Earthquakes and sharpshooters

A guy is driving through Texas, and passes a barn.  It's got a bullseye painted on the side -- with a bullet hole in the dead center.

He sees two old-timers leaning on a fence nearby, and pulls over to talk to them.

"Did one of you guys make that bullseye shot?" he says.

One of them says, a proud smile on his face, "Yeah.  That was me."

"That's some amazing shooting!"

The man says, "Yeah, I guess it was a pretty good shot."

The old-timer's friend gives a derisive snort.  "Don't let him fool you, mister," he says.  "He got drunk, shot a hole in the side of his own barn, and the next day painted the bullseye around the bullet hole."

This is the origin of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, the practice of analyzing an outcome out of context and after the fact, and overemphasizing its accuracy.  Kind of the bastard child of cherry-picking and confirmation bias.  And I ran into a great example of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy just yesterday -- a Dutch geologist who has gone viral for allegedly predicting the devastating earthquake that hit southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria on February 6.

The facts of the story are that on February 3, a man named Frank Hoogerbeets posted on Twitter, "Sooner or later there will be a ~M 7.5 earthquake in this region (South-Central Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon)."  This, coupled with the fact that the day before, the SSGEOS (the agency for which Hoogerbeets works) had posted on its website, "Larger seismic activity may occur from 4 to 6 February, most likely up to mid or high 6 magnitude. There is a slight possibility of a larger seismic event around 4 February," has led many to conclude that they were either prescient or else have figured out a way to predict earthquakes accurately -- something that has eluded seismologists for years.  The result is that Hoogerbeets's tweet has gone viral, and has had over thirty-three million views and almost forty thousand retweets.

Okay, let's look at this claim carefully.

First, if you'll look at Hoogerbeets's twitter account and the SSGEOS website, you'll see a couple of things right away.  First, they specialize in linking earthquake frequency to the weather and to the positions of bodies in the Solar System, both of which are correlations most scientists find dubious at best.  Second, though, is that Hoogerbeets and the SSGEOS have made tons of predictions of earthquakes that didn't pan out; in fact, the misses far outnumber the hits.

Lastly, the East Anatolian Fault, where the earthquake occurred, is one of the most active fault zones in the world; saying an earthquake would happen there "sooner or later" doesn't take a professional geologist.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Roxy, Anatolian Plate Vectoral, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What seems to have happened here is that the people who are astonished at Hoogerbeets's prediction have basically taken that one tweet and painted a bullseye around it.  The problem, of course, is that this isn't how science works.  You can't just take this guy's one spot-on prediction and say it's proof; in order to support a claim, you need a mass of evidence that all points to a strong correlation.

Put a different way: the plural of anecdote is not data.

No less an authority than the United States Geological Service has stated outright that despite improvements in fault monitoring and our general knowledge about how earthquakes work, quakes are still unpredictable.  "Neither the USGS nor any other scientists have ever predicted a major earthquake," their website states.  "We do not know how, and we do not expect to know how any time in the foreseeable future.  USGS scientists can only calculate the probability that a significant earthquake will occur (shown on our hazard mapping) in a specific area within a certain number of years."

So what Hoogerbeets and the SSGEOS did was basically nothing more than an unusually shrewd guess, and I'd be willing to bet that the next "sooner or later" prediction from that source will turn out to be inaccurate at best.  Unfortunate, really; having an accurate way to forecast earthquakes could save lives.

But realistically speaking, we are nowhere near able to do that -- viral tweets and spurious bullseyes notwithstanding.

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Falling in line

What amazes me about so many crazy claims is that you get the impression that the people making them didn't even try to find a natural explanation.

It's one thing to speculate wildly about a phenomenon for which science is still searching for explanations.  Déjà vu, for example, is one experience that virtually everyone shares, and for which no convincing explanation has yet been found.  It's no wonder that it's fertile ground for people who prefer to ascribe such occurrences to the paranormal.

