The Geeky Atheist

Sorry for the long outage, I've been having a crazy busy summer. I'm trying to finish up a lot of work before I'm off to TAM, but as I was walking my dog the other day, I was listening to the latest episode of The Non-Prophets. In it Dennis reads out part of an email from someone named Jim they received. If anyone knows who the author is and if they have a website, please let me know so I can link to them.

I play drums in a rock band for fun, and I've decided I need to help the global financial crisis by buying a new set of drums. Anyway, I was busy setting them up, all excited, when I dropped my tuning key -- a small key, a few centimeters across used for setting up and tuning the drums. Something that drummers always lose.

I watched it bounce to the floor, and under my kick drum pedal. I got down on my hands and knees and found the key under the pedal, resting on the pedal base plate. However, it was sitting perfectly in a drum-key shaped rubber hollow. It had fallen in into a special spot designed by the kick pedal designers to store the drum key.

I was amazed. The key holder was a clever and useful design and I only found it because I accidentally dropped my drum key, and it fell into it. I have a mathematics degree, and I knew this was not impossible, but certainly improbable. However, I was quite excited about how I discovered the secret storage place. The odds were very low, so I knew it would make a great story to share about how I found it.

I want you to pause here, and ask yourself what assumption you personally would have drawn from that experience. Same as me?

Because a while later, I was packing up the drums and found a drum key on the floor. It was the one I had dropped. The rubber hollow already had another spare drum key in it by those very clever kick pedal designers.

Now I, a very scientifically minded person, automatically assumed the incredibly high odds of it falling-perfectly-into-its-mold hypothesis, rather than the very obvious spare-key-already-in-place hypothesis. In both cases, I jumped to the less probable conclusion.

This is a perfect anecdote to use to ponder: when should you be skeptical of highly improbable events? The discussion ensues, and they highlight most of the good points:

• Since his skepticism would have only wasted his efforts when all he needed was a drum key, his conclusion jumping wasn't harmful.
• Someone might be too skeptical if they were to look an additional 10-15 minutes after they found the spare key.
• A true-believer is someone who would later find the other key and continue to proclaim that the original key was the one in the mold.

So, how would you have reacted? I found this story fascinating because I jumped to the same conclusion -- probably partially a result of his choice of words. However, I think I would have also came to that conclusion initially as well.