Shermer & agent
Here’s an article about what many of our readers here would call an obvious synchronicity – a meaningful coincidence. But to arch-skeptic Michael Shermer, the fact that it’s an unusual experience, out-of-the-ordinary, is the very reason why he thinks there’s nothing significant about it. Read his synchro and follow his logic…or try to.
COINCIDENCES AND CERTAINTIES
On the morning of Friday, November 16, 2012, I wandered out of my hotel in Portland, Oregon—The Crystal Hotel, an exotic boutique hotel with rooms decorated in the theme of a musician, poet, or artist (I stayed in the Allen Ginsberg room staring at a portrait of the beat poet and realized why I write nonfiction). In search of breakfast, I could have turned left or right as I exited the lobby. I turned right. At the first intersection I could have continued straight, gone left, or gone right. I went left. There were breakfast restaurants on both the left and the right side of the street. I chose one on the right. The hostess asked if I wanted to be seated near the window or next to the wall. I chose the window. About half way through my breakfast I happened to look up to see a man walking by who looked familiar. He looked at me with similar familiarity. I waved him into the restaurant. He spoke my name in recognition. I stuttered and stammered and hemmed and hawed and finally admitted, “I’m sorry, but I can’t remember your name.”
He said, “Uh, Michael, it’s me, Scott Wolfman, your agent!”
After I recovered from my embarrassment and momentary fear that I’d never get another speaking engagement, we had a laugh about it all, but then got to thinking—what are the odds of something like this happening? I’m from Southern California and Scott is from Connecticut. And we happened to run into each other in Portland, Oregon, a city neither of us normally has any business being in. I was randomly walking about the town, as was Scott. We were stunned. It sure seemed like something more than a coincidence, and we both joked about how there must be some sort of scheduling god who makes these things happen.
But Scott and I are good skeptics. We know how to think about such events. Even though such coincidences as this really stand out as unusual—and they are when I describe it in this manner—most people forget to consider all the other possibilities: the thousands of people I know who didn’t happen by that diner, the delay at the diner talking to Scott when I might have left earlier and had something else unusual happen that now didn’t, all the other cities I’ve traveled to and dined in when I didn’t see anyone I knew, and so on. And the same for Scott: he has hundreds of clients and knows thousands of people in the lecture business, any one of which he would ever happen to bump into in any given city he happened to travel to, would stand out as unusual.
In other words, after the fact we construct all the contingencies that had to come together in just such a way for one particular event to happen, and then we only notice and remember (and later tell stories like the above) about the events that we noticed as extraordinary, and conveniently forget to notice all the other possibilities. Here’s an article opening you’ll never read:
“A remarkable thing happened to me this morning. When I went out for breakfast I didn’t see a single person I know.”
And yet I’ve had thousands of breakfasts just like this one in which I see nothing but strangers. And, of course, I don’t bother to take note of that uninteresting fact, and I do not give it a second thought. The main cognitive bias at work here is the hindsight bias.
The hindsight bias is the tendency to reconstruct the past to fit with present knowledge. Once an event has occurred, we look back and reconstruct how it happened, why it had to happen that way and not some other way, and why we should have seen it coming all along. Such “Monday-morning quarterbacking” is literally evident on the Monday mornings following a weekend filled with football games. We all know what plays should have been called…after the outcome. Ditto the stock market and the endless parade of financial experts whose prognostications are quickly forgotten as they shift to post-diction analysis after the market closes—it’s easy to “buy low, sell high” once you have perfect information, which is only available after the fact when it is too late. In this story, the hindsight bias was my noticing after the fact all the particularities that had to come together in just such a way for Scott and I to run into each other.
What would have been truly and extraordinarily beyond coincidence is if I had computed ahead of time the odds of running into my lecture agent at that very time and place, and then it happened. But that’s not what happened. My account here is a post-diction—an after-the-fact analysis—instead of a prediction. Unfortunately, most people who are not aware of such cognitive biases fail to consider all the other possibilities, and how the sum of all these possibilities is certainty—something must happen, and 99.99% of the things that happen are uninteresting and unimportant and so we don’t notice or recall them later. This cognitive shortcoming is, in part, the basis of a type of superstition and magical thinking that finds deep meaning in coincidence, while ignoring entirely the certainties that must happen according to the laws of nature and contingencies of history.
