patternicity

Many appeal to intuition and personal experience (especially if/when common/shared) to justify beliefs in the otherwise nonexistent. Many (most?) conclusions reached due to intuition/personal experience can often be explained by the phenomenon of patternicity, the tendency of people to overly pattern match/recognize, erroneously seeing patterns where statistically/scientifically there are none(1).

By keeping in mind the patternicity effect, one can learn to question/doubt such intuitive leaps as nothing more than "intuitive illusions" perhaps a psychological equivalent to "optical illusions", a source of false conclusions based on sensory experience that many more are familiar with.

application

Useful in the context of discussing / refuting / liberating mythology worship (as tweeted 2009-028)

1. counter mythology worship with http://tr.im/teapot analogy (2)
2. rebut appeal to intuition with http://tr.im/scipatternicity

references

• (1) Scientific American Magazine 2008-11-25: Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise / Why the brain believes something is real when it is not
  • http://tr.im/scipatternicity
• (2) Wikipedia: Russell's teapot analogy
  • http://tr.im/teapot

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