Freak Event

Your average marks in the last 3 quizzes was 6. This quiz was no different from the others and you get a 9. Hmm....how do you explain it? Common sense, of course would ascribe it to a better performance. But wait, someone is saying it was a freak, an accident which can not be explained. A highly improbable event almost unlikely to take place in the next 5 quizzes.

This reminds me of an off the cuff remark made by our “Business, Government and Society” professor who had a way of making ‘not so obvious’ logical fallacies, stimulating interesting thought processes. According to him the American constitution was a product of pure accident, that a constitution based on life, liberty and the right to happiness was a freak. After all there has to be one such constitution different from the many variants of socialistic constitutions.

Another blatant abuse of the concept of probability. In this case that of probability distribution. The abuse of probability distribution to explain human action is not a very novel one. Back in my schooldays, in my over-enthusiasm to pick up any book with the word relativity written in it, I read a book on Relativism with a foreword by none other than Dr. Albert Einstein. The author at one point of time explained that even though you think you are exercising your choice in wearing a particular color of shoe or waving the banner of the Republican Party, you are but only a part of the group who have a liking for the new fashion or endorsement of the party's manifesto. A classic case of putting the cart before the horse- assuming the probability distribution to be a cause affecting the choice of allegiance.

Clearly a futile attempt to disprove the axiom of freewill. Little the author knew that any attempt to disprove freewill only in turn evokes freewill. In saying that there exists no freewill one has to exercise his freewill thus contradicting himself.