r/BeAmazed • u/Soloflow786 • Feb 10 '25

Miscellaneous / Others This incredible video shows a cloud shaped like a dog seen from a window seat

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u/kmoneyrecords Feb 10 '25 edited Feb 10 '25

This is also a good example of how random sampling can turn into false beliefs about religion/supernatural shit; the bigger a plane is, the higher the chances are that someone on there will have a dog that died recently just due to the size of the sample. To that person, this was a miracle/religious moment but the truth is that they were just the “positive” expected in a sample of that size.

This method is how psychics fake their “cold readings” of a crowd of people, as well as how people end up believing in things like pets being able to “predict” storms. The truth is that in any given storm, there are likely tens of thousands of pets who are in it, and statistically a few of those pets will just be acting weird at that time because pets just act weird sometimes, rather than because they sensed a storm.

EDIT - the pets and storms example isn’t the best example of this because they do have senses in certain ways that let them detect weather changes better than we can to varying degrees.

But there are tons of good examples of this, such as autism being falsely attributed to vaccines, or healing falsely being attributed to homeopathic medicines. It’s why the scientific method and rigorous testing is so important.

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u/PeacefulKnightmare Feb 10 '25

I'd say the storm thing is probably more due to pets being hyper sensitive to certain elements like air pressure changes and smells that would be getting kicked up by storm winds miles away.

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u/JeffrotheDude Feb 10 '25

Do you have any links where it explains pets predicting storms is a myth? As far as i know a lot of animals bodies are evolutionarily trained to know when bad weather is coming because, well, they needed to for survival. Whether it's just sensing pressure differences or something like how birds can see the magnetic fields of the earth. If not I'll do some research later on my own 🙂

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u/kmoneyrecords Feb 10 '25

So animals have some senses that are sharper than ours so sometimes they can feel a storm shortly before us, but is equivalent to us seeing rain clouds on the horizon rather than any kind of psychic sense.

Perhaps better examples would be homeopathic remedies seeming to “cure” people of an ailment they would have otherwise healed from on their own, and even things like autism being misattributed to vaccines, when in reality, if millions of kids are vaccinated, some of them will have been autistic in the first place regardless of the vaccines.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4488611/

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u/APoopingBook Feb 10 '25

I have an example that tends to make people understand complex stuff like this.

Imagine at the beginning of basketball season someone sends you a letter and says "X team is going to win their next game." But every week you get another prediction that ends up correct. "X wins this week. "X loses next week."

How many of those in a row do you get before thinking, hey, maybe these are worth something! Finally the championship happens and the note says "Alright, I'll tell you the winner but pay me for that info so you can bet on it," or whatever. Would it be irrational to at least try it out? Would it mean you were stupid or crazy if you see if they might be correct and able to tell the future or know about games being rigged or whatever?

Now pause there. Let's tell a different story.

Someone writes 1,000,000 letters. Half of them say "Team X will win" the other half "Team Y will win". They get mailed to 1,000,000 people. Team X ends up winning. Now they mail 500,000 letters to everyone who initially were told "Team X will win", half of them say it will happen again, half say it won't. Keep repeating this.

250,000 letter. 125,000 letters. And on and on.

FIFTEEN GAMES LATER, you have correctly told 30 people the exact results of every single one of those 15 games, so you ask them for money for the information to predict the 16th game.

Or you tell them you're magic. Or that you can rig games. Or anything else you want to tell them because for them, you just pulled off something unbelievable while for you it took 0 supernatural power to look like you had some.

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u/kmoneyrecords Feb 10 '25

Love this explanation! Do you know the formal term for this phenomenon?

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u/APoopingBook Feb 10 '25

I think it would be False Positive Fallacy, but a complex version of it. Everytime they trusted a bullshit letter because it turned out to be accidentally true (false positive) and ignored (because they didn't know) about all the times the letters failed.

They don't know or remember or care about all the times the psychic said something incorrect, because the psychic covered it up or ignored whoever they told that too, but instead keeps focusing on the people who they did coincidentally guess it correct for.

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u/Snobolski Feb 10 '25

It's called "Spending a lot of money on stamps."

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u/mcboobie Feb 10 '25

‘Correlation does not always equal causation’

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u/kmoneyrecords Feb 10 '25

Yes, but this is even different from that - this is like the “shotgun method” - given enough random tries, a correlation will eventually arise. Like the infinite chimps on infinite typewriters writing Shakespeare example - eventually you’ll get a “hit” but it doesn’t mean it’s significant.

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u/EmmaTheHedgehog Feb 10 '25

Just wait until I bust out my improbability drive to fly The Heart of Gold.

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u/NeedlesTwistedKane Feb 10 '25

I dunno, you had me at first and then you lost me.

Didn’t all those animals walk to high ground right before the 2004 tsunami struck - the one that killed hundreds of thousands of people?

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u/kmoneyrecords Feb 10 '25 edited Feb 10 '25

Yeah, that last example wasn’t the greatest because some animals do have greater basic senses than us, but other examples include homeopathic remedies coincidentally being taken while someone was healing anyways, or vaccines being attributed to causing autism when really autism is just prevalent in a certain amount of the population, regardless of vaccination. Someone else replied with a great example about basketball predictions.

The tsunami example is different in that a statistically significant amount of animals did something out of the ordinary, rather than one specific anecdote out of an entire large population.

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u/MusicNerd-2735 Feb 10 '25

Or why don't you just let other people believe what they want to believe

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u/kmoneyrecords Feb 10 '25

Because in examples such as public health, where things like autism are falsely attributed to vaccines solely due to the fact that out of millions of vaccinations, some of the kids will be autistic, vaccinated or not, it can literally cause actual damage to a society. See the measles outbreak currently happening in Texas.

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u/MusicNerd-2735 Feb 10 '25

I get the ones for health reasons but this is a little bit different though

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u/kmoneyrecords Feb 10 '25

Just trying to point out a related and interesting statistical phenomenon that shapes our beliefs about the world in a not-obvious way, not telling people what their beliefs should be. Idc what you think the significance of this cloud dog is.

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u/jednatt Feb 10 '25

While good to keep in mind for situations like this, it also works the other way where the causation can be hand-waved away because of false alarms. i.e. the doctor has seen 50 patients with extreme stomach pain that was gas/whatever, but you happen to have a serious condition and went home with gas-x.

And in the supernatural sense, say we live in a universe where mysterious supernatural shit DOES happen... it can forever be explained away in this manner, lol.

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u/kmoneyrecords Feb 10 '25

But that’s why we have rigorous testing standards and methods such as double-blinding which can remove both false positives and false negatives, as well as a doctor’s own bias and blind spots.

In your example, one can look at the average and median numbers of extreme stomach pain reports in a given month, going back year of year, even decades - if the current situation shows a statistically significant spike, then hospitals would take heed and sound the alarms that something unusual is happening.

Mysterious shit in the universe exists and is just phenomenon that science hasn’t explained yet, but there is also not-actually-mysterious shit that probability and the human mind can make mysterious and that’s what I’m talking about.

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u/jednatt Feb 10 '25

But that’s why we have rigorous testing standards and methods such as double-blinding which can remove both false positives and false negatives, as well as a doctor’s own bias and blind spots.

I'm not talking about medical studies dude, just normal doctor/patient interaction. And nothing can ever be perfect. Medical science is also a very wide and very fuzzy dicipline.

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u/kmoneyrecords Feb 10 '25

Nothing can ever be perfect which is why statistics and science have systems for verifying when things are wrong - they’re self-correcting over time, which are things that religion and superstition sorely lack. It’s the reason why we aren’t still practicing blood-letting.

And I’m not talking about one-on-one interactions at all even a little bit, I’m talking about how one-in-a-million things happen, and it’s not because of God or fate, it’s just that something will likely happen to someone given a million tries.

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u/jednatt Feb 10 '25

And I’m not talking about one-on-one interactions at all even a little bit, I’m talking about how one-in-a-million things happen, and it’s not because of God or fate, it’s just that something will likely happen to someone given a million tries.

No, when you're talking about people making harmful medical suppositions you're referencing individual interactions because these people aren't conducting scientific studies. You seem to be arguing with yourself, carry on.

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u/kmoneyrecords Feb 10 '25

Uhhh what? You brought that in as an example and I tried to meet you at your level. What in my original post talks about individual interactions at all? Did you forget you responded to me first?

Anecdotal evidence is beaten by understanding statistical significance. What issue do you have with that?

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u/jednatt Feb 10 '25

I responded to: "Because in examples such as public health, where things like autism are falsely attributed to vaccines solely due to the fact that out of millions of vaccinations, some of the kids will be autistic, vaccinated or not, it can literally cause actual damage to a society. See the measles outbreak currently happening in Texas."

I took you to be referring to parents thinking their kid got autism from a vaccination. That's an individual incorrect diagnosing of the problem influencing things negatively. These ideas aren't springing from a vacuum.

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u/Apprehensive-Bar6595 Feb 11 '25

or maybe it was meant for someone on the plane and everyone else were present so they witnessed it too? not that I believe dogs go to Heaven, but yea