The power of prayer: in action

One of the major reasons people believe in the effectiveness of prayer, amazing coincidences, or meaningful "signs" from the beyond is their lack of mathematical ability. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that people overstate the likelihood of an event or risks of certain outcomes due to their gross misunderstanding of the laws of probability. If someone isn't able to work out the probability of an outcome as it relates to a card trick or a simple logic problem, why should we be surprised that he attributes a not-so-significant coincidence (like your fishing example) to the activity of his deity?regards,
Esteban Hambre

Mike says,

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Indeed, it takes no mathematical ability to acknowledge an amazing coincidence

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Sure it does. That's exactly what I'm saying, that people who can't determine probability attribute significance to events far beyond what they deserve. If there's a group of two dozen people, what's the chance that two of them will share a birthday? After all, there are 365 days in a year, so the probability of a group of people that number much less than 10% of that having two people with the same birthday must be really small, right? Well, it turns out that the probability is around 50%, which means that given groups of two dozen people, you'd expect to find two people in each group with the same birthday half the time. So the fact that I share the same birthday with my boss isn't some amazing coincidence, given that there are about two dozen people in our department. Half the departments in the company should contain a pair who share the same birthday, if they each comprise two dozen people.The cognitive filter that allows us to believe in answered prayers acts this way: if I ask for a sign and don't receive it, even multiple times, I don't attribute as much significance to any or all of those instances as I do to the one instance when I think I receive a sign. It's commonly known as the Jeane Dixon effect, since people who read those moronic newspaper horoscopes only remember the rare times when they notice a correlation between the horoscope and things that happen in their lives. They filter out all the days when the horoscope doesn't seem at all meaningful.Believers claim all the time to have received signs, and the instance they describe can seem significant. However, we're never told all the times they haven't received signs, because the believer assumes the Magic 8-ball was merely telling them "Ask again later." I live near Boston, so guess how many people have told me "I said in May this was the year for the Red Sox" in the past two days. They're right, of course, but they've said the same thing every May. How impressive is that?regards,
Esteban Hambre