Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and John Perich to overthink stranger danger (and Wrather’s cross-country trip), Michael Jackson’s posthumous sales figures, McCourt…Frank McCourt, Walter Cronkite and the crisis of authority in newscasting, and Emmy Nominations.
Tell us what you think! Email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401. And… spread the overthinking by forwarding this episode to a friend!
Dress it up however you want, the “Rule of Three” is just poor thinking, not overthinking.
http://www.cockeyed.com/science/threes/threes.html
It’s not just how much time between deaths that is vague, but also how one measures celebrity. It’s all subjective and therefore not a rule or even a guideline but a “suggestion”.
If it was a real rule, you should be able to get some predictive power out of it. Next time there are two deaths, I challenge you to predict who will be third.
-JM
@jokermage
While I agree the rule of three is a phenomenon of observation and perspective (and, above all, contextualization and narrativization), demanding “predictive power” as a litmus test for “real rules” is very 18th century of you. You’re going to end up disqualifying a great many proven and demonstrable scientific concepts with that rule, and it’s going to be next to useless describing anything cultural.
Almost all explanations for things are backward-looking, and it is only when you restrict yourself to a very narrow set of phenomena (like much of high-school level science) that knowledge of how things work gives you reliable powers of prediction outside of a controlled environment. Human experience is dominated by the unexpected.
This is, of course, not to detract from the analysis you posted, which is fun and good and which people should read.
You’re going to end up disqualifying a great many proven and demonstrable scientific concepts with that rule
Such as? You’ve piqued my curiosity.
@ john
Here are some examples:
Rule – over time, a changing environment will cause the species thriving in it to change in response to its stimuli
Impossible prediction – predict the specific species that will exist and thrive in a rapidly changing environment 10,000 years from now
Rule – a detailed map of the established seasonal air and water currents in the north atlantic ocean
Impossible prediction – predict exactly where an unmanned sailboat dropped in the middle of the north atlantic will wash up onshore.
Rule – you know a given substance is a carcinogen.
Impossible prediction – given a table of people in a town and the amount of that carcinogen they are exposed to in a year, predict who will get cancer.
The common threads through all of these are confounding factors and random noise. The biologist’s rule isn’t wrong, the meteorologist’s/oceanographer’s rules aren’t wrong, and the pathologist’s rule isn’t wrong, but any predictions they come up with are going to only give you probabilistic answers that are going to be about as good as a guess at determining exactly what’s going to happen.
@fenzel:
Rule 1 – the prediction is that species will adapt (or perish) to changes in the environment. Not what kind of species will exist. You’re basically moving the goalposts.
Rule 2 – given enough real time data of the currents and wind and the capability of the boat I think that you could actually predict this one. To within a reasonable margin of error at least.
Rule 3 – the substance can cause cancer. It doesn’t mean it will cause cancer in all cases (or any, depending on the sample group). But again if you had enough data on the people in the town, their medical and genetic records, etc you could make a pretty good prediction about who is the most likely to get cancer.
In all cases, it’s better than guessing. All such rules have to be predictive. That’s how we test them to make sure they’re good rules.
The rule of three isn’t a rule in this sense. It’s just people grouping stuff into digestable bite sized chunks that fit easily into a headline or blog.
it would be fun to try grouping celebrity deaths according to the rules of the card game Set; that is, each major aspect of that individual’s celebrity (e.g. line of work, or endorsements, or personal foibles) must be identical throughout the group or entirely different throughout the group. hence the pair of frank mccourt and john updike might best be completed by another writer, most famous for something neither memoir nor fiction – perhaps a historian of science such as horace freeland judson.
please pardon my nitpicking: that onion piece was not a celebrity death triad but a tetrad. i believe the fourth was strom thurmond; and under the headline “2003 obituaries” was the caption “old bastard, dirty bastard, dirty old bastard, ol’ dirty bastard.”
and further nitpicking: olbermann isn’t trying to be cronkite, he’s trying to be the same guy he was on sportscenter. the broadcast legend he gives props to every night is not cronkite but murrow. olbermann ends each broadcast by saying “good night and good luck” as homage.
p.s. i feel like a horrible person for just now implicitly predicting the untimely passing of h.f. judson… i guess i just kinda wish the publishers could have occasion to reprint “the eighth day of creation”.