+++
Two things struck me about the logic of his argument. First, according to Shermer’s criteria, coincidences apparently aren’t meaningful to him because of all the times when life is ordinary, functioning on linear time and cause and effect – when there are not coincidences happening. This seems a strange argument because obviously part of the magic is that such co-incidents DON’T happen all the time.
His second argument is even stranger and reveals a lack of understanding about the nature of synchronicity. Shermer says that people who believe in meaningful coincidence have a ‘hindsight bias.’ In other words, they figure out the synchro after it happens by retracing the events leading to it. Shermer seems to think that a real synchronicity would be one that is predicted. But, Mike, that’s precognition, another matter.
Here’s the difference. If I were thinking about people who are skeptical about psychic matters and Gabe Carlson sends me the above article, that’s synchronicity. But if I were to say ‘I have the feeling that I’m going to hear about someone’s skeptical point of view on synchronicity,’ then the article arrives, that’s a premonition or precognitive event. It could also be seen as a synchro, of course, but what Shermer is doing is upping the ante.
However, before anyone presents Mr. Shermer with an example of precogniton, keep in mind that he does not believe that psychic abilities exist, so he would not be impressed. I predict that he would have another contorted explanation for it.
Bottom line: Shermer was pretty baffled by the incident, so much so that he forgot the name of his literary agent. In fact, he was the one who played Monday-morning quarterback and tried his best to re-fit a neat synchro into an ordinary event.
You know what I would tell this killjoy? “Monkeys on a typewriter!” Every time some atheist type person dismisses coincidence / synchronicity as a probability statistic, my response is “monkeys on a typewriter!” Of course, they have no idea what I mean by that. Basically, to dismiss a coincidence as “just a coincidence” is like putting 100 monkeys on a typewriter and expecting them to eventually produce “Hamlet”. It doesn’t just happen. His coincidence meant something. Too bad he had to rob himself of the joy and wonder if this unexpected reunion with his agent.
I’m pleased to hear that it happened in my city. Portland OR is great. I wonder if he was in town for a Powell’s lecture / booksigning. I’ve never heard of him before.
“An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.” Max Planck
Turning one’s vorldview upside-down can be like death to some people, I guess.
Gosh, such arrogance for him to say, “We (him and his agent) know how to think about such events.” And, of course, to a closed mind nobody else does.
For him it seems that coincidence or synchronicity is only valid if thought of and predicted in advance. But that’s okay we all wake slowly at different times.
I agree with Anthony: virtually ANYTHING, ANY religious dogma or spiritual concept, or any doctrine or any scientific facts that an individual embraces to the degree that he or she connects it persistently and consistently to his or her belief construct, is over-kill. For me, it’s Freud connecting absolutely everything in a person’s life to his or her relationship, especially sexual, with the Mother or Father. For myself, I do my very best to maintain a sense of balance. To not attach the term ‘synchronicity’ to every single incident that occurs, and contrarily, to not ignore the synchronicities that DO occur with great frequency. Some are infinitesimal; some smack me in the face. But to deny the existence of synchronicity, in my humble opinon, is to deny the fundamental tenet, the foundation of experience in life, and those fundamental, foundational experiences are synchronicity at work. Again, in my humble opinion, synchronicity is the manifestation of the sometimes tangled and hidden web of connectedness of everything and every one in our lives. Certainly everything is not a synchronicity, just as everything we feel isn’t rleative to our relationships with our mother and/or father. Nevertheless, synchronicity seems to me to be ONE of the cornerstones of human existence, and to deny that, is to deny the reality of live itself. AND….to miss the magick that surrounds us every moment of every day. W#e simply must remember to keep it all in balance.
