There have been documentary programs on Nostradamus' prophecies where the proponents of Nostradamus' prescience do things like add and subtract numbers or alter letters in order to interpret things he wrote as referencing WWII.
Spore ds tv tropes code#
John Safran vs God put this argument to the test by feeding the entirety of Vanilla Ice's back catalog (song lyrics and liner notes) into the decoder even "Ice Ice Baby" can turn up 9/11 "predictions." Then they took the 9/11 Commission's report and used the code to find references to the fall of Vanilla Ice's career.As with the metaphor of Monkeys on a Typewriter, any long-enough stream of data, if looked over using enough different formulae, will produce words or phrases that correlate to some kind of event that occurred after that book was written. To prove that such a "spectacularly rare occurrence" actually was more likely than people were willing to admit, he applied the principles for finding codes to Moby-Dick, looking for "predictions" of the assassination of JFK. This is shot down by a skeptic in a History Channel documentary about such Bible Codes.Words count regardless of whether they run up, down, right-to-left, left-to-right, diagonally, or even have the letters adjacent at all. Rather than saying what they expect to find in a particular book beforehand, the people who produce these simply manipulate the letters until they find something that they can use. The so-called " Bible Codes" use this fallacy.and even then he didn't catch her and might have even derailed real inquiries into her, since her misdeeds were only found out long after she died. This is akin to the fallacy insofar as McCarthy's supporters claim that the facts that he accused Keeney and she was guilty of spying (the only person called before McCarthy who was note Keeney's husband, Philip, was also a spy, but McCarthy didn't interrogate him.) show he was right in fact, it shows he had no idea what he was doing and found Keeney mostly by dumb luck. which distracted from the fact that she was an actual GRU spy. McCarthy said she was a Communist Party member. and not even for what McCarthy accused her of. In fact, the Venona intercepts only mention one of McCarthy's accusees, Mary Jane Keeney, note The rest of the intercepts concern Alger Hiss and the atomic spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Displayed by apologists for Joseph McCarthy, such as Ann Coulter, who claim that the Venona intercepts declassified in 1995 show that McCarthy was quite right.Which is pretty much the same thing as the concept of falsifiability.įrequently overlaps with Insane Troll Logic.Ĭontrast with Moving the Goalposts, where standards are frequently altered to disprove an argument. Basically, if any possible outcome could be interpreted as supporting the theory then it is useless.
Karl Popper summed up this fallacy as applied to science with "A theory that explains everything, explains nothing". This is a common fallacy in claims of messages in fiction: the writer will find a pattern to the text, then declare this pattern was obviously the author's intention, without any proof this is actually the case.
When the thing is found, the convoluted method is said to obviously be the intended method of parsing the data. Obviously, hitting a bullseye is significant if you decided where the bullseye was before you fired, but not so much if you claim you knew where it was after the fact.Īll such " I Meant to Do That" justifications are examples of this fallacy, but it also applies to cases where a set of data is analysed with no real methodology, simply in an attempt to find something by any means. The prototypical example is of a person shooting a gun at a wall, then painting a target around the bullet-hole, and claiming to have scored a bullseye because that is clearly where he was trying to hit. OcarinaSenpai's comment on "Fascinating Metroid Theories"Ī way of fiddling statistics or other forms of data analysis, this occurs where data is gathered first and then an after-the-fact hypothesis is produced to explain the conclusion drawn from it: in other words, the same data is used to generate both the hypothesis and the conclusion.
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