Proofiness - Charles Seife [21]
Unfortunately, the randomness of the dice and of the slot machine ensure that there’s no reality to these patterns at all. Each roll of the die, each pull of the lever gives a result that is totally unrelated to the events that came before it. That’s the definition of random: there’s no relationship, no pattern there to be discovered. Yet our brains simply refuse to accept this fact. This is randumbness: insisting that there is order where there is only chaos—creating a pattern where there is none to see.
Randumbness has a powerful hold over us. It gets even very smart people to believe some idiotic things. In 2005, anthropologists published a study in Nature—arguably the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal in the world—that showed how randomness can make even the most ridiculous of ideas seem credible. The study was an analysis of the results of wrestling, boxing, and taekwondo matches in the 2004 Olympics. In these contests, one athlete always wore red and the other wore blue. It so happened that the people who wore red won roughly 55 percent of the time, beating their blue-clad colleague. The conclusion? Wearing red helps athletes win.
Just a moment’s thought should tell you that this is a pretty absurd notion. How could the choice of a red or blue jersey give a significant advantage to an athlete? But the authors of the paper were able to construct a “just so” story that made the discovery seem respectable enough for publication in a premier scientific journal: they cited a paper where experimenters put red bands on zebra finches, causing the wee birdies to act more dominant. If it’s true for finches, why can’t it be true for humans? The referees at the journal bought it, it was published, and media around the world trumpeted the finding to their audiences.
In truth, the authors were simply looking at a bunch of random data and constructing a pattern out of that random event. It was a fluke that slightly more red-wearing athletes beat blue-wearing athletes than vice versa, and the anthropologists created a study to explain that fluke. (If they had found that there were more blue-wearing victors than red-wearing ones, they could have constructed an explanation by using a bird species, like the purple martin, where blue coloration is a sign of dominance.) However, it’s clear that the researchers’ result is sheer randumbness. If the anthropologists took the time to check other Olympics, they’d no doubt find that their seeming pattern disappears. Indeed, analyzing sports in the 2008 Olympics shows there’s no advantage to wearing red; if you look at the winners of the same events, there seems to be a slight disadvantage. Athletes wearing blue won more matches than those wearing red, particularly when it came to freestyle wrestling. The “advantage” to wearing red simply evaporated with a new set of data.22
If you take any random collection of data and squint hard enough, you’ll see a pattern of some sort. If you’re clever, you can get other people to see the pattern too. For example, you can take a completely random collection of data and plot it; it’ll look like a shotgun blast—there’s no order to be found. However, if you take that shotgun blast and draw a line through it, you can make people see a pattern when there isn’t one. If you do it convincingly enough, you might even get it published in a peer-reviewed journal. Diagrams such as the following, which appeared in Nature to support the idea that wide-hipped women give birth to more sons, would be a laughing matter if people didn’t take them so seriously.
Figure 7. Faux order in chaotic data.
Drawing a line or curve through a clot