Randomness, Reformation, Creationists and ConspiroNumpties

So it's Wednesday night and I'm watching a documentary on BBC4 about the rise of Protestantism.

In the interests of balance - because the Reformation was looking like too much of a good thing - they interview some dopey American Creationist.

She states that Darwin's theories (aka The Official Story) is demonstrably false in many respects. She then reveals that by demonstrably false that she really means that some bits of the theory can't be proved to her satisfaction.

The term "demonstrably false" reminded me of the 9/11 ConspiroNumpties, especially that big old windbag Alex Jones.

It also reminded me of Nassim Taleb's book "Fooled by Randomness" in which he produced a Table of Confusion that I like to glance at every so often to check if I'm being fooled.

Here is an excerpt:

Luck	Skills
Probability	Certainty
Belief, conjecture	Knowledge, certitude
Theory	Reality
Anecdote, coincidence	Causality, law
Forecast	Prophecy
Noise	Signal
Epistemic probability	Physical probability
Induction	Deduction
Synthetic proposition	Analytic proposition
Contingent	Certain
Contingent	Necessary
Contingent	True in all possible worlds

It's human to want to move from left to right across the table - but doing so prematurely or without sufficient evidence or testing means that you are being fooled by randomness.

The creationists and the conspiracy theorists live their lives in a permanently fooled state. Yet they believe (meaning they "know") that it is the rest of us who are the poor fools...