@sariel
1. I’m not moving the goalposts, I’m saying the rule generates probabilistic, nonspecific predictions. By the standard jokermage set up, this isn’t predictive enough to qualify as a valid rule. I can predict that some celebrity will die at some point somewhere. I can’t predict which one, how or when. It’s the same with evolution. That doesn’t disprove evolution.
2. I’m pretty sure you’re incorrect in this. Butterfly effect and all that. But “reasonable margin of error” is a hole big enough to drive a truck through. All that does is give a way out of acknowledging how limited your predictive power is.
Yes, the way a scientist would handle it is to acknowledge how likely he or she is to be off just by the equivalent of random chance. It’s basic, but it’s so basic that people don’t stop But that sense of correctness that comes with setting up a realistic margin of error
@sariel
1. I’m not moving the goalposts, I’m saying the rule generates probabilistic, nonspecific predictions. By the standard jokermage set up, this isn’t predictive enough to qualify as a valid rule. I can predict that some celebrity will die at some point somewhere. I can’t predict which one, how or when. It’s the same with evolution. That doesn’t disprove evolution.
2. I’m pretty sure you’re incorrect in this. Butterfly effect and all that. But “reasonable margin of error” is a hole big enough to drive a truck through. All that does is give a way out of acknowledging how limited your predictive power is.
Yes, the way a scientist would handle it is to acknowledge how likely he or she is to be off just by the equivalent of random chance. It’s basic, but it’s so basic that people don’t stop to think what it means. That sense of correctness that comes with setting up a realistic margin of error feels like the confidence of being able to predict the future, but when the real world drifts a standard deviation or two outside the median, all of a sudden you’ve managed to successfully predict nothing. This gap in thinking, the false confidence instilled by margins of error, is a big part of what causes financial crises and market crashes these days, so it shouldn’t be dismissed lightly.
3. The burden for the kind of information you need to make this prediction accurately (and it’s a lot of information, and it still gives you a probabilistic answer and nothing definite) is too great to be met in most practical, real-world situations – as I said, “outside a controlled environment.”
And even so, I don’t think, even with all that information, you’re going to do as well as you think you are, especially not when dealing with individuals. Systems get chaotic, variables change, data gets confounded, and you end up having to make a lot of retroactive explanations that you never would have come up with ahead of time given all the information in the world. Like, whether somebody gets a divorce can affect whether they get cancer (by changing their lifestyle, for one).
Oh, you can predict things, but you’ll be wrong so often that you have to resort to statistics to prove that you beat random guessing. This feels like certainty about the future, but it really isn’t.
By the way, the reason the boat thing doesn’t work is because the system doesn’t average out small variations (like the orbit of a planet), it magnifies them.
The angle of the sail relative to the wind changes the force applied to the boat and the direction it travels. A small eddy in the water that lurches the prow of the boat a few inches to the left, which is impossible to predict in the atlantic ocean, will change the effect of subsequent gusts and currents on the path of the boat. Maybe it goes a degree or two off course – suddenly you’re going to land hundreds of miles away from where you would have landed otherwise. But then, maybe this means you run into a storm you would have otherwise avoided. Or maybe it means you get caught by different currents entirely and end up going south instead of north.
Okay, I’ll stop trying to be Ian Malcolm for a second and get back to work ;)
I’m confused. I thought the superstition was bad things happen in threes, and that these bad things were not necessarily deaths.
Where did the celebrities die in threes rule come from? From Jokermage’s link I gather that this rule existed in 2005, but…really?
I feel like I missed something. Which Rule of Three is everyone debating here?
The media establishment has been fighting populism and new technology since we were little kids.
This week, we celebrate twenty years of “Weird” Al Yankovic’s shocking political thriller “UHF”. The NY Times, Warner Bros and Fox would do well to learn from this movie: intimidation and lawsuits can’t stop the signal. Nothing can.
Excellent episode, Overthinkers!
About the idea of you guys making an audio commentary for a show or a movie: Yes! Do it, I would totally listen to it (provided I like the show or movie, which I have my doubts about in the case of the Pokemon movies, but to be fair, I would watch the trailer and then decide ;-)
So, go ahead, I think it would be fun!
In a way…
@fenzel what are you some kind of commie? Toyota: Like a rock!?!? Who can confuse “I love what you do for me, Toyota! *insert jumping person here* of the late 80’s with the overtly Pro-American advertising of Chevy’s Like a rock campaign of the 90’s??!?!?! The American auto industry is weeping, not because of bankruptcy but because you have killed it with your blatant support of foreign motor cars with your mix up! Their last ditch efforts of stimulus vouchers and crack advertising is obviously failing. I think the blame rests solely on your shoulders. Thanks a lot Fenzel for bringing down America in one fell swoop.
Was it you or Belinkie that messed up the car reference a few podcasts ago? You really need a gear-head up in this B.
Maybe I should have called this one in, screaming it at the top of my lungs… but I’m a lady. ;)
(Wow- being back in a red state for such a short period and I really channeled my inner Republican there. Can’t wait to get back home and drive my Volkswagon.)
I have belatedly listened to the podcast, and I don’t mind making it known that I was the one who made business cards to hand out to girls in bars. I thought it was a cute idea, and I guess I figured that any girl that I would have long-term potential with would also think they were cute. Mark is correct: I had zero luck with them. But as anyone who ever witnessed my early-2000’s pickup style can attest, there are lots of reasons besides the cards why someone might have decided not to call.
@Matthew: see, I really like the idea in concept. I might tinker with it to read something like:
That seems less sleazy but equally silly.
Of course, the one downside to all of this is that it’s clearly calculated. No one has business cards like that on them by accident. The effort involved makes it seem less sexy and more cheesy.
@Matt
To be entirely fair to Belinkie, he didn’t really use the cards all that much. The idea itself was really funny, but it’s not like he literally walked around passing them out to everybody. As I recall, he mostly saved them as a cute joke for when they might work.
But the story works better if you imagine him just spamming a room with them.
Yes, do a movie with peanut-gallery comments the whole time. Something amazingly bad or just fun to make fun of. Like a Michael Bay movie!
And the three thing? I’ve heard that for years, that celebrities die in threes. Why three? Well, three is one of those mystical, powerful, ::insert spooky-ish adjective here:: numbers with deep significance in a lot of different cultures and religions. The Trinity (Christianity), the Rule of Three and the Triple Goddess in Wiccan tradition, and various Eastern religions that use the cycle of life, death, and rebirth are the ones I think of just off the top of my head.
Numbers play a big part in a lot of peoples’ lives. Eg.:
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42
You have no idea how much I have suffered masochistically over this sequence. Double-you tee eff, mate.
@Belinkie. Speaking just for me, if a guy came up and put the schmooze on and then left me that “calling card” I would definitely give that guy a second glance. I mean it ingenuity and creativeness at it’s best. But then again I’m of a different breed I suppose. I say, Who needs those shallow B’s anyway?
@Perich I think you should try to pefect Belinkie’s go at this.. but you should make sure that you put somewhere on there… “Not Jamie Hyneman… But I do dispell the dating myths” or go take what’s behind lude door number one, “Not Jamie Hyenman… But I still give mustache rides..”. Oh that was in poor taste…did I just lose my clean rating? I apologize! Either way, Embrace it man!! Those dulcet tones are dead sexy! LOL
Please do make a commentary track sometime! And Belinkie; while i can’t imagine you’d ever have any luck using the card trick, you get massive style-points just for following through on a silly idea, even if just once or twice.
Any word on Wrather’s cross-country drive progress?
Sigh. Back to lurking. Cheers all!
Speaking of celebrity deaths, btw:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/unleashed/2009/07/gidget-taco-bell-chihuahua-dog-dies.html