conspiracy theory
The NYT has neat article on
the mathematics and biology of coincidence, with the
"strange cluster" of microbiologist deaths the underlying thread:
As a species, we appear to be biologically programmed to see patterns and conspiracies, and this tendency increases when we sense that we're in danger. ''We are hard-wired to overreact to coincidences,'' says Persi Diaconis. ''It goes back to primitive man. You look in the bush, it looks like stripes, you'd better get out of there before you determine the odds that you're looking at a tiger. The cost of being flattened by the tiger is high. Right now, people are noticing any kind of odd behavior and being nervous about it.''
Godless comments:
I think that "jumping to conclusions" happens because fully Bayesian inference is computationally
expensive :
Legal scholars have recently advanced a behavioral approach to the law and economics school of thought, replacing the traditionally assumed rational actor with an empirically based “boundedly rational” decision maker. This decision maker is affected by emotion and motivation and has only limited cognitive resources. To function effectively in a complex world, however, boundedly rational individuals must rely on cognitive heuristics - simplifying mental shortcuts - that inevitably lead people to make some systematic decision errors. Consequently, their behavior deviates from that predicted by rational actor models.