The obvious irony is that Shermer also explains his experience in terms of his worldview – in hindsight. The mechanical universe – random, meaningless, purposeless – is a worldview. It is no more provable or testable than any other worldview. So each to his own. It is true that seeing ‘signs’ – including synchronicity itself – can become a kind of belief or pseudo-religion. That’s the complementarity for those who want to see signs in everything. The complementarity for Shermer is the possibility of being shaken out of his belief in a mechanical universe and seeing that it does not account for a great deal of human experience. But of course he will not budge; will not surrender. And that is his perfect right. In cases like the Shermer story I always like to remember the worlds of physicist Niels Bohr: “The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
Marcus
I wonder if you can be so skeptical that when you’re dead, you still don’t believe in life after death. I suppose such a person might go into a deep sleep and experience a sense of nothingness, then gradually come to realize that his/her awareness remains intact.
The obvious irony is that Shermer also explains his experience in terms of his worldview – in hindsight. The mechanical universe – random, meaningless, purposeless – is a worldview. It is no more provable or testable than any other worldview. So each to his own. It is true that seeing ‘signs’ – including synchronicity itself – can become a kind of belief or pseudo-religion. That’s the complimentarity for those who want to see signs in everything. The complimentarity for Shermer is the possibility of being shaken out of his belief in a mechanical universe and seeing that it does not account for a great deal of human experience. But of course he will not budge; will not surrender. And that is his perfct right. In cases like the Shermer story I always like to remember the worlds of physicist Niels Bohr: “The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
It’s funny that you should comment on this post Marcus,because I was thinking Michael’s coincidental bumping into his agent was like when I bumped into you at the Byron Bay Writer’s Festival.I was leaving after being there for two days and you had just arrived on the Saturday.I thought that was pretty mind blowing odds wise. But thinking it over I guess Micheal is right,because I didn’t see you there last year.-)
Yes, you are still the only person who has yet recognised me on the street from my blogs/books/media appearances, Darren! (well, the only one who introduced himself!)
I find him to be an ignorant, biased man and truly feel sorry for him.
He expends so much energy trying to negate the natural.
I was checking out “The Crystal Hotel” website and found a piece of advice that could be directed at Michael –
” Even if you think you’ve seen it all, keep your eyes open — our artists are in perpetual motion so you never know what you’ll find around the bend.”
https://www.mcmenamins.com/Artwork
Perfect quote!
I think Benard sums it up well when he says
” Within each of us is an internal, subconscious tracking system that helps to guide us to desirable people, ideas and things in our environments . ”
Michael acts like he has seen (and believes he has seen a ghost) ,but tries every way possible to convince himself otherwise,so he can go back to sleep and not have his safe little fantasy world shattered by something that turns the way he sees the world upside down.
I say let him sleep if that’s what he prefers,it doesn’t make the ghost disappear
because he refuses to look at it and hide under the covers.Explaining a phenomena away doesn’t make it disappear just because you don’t want to see it.
Sweet dreams Michael.
Sweet dreams, indeed!
Nicely put.
You either see the world full of mystery and excitement or you see the world flat and devoid of magic. Mechanistic. Two dimensional.
It’s your choice.
We always have a choice, and it is clear what choice he made. Poor guy.
Mechanistic, for sure. He needs to come up with better arguments to explain it all away.
Shermer de-explains and the commentator excellently refutes the de-explanations. I offer an explanation for this subset of coincidences. finding something you are seeking sometimes without consciously knowing you are seeking it.
Each person found someone with whom he had much in common. Each person was delighted with the discovery. Within each of us is an internal, subconscious tracking system that helps to guide us to desirable people, ideas and things in our environments . Like lost dogs finding their way back home and migratory birds finding their winter homes, we have an ability without knowing it to create coincidences like these. I first learned of this ability at age 8 or 9 when my lost dog and I found each other on a street we had never been on. Like Shermer my dog had to make several right-left-straight decisions to find me looking for him.
Shermer likes to use claim probability as an explanation. Others claim God or the Universe. Both are not explanations but instead are ambiguities covering ignorance. Coincidences like this one are “preversions” predictions of powers latent within each of us that will someday soon be considered normal abilities.
Shermer’s job, it seems, is to do his best to remove the magic from life.
Preversions: I like the term and your explanation, Bernard. And love the story about you and your lost dog. It certainly fits what happened to Shermer.