The anniversary of the September 11, 2001 mass murder has passed. For the same reasons Granger expressed recently on this site, I have forgone any attempt at a commemorative essay or retrospective analysis. It's been done (and done to death) by people with closer connections to the event (and others in the media who used the opportunity to move copy), and there's little of substance that I could add.
But I do want to comment on a news item that caused quite a stir in certain circles and is destined to become one of the more interesting footnotes in this sad chapter of American history. I am referring to the winning New York lottery numbers on September 11, 2002, which were, weirdly, 9-1-1.
I must confess that when NBC's Katie Couric announced this juicy tidbit on the morning of September 12, I was struck by the apparent significance of the winning numbers. How could such a thing be a mere coincidence? Being a committed skeptic, I promised myself that I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt until I had a chance to crunch out the odds, but I was sure those odds would be astronomical.
Well, apparently my coffee had not kicked in yet, because later that morning on my commute I figured out the odds in about fourteen seconds ? 1:1000. It works like this: three balls were chosen, each printed with a number ranging from 0-9. The odds of any given digit appearing on the first draw are 1:10. With me so far? Now, the odds of drawing any particular sequence of digits are 1:(10^n), where the exponent is the number of digits in the sequence. In this case, the odds are 1:(10^3) or 1:1000.
The math is simple enough. So simple, in fact, that I was sure I had missed something. 1:1000 is rare enough to be exceptional, but not nearly so rare as to justify the sense of cosmic mystery I had felt when Ms. Couric interrupted my shaving routine. A randomly chosen American has about the same lifetime odds of drowning or dying in a structural fire ? events that are rare enough to be considered tragic and unexpected when they occur, but which never make the headlines solely on account of their improbability. Shouldn't the denominator be multiplied by 365 or something to account for the improbability of 9-1-1 being drawn on that particular day? What about the fact that the drawing was held in the same state that suffered the most from the terrorist attacks? Shouldn't that be plugged into the equation?
Try as I might, I could think of no good reason why those factor would be mathematically significant. Later, of course, the handicappers and statisticians came out of the woodwork to assure us that the odds are, in fact, 1:1000, and that the date and location of the drawing don't change the odds one bit, and that the whole thing was nothing more than an interesting coincidence. The Associated Press noted a similar occurrence on November 12 of last year, when the numbers 5-8-7 were drawn on the same day that Flight 587 blew up over Queens.
By then, however, starry-eyed mystics had already deluged online discussion boards with terabytes of vague but impressive sounding speculation. New Age gurus pointed to the event as evidence of synchronicity ? the concept that every apparent coincidence is meaningful. Christians of an apocalyptic bent claimed the event "proved" the existence of God, and His concern for the victims of this tragedy. Faced with a signal to noise ratio of at least 1:1000, the job of the skeptic on September 12 was daunting, and not exactly welcome. Given the choice between an attentive and caring supernatural agency on the one hand, and cold statistical reality on the other, an incredible number of educated, otherwise rational people opted for the former.
Fine. A skeptic can calculate odds, but no amount of number-crunching can conclusively disprove a metaphysical hypothesis. And so, for argument's sake, let's assume that the numbers drawn in the September 11, 2002 New York lottery did indeed have cosmic significance. This leaves us with some very heavy, still-unanswered questions. For example, if the numbers drawn constituted a message from a Higher Power, then what exactly was that message? The numbers 9-1-1, by themselves, are not immediately suggestive of anything other than a phone number or a date on the calendar, which can be determined from other sources ? such as a phone book or a calendar. Aside from calendrical significance, what else could have been spelled out in the winning numbers? The information content of a three-digit bitstream is very low, which restricts the amount of coded content it can carry and leaves the message open to lots of ambiguity. Why wouldn't God have chosen a higher-bandwidth medium ? like cable television, for example, or a burning bush? And finally (although many more such questions could be asked), given that God chose to communicate through a lottery drawing, should fundamentalist protestant sects reconsider their opposition to gambling on religious grounds?
Skeptics are often accused of taking morbid pleasure in wrecking cherished popular fantasies, and as my sarcasm in the previous paragraph ought to make clear, this is true to some extent. We are also accused of lacking imagination and sensitivity to those aspects of human psychology that cannot be quantified. Fair enough. But let's give human psychology a closer look for just a moment.
The human mind has a remarkable capacity for pattern recognition. In his book Why People Believe Weird Things, [note: apparently Zarathustra had imbedded a citation to this book in the original copy of this article - unfortunately it did not make it through when he transmitted the article to me. My apologies. -The CEO] arch-skeptic Michael Shermer speculates ? very reasonably ? that pattern recognition served our evolutionary ancestors very well. The Australopithecus, for example, who was able to associate sudden loud noises with imminent danger was more likely to add his pattern recognition genes to subsequent Australopithecus generations. Of course, not every sudden loud noise is really followed by a charging mastodon or a falling boulder. But in an environment where false negatives are deadly and false positives are largely costless, the evolutionary pressure for the human mind to overcompensate is unavoidable. As a result, humanity is hardwired to spot images of Jesus in burnt tortillas and messages from God in lottery drawings.
Closely associated to the human capacity for recognizing patterns is the human need for comfort in the face of uncertainty. Viewed objectively, the universe displays precisely the characteristics one would expect it to possess if it were ruled by nothing more than the laws of physics plus chance. Many Americans woke up to this sobering truth for the first time on September 11, 2001, after having believed in a concerned, benevolent deity all their lives. If, one year later, a statistical quirk in a game of chance helps restore their faith in the moral order of the universe, who am I to criticize?