Pete Carlton wrote:
>Jesse has it right on here, and one can go even further in this vein. You
>are impressed by the relationship between one particular story and one
>particular event - but you hand-picked both the story and the event for
>discussion here because of their superficial similarities. You challenged
>me to find another example of a story with the same resemblances that the
>Heinlein story has to the atomic bomb project. But resemblances between
>any written story and any similar event that happens after the story's
>publication would be in the same class.
>
>I'm not saying that the resemblances between the story and the bomb are
>trivial - they do make an impression. It also makes an impression when
>someone dreams of a relative dying and the next day they receive news that
>that relative did in fact die that night; or when you're in a foreign city
>and you look up the number of the taxi company and it turns out to be your
>home phone number, or when exactly 100 years separate (1) the election to
>Congress (2) the election to the presidency (3) the birth of the assassins
>of and (4) the birth of the successors of John F. Kennedy and Abraham
>Lincoln.
You also need to consider what in the academic world is called publication
bias. Richard Feynman once told a story about a sudden premonition he had
that his grandmother had died. Uncannily, the next moment the phone rang -
and it was his grandmother, alive and well. For every case you hear about
where a premonition (or whatever) miraculously "comes true", there are the
hundreds of cases where it doesn't come true, which you don't hear about
because they're not noteworthy.
Is it just a coincidence that just about everyone on this list is a cynical
skeptic?
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Tue Jun 07 2005 - 00:05:05 PDT