The eye has a blind spot, and yet...you'd never know it, because your brain's visual system cleverly fills it in. Rare is the person who responds to a question by saying "I don't know." Instead, we parade our majestic delusions for all to admire. This is why students in class sit right up front, with their laptops open, playing games and sending messages, because they really already know everything the professor's going to say...or, in other words, they leave the class knowing just as much as when they came in.
Here are a few examples of statements that have been dressed up in science clothes but which inadequately hide the underlying ignorance.
"As I was circling in my car, I worked out that, just as the North Pole is always north, the town centre is always at a tangent from the ring roads and that it therefore didn't matter which unsigned approach to it I took."Sebastian Faulks, "Engleby".
"This track, as you perceive, was made by a rider who was going from the direction of the school."Arthur Conan Doyle, in "The Adventure of the Priory School". Whether a bicycle is going left or right, the back tire will cross a given point after the front tire. This information alone tells nothing about the direction.
"Or towards it?"
"No, no, my dear Watson. The more deeply sunk impression is, of course, the hind wheel, upon which the weight rests. You perceive several places where it has passed across and obliterated the more shallow mark of the front one. It was undoubtedly heading away from the school."
"Now imagine you're the goalkeeper preparing to block this shot. Because it's been flung from the other side of the field, that dense, little ball has gained a lot of momentum. By the time it reaches you it's moving at 100 miles per hour."Loren Berlin, "The Craziest Men in Sports", Slate Magazine, 13 April 2011.
"After testing the products the result came out that Duracell was the longest lasting battery. This information proved that my hypnosis was right."The writeup of a student science project.
"Nothing, for example, is more difficult than to convince the merely general reader that the fact of sixes having been thrown twice in succession by a player at dice, is sufficient cause for betting the largest odds that sixes will not be thrown again on the third attempt. A suggestion to this effect is usually rejected by the intellect at once. It does not appear that the two throws which have been completed, and which lie now absolutely in the Past, can have influence upon the throw which exists only in the Future. The chance for throwing sixes seems to be precisely as it was at any ordinary time - that is to say, subject only to the influence of the various other throws which may be made by the dice. And this is a reflection which appears so exceedingly obvious that attempts to controvert it are received more frequently with a derisive smile than with any thing like respectful attention. The error here involved - a gross error redolent of mischief - I cannot pretend to expose within the limits assigned me at present; and with the philosophical it needs no exposure. It may be sufficient here to say that it forms one of an infinite series of mistakes which arise in the path of Reason through her propensity for seeking truth in detail."Edgar Allan Poe, in 'The Mystery of Marie Roget', exclaiming at the blockheads who don't understand probability.
"Let us use a simple bi-nomial theory. That is, whenever defendant needed a name for some character in his story, he could either create a name that happens to appear in 'Vintage' or choose one that does not - a 0.5 probability, or one chance out of two that he would use a name also appearing in 'Vintage'. For the naming of a second character, the same formula would yield a 0.25 probability, or one chance in four tries that both names would also have appeared in 'Vintage'. When this conservative formula is used to determine the probability that 12 names in 'The Vintage Years' would also have appeared in 'Vintage', we get the minuscule figure 0.00024414. In other words, an author who had not been influenced by the names in 'Vintage' would have to write 4,096 novels, regardless of their content, before writing one that contained 12 names also appearing in 'Vintage'."From an affidavit of Edward Condren, professor in the UCLA English department, called as an expert witness in a plagiarism suit, quoted by Thomas Mallon in "Stolen Words".
"We had the phenomenon of a full moon located just in the same spot in the heavens a the same hour every night. The reason for this singular conduct on the part of the moon did not occur to us at first, but it did afterward when we reflected that we were gaining about twenty minutes every day, because we were going east so fast - we gained just about enough each day to keep along with the moon. It was becoming an old moon to the friends we had left behind us, but to us Joshuas it stood still in the same place, and remained always the same."Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad".
"Captain Brinkmann in the Prinz Eugen saved his ship from certain destruction when he ordered his helmsman to steer towards the water fountains, knowing that salvoes never land in the same place twice."Erik Durschmied, "How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History".