Prophecy fullfilled

[minsc_tdp]

I certainly don't hope to make any enemies here since this is, by far, my favorite forum on the net and I hope any heated attitudes don't spill over into other, unrelated, friendly game threads.

Having said that, I will first acknowledge that you did make your statement about 2 months before the "hurricane" hit. But I will try to boil this down to the two key things you are simply ignoring or not understanding that make it all irrelevant.

The first is the overall odds of your revelation coming true. What were the odds? Let's pretend we're bookies and do a little oddsmaking. Well given that a hurricane has broached texas before, and the area has been generally pummelled with hurricanes the last few years, this is a pretty solid bet. If I were a bookie, I'd maybe give you 1.5 to 1. Hurricane Rita hit Texas in 2005 for christs sake. What fool would bet against your revelation?

The statement of "this has never happened before" is only referring to the rapid overnight growth which promoted its status. But your revelation didn't include that so it is completely irrelevant to all of this. You are (perhaps unconsciously) trying to use that to make it appear that the odds of your revelation coming true were very long, when in fact they simply weren't. You want it to be a revelation so you're twisting logic to reinforce that belief. It's called a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You also didn't state when it would happen, and while you got lucky and it happened shortly after your revelation was made, which appears to bolster your revelation, it actually doesn't matter since you didn't say when. It could have taken years and your old thread would have been dredged up at that time as Prophecy Fulfilled, albeit with less impact than the way things turned out. But we'll get to that in a second. Focusing still on the odds, as a Vegas bookie, if you tried to make an open-ended bet like that, none would take it, since the bookie will eventually lose the bet. But even if you had added the stipulation (which you didn't) that it would happen by the end of the year, a bookie MIGHT take that bet but the odds would still be maybe 1.5 to 1, given the recent hurricane activity in that area and the randomness of weather. Vegas isn't stupid, and the amazing things they have built are testaments to that.

So there's the odds. Keeping in mind we're talking about a 1.5 to 1 odds bet here, let's move onto point #2. This is a classic case of focusing on the hits and ignoring the misses. The "hit" in this case is your single prediction, even though the odds of it coming true were pretty good of it happening in the first place. The "misses" are the thousands upon thousands of revelations and predictions per hour made throughout the world that don't come true. Those are conveniently ignored, but there is a lot of "I told you so" on the ones that do come true. The way to be on the winning team is to use predictions so vague and open-ended that some of them will come true which you can then focus on - but hell, even Nostradomus knew this trick and was a master at exploiting it, though I think even he would be surprised at the gullibility of people centuries after.

There's even a well established term for this: Confirmation Bias:

"Confirmation-bias (selective evidence). Many people report a common perception of thinking about someone, when the phone then rings and the caller is the person they were thinking of. Is this strong evidence for a psychic ability between these people? The answer is no. It reflects a selective bias in memory and reason. Although we can remember the instances when this does happen (as they can be striking) we rarely remember the instances when it is not the person we were thinking of. Our memory is biased to place an emphasis on the ‘hits’ and ignore the ‘misses’."

Look at the Internet as giant collective brain, and you'll see how a supposedly amazing "hit" will be honed in on by dozens of people and marvelled at when it is just the simple phenominon of confirmation bias.

I fully agree that you believe that God revealed this to you. This might also be the only prediction you've ever made. So, from your perspective, you're 1 for 1. But you are one of many people making predictions, most of which do not come true unless they are vague and open ended like yours and already have good odds that they will come true.

Focusing on the hits and ignoring the misses, completly ignoring the odds, and trying to twist an unrelated fact in your favor, is ignoring the entire field of mathematics and logic, and a slap in the face to every great mathematician who has ever existed over thousands of years, and by extension, every great scientist who has ever lived from the early chinese to Einstein to those alive today.

It is also a slap in the face of all the math and sciences which fueled the industrial revolution and the ensuing population boom which contributed heavily to the odds of your even existing. It's a slap in the face to every person who applies mathematics and science every day to manage the logistics of your trash and water services, and the power services which power the very computer you are on right now, which wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for the combined work of math and science over centuries and, more specifically, the dedicated mathematic and scientific work by the engineers responsible for the actual technology you are using. God did not put that *******ing computer on your desk.

I believe that the world would be a better place if everyone realized such obvious facts and threw out childish notions of spirits and woo-woo. I strongly suggest reading www.randi.org or "Why People Believe Weird Things" by Michael Shermer. Like all who evangelize, please realize that I am only trying to help you and all readers of this thread by showing the truth, nothing more.