Proofiness - Charles Seife [16]
The downside to this spectacular pattern-matching ability is that we go overboard, seeing patterns even when they’re not there. We see portents everywhere. We convince ourselves that plane crashes happen in threes, that hemlines can foretell whether it’ll be a good year or a bad year on Wall Street, and that the winner of a football game determines who will win the next presidential election. Sometimes we use patterns to try to alter the future, not just predict it. Watch any sporting event on television and you’ll be treated to the players carrying out elaborate rituals to ensure victory through countless bizarre jinxes and mojos. Superstitions like these were born when a player thought he saw a pattern, a hidden cause behind certain events: a lucky pair of shorts would seem to make the team more likely to win a game, uttering a particular phrase seems to make someone more likely to strike out, or bouncing the ball exactly three times seems to make it easier to sink a free throw. But these patterns are all false—faulty beliefs brought on by our brain’s overzealous attempts to make connections between events. Several powerful forms of proofiness are a product of this misfiring of our pattern-seeking behavior.
In 1992, future New Jersey congressman Rush Holt was the spokesperson for the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a high-tech facility devoted to fusion research, with an eye toward building power plants. Unfortunately, the future of fusion in the United States was getting increasingly grim; it seemed that budgets were about to get slashed before too long. As spokesperson, Holt had to try to justify to the public—and to legislators in charge of the budget—why the laboratory should consume tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in the quest for fusion energy.
Holt bolstered his case with several dramatic slides, scatter plots of data similar to the one below, showing how energy consumption (and production) benefits humanity. The data made a point quite clearly: the more energy a society consumes, the longer its citizens live, and the less frequently its infants die. The chart was the key to long life; if you want your citizens to survive longer, you should be building more power plants and, of course, pouring money into the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory to research future sources of energy. (Fund us if you want your children to live!)
Figure 3. High energy consumption means a long life.
The data were correct, and the trend was real. The more energy people in a society produce and consume, the longer those people will live. More power equals longer life, right? Not so fast.
Holt’s graphs showed that there was a tight relationship—a “correlation”—between power consumption and life expectancy; the higher the power consumption, the higher the life expectancy. However, it’s a classic mistake to say that you can increase life expectancy by increasing power consumption—to say power consumption causes longer lives.
Yes, it’s true that the more power a society uses, the longer its citizens live, on average. It’s equally true, however, that the more garbage a society produces, the longer its people live. The more automobiles people in a society drive, the more newspapers people in a society read, the more fast food people consume, the more television sets people have, the more time people spend on the Internet . . . in fact, the more edible underwear people in a nation eat, the longer the citizens of that nation will live, on average. Power plants don’t lead to long life any more than garbage, Internet usage,