posting a win against New Zealand's All Blacks ... and, apparently, waiting for an hour to get one's "missing/crowded" teeth x-rayed.

Since my dentist indicated that I will have to make a number of visits to the radiology, I am mainly concerned with two questions.

First, what is the probability of my being "unlucky" in the same radiology's waiting room in my next visit?

For the sake of argument, let's assume that, on average, 1 in 100 dental x-ray patients on a Saturday morning gets "unlucky" in that particular radiology, ending up waiting an hour. This means the probability of getting unlucky is 1 percent or 0.01.

From this, assuming that two visits to the radiology for dental x-rays are independent, i.e. the first visit does not influence the waiting time of the second visit, the probability that I will again be "unlucky" on the second visit is still 0.01.

A slightly different question is this. What is the probability that a patient like myself will be "unlucky" in two consecutive visits? Intuition tells us that it has to be lower than 1 in 100. In fact, it is 0.01 x 0.01 = 0.0001 or 1 in 10,000.

On the other hand, I may reason that since I was already unlucky in my last visit to the radiology, the probability of getting unlucky in the next visit is lower than 1 in 100. If I reason like this, assuming that the previous visit has no effect on the waiting time of my next visit, I have just fallen victim to the gambler's fallacy.

The next question I am interested is this. If I am not unlucky in my next visit to the radiology, what should I expect the waiting time to be? To put it another way, what is the average waiting time for a dental x-ray on a Saturday morning?

Assuming that waiting times are normally distributed and a waiting time of 1 hour lies in the upper 1 percent of the distribution, i.e. 99 percent of waiting times are less than 1 hour, the average waiting time is around 35 minutes, with the standard deviation of around 11 minutes.

This means that my initial hope of wrapping up the visit in 15 minutes was a forlorn hope. From the properties of the normal distribution, it can be estimated that there is less than 3 percent likelihood of a waiting time to be 15 minutes or less.