Post #996708

@mwk@donotsta.re Michael Crichton took great pains to make a similar point. In Jurassic Park, there's a lot of talk between Ian Malcolm (the mathematician) and some of the scientists at the park while they try and figure out what happened. They took surveys of the dinosaur's sizes and had a nice Gaussian/normal distribution and went okay, great, looks fantastic, and never looked at them again. Ian interrogates them on this: supposedly, they only hatched 'female' dinosaurs and released them into the park. But hatching occurred in stages! They'd done three staged hatches, so far. And if there was no breeding in the wild, then they should have seen not one well formed Gaussian distribution of size, but instead a size graph with three peaks, each peak corresponding to one of the hatchings/release. The scientists saw the 'expected' graph and thought great, it looks fine, everything is good. Even though their expectation was not only wrong, but in actuality, a well formed normal distribution meant breeding was happening in the wild (because now eggs were hatching regularly instead of just when they did it, so dinosaurs of all sizes were appearing). They ignored evidence because it fit with their expectation and a lot of people died because of it. man oh man, it's almost like there's so many examples of this particular problem...