Who “Designed” the Bell Curve?
The desire to seek an explanation is part of human nature. We accept “just so” stories to avoid uncertainty but we pay a price because the explanations come in lieu of understanding and often lead us astray. Today’s (July 27, 2005) Boston Globe has a story on George Gilder and his advocacy of Intelligent Design. The argument is classic – if you can’t explain something you have to ascribe it to something or someone. The Intelligent Designer is the explanation of last resort. Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) gave a talk at last year’s PopTech in which he noted that if you ask people for an explanation they will give you one. In his example people were asked why they preferred one chair over another. But the stories had no predictive value – they were made up because it’s in our nature to fill in the holes. I think of it as the cognitive equivalent of the persistence of vision. People who are missing part of their visual fields are often not even aware of it because they cover it so well. In fact