But in other cases, there is such a simple, convincing natural explanation that you have to wonder why the claimant isn't going there.  Such, for example, is the suggestion over at the phenomenally bizarre quasi-religious site The Watchman's Cry that geographical locations on the Earth that have been the sites of disasters (natural or manmade) fall along connecting lines, making some sort of mystical, meaningful pattern.

The article starts out with a bang, with the phrase, "Several months ago, I had four prophetic dreams which took place on the same night."  Four precognitive dreams is pretty impressive, I have to say, especially since most skeptics don't think precognition occurs at all.  Be that as it may, these dreams involved train wrecks, which is ironic, because that is what the rest of the site turns out to be.

Both literally and figuratively.

The site goes into great detail about various train derailments, and how if you connect them by lines (great circles, to be more precise), those lines then go around the Earth and connect to other sites that have had bad things happen.  These then intersect other such great circles, which go other interesting places, and so on.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's just ley lines all over again, isn't it?  If your search parameters are wide enough -- basically, "anywhere that anything bad has happened in the past two centuries" -- you can find great circles that link them up.  Which is entirely unsurprising. I could draw a great circle anywhere on Earth and pretty much guarantee that I'll find three or more sites near it that had some kind of natural or manmade calamity in the past two centuries.  The Earth is a big place, and there are lots of calamities to choose from.

So this whole thing is an excellent example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, the choosing of data points favorable to your hypothesis after the fact.  The name comes from a folk story:

A traveler through Texas passed a barn that had a bullseye painted on the side, with three bullet holes near the dead center of the target.  There were two old-timers leaning on a fence nearby, and the visitor slowed down his car and said, "That's some pretty good shooting, right there."

One of the old-timers grins, and says, "Why, thank you."

The other one scowls.  "Don't pay any attention to him.  He just got drunk one night and shot the side of his barn, then the next morning painted a bullseye around the bullet holes."

Anyhow, what gets me most about the claim in The Watchman's Cry is that they don't even seem to understand that given the fact that the Earth is a sphere (an oblate spheroid, to be precise, but let's not get technical), a given point on Earth has an infinite number of great circles passing through it.  Just as two points on a plane define a line, two points on a sphere define a great circle.  And his lack of grasp of simple geometry becomes apparent when he tells us that it's amazing that two intersecting great circles (ones connecting Houston, Texas to train derailment sites in Rosedale, Maryland and Bear Creek, Alabama, respectively) were "only 900 feet apart."

How can you say that two intersecting lines are any specific distance apart?  If they intersect, they are (at that point) zero feet apart.  Farther from the intersection, they are farther apart.  Because that's how intersection works.

But the author of this site trumpets this statement as if it were some kind of epiphany.  It's like being excited because you found a triangle that had three sides.

I'll leave you to explore the site on your own, if you're curious to see more of this false-pattern malarkey, but suffice it to say that there's nothing at all mystical going on here.  He's adding geometry to coincidence and finding meaning, and it's no great surprise that it turns out to be the meaning he already believed going into it.

So like the ley lines people, this guy doesn't seem to be trying very hard to see if there's a natural explanation that sufficiently accounts for all of the facts, a tendency I have a hard time comprehending.  Why are people attracted to this kind of hokum?  Science itself is a grand, soaring vision, telling us that we are capable of understanding how the universe works, from the realm of the enormous to the realm of the unimaginably small.  With a little work, you can find out the rules that govern everything from galaxies to quarks.

But that, apparently, isn't enough for some people.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one -- George Zaidan's Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us.  Springboarding off the loony recommendations that have been rampant in the last few years -- fad diets, alarmist warnings about everything from vaccines to sunscreen, the pros and cons of processed food, substances that seem to be good for us one week and bad for us the next, Zaidan goes through the reality behind the hype, taking apart the claims in a way that is both factually accurate and laugh-out-loud funny.

And high time.  Bogus health claims, fueled by such sites as Natural News, are potentially dangerous.  Zaidan's book holds a lens up to the chemicals we ingest, inhale, and put on our skin -- and will help you sort the fact from the fiction.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Oil prophecies

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy