>Sometimes, people who don't understand any better confuse the mundane with the divine, mistake hard work for lightning bolts.
Now that is condescending.
>They couldn't pull off that same stunt, and so they convince themselves that nobody else could, either.
Suppose you'd never met Rain-Man and saw him pull off one of his counting "stunts". Wouldn't your null hypothesis be that it was a trick? Now you meet someone else, Derren Brown say, doing the same trick do you assume he does it the same way or is it really a trick. Next you try with a buddy - first time he gets it right, WTH? Savant, conjurer or lucky?
Once at school I got a run of about 8 dates fired at me (I can't remember the context it might have been birth dates) and told people the day of the week correctly for that date. They wondered how I did it, and as I'm good at maths, figured it was some mental ability. As it happened I just guessed.
The probability of getting 8 weekdays right in a row by random guessing is 1/7^8, or about 1 in 6 million. So my random guess is that either the number was substantially less than 8, or there was actually some extra information that you made use of somehow, or you didn't really get them right and the other people were just messing with your head. Or, of course, you're messing with ours.
It's crazy isn't it. Seriously, it was one of those moments where you think "hey how am I doing this". I really thought for a very short while I had some sort of untapped savantish ability to know the day for any date (I think there are people that can do this based on some form of learning|equation?). In actual fact I can barely remember the day it is today ...
The dates were being checked on this one kids graphing calc. He was the only person in the class, in the school I suspect, that had one.
Whilst the chance of guessing 1 in 7 eight times in a row is very small, a string of guesses that are correct in a larger population of guesses has no greater probability of being in any particular place in the string than any other. Provided that if I'd continued guessing a large number of times then I only achieved c. 14% correct then there is nothing wrong statistically with such a feat ...
Maybe I didn't guess at all. Maybe I had a psychic link with my classmates Casio ... ;0)
For each of the Rain-Man savants in the world who can look at a pile of dropped toothpicks fresh from the box and tell you that there are 1996 rolling across the floor, there are a hundred savvy chaps who will see a fresh box with "2000 count" on the side, the four remaining un-dropped toothpicks, and make an educated guess.
There are people who have always been able to look at a Rubix cube and solve it on intuition, but that number's piddling compared to the people who can do something that looks exactly the same, but involved practice, study, interest, and the gradual honing of some basic principles into a slick, refined art.
Not to mention, so long as there is more than one Rain-Man savant the one you see & are impressed by has plenty of sweat and blood into it too. How else did he rise to the top from amongst the other savants? He wasn't just 'more savant'.
Now that is condescending.
>They couldn't pull off that same stunt, and so they convince themselves that nobody else could, either.
Suppose you'd never met Rain-Man and saw him pull off one of his counting "stunts". Wouldn't your null hypothesis be that it was a trick? Now you meet someone else, Derren Brown say, doing the same trick do you assume he does it the same way or is it really a trick. Next you try with a buddy - first time he gets it right, WTH? Savant, conjurer or lucky?
Once at school I got a run of about 8 dates fired at me (I can't remember the context it might have been birth dates) and told people the day of the week correctly for that date. They wondered how I did it, and as I'm good at maths, figured it was some mental ability. As it happened I just guessed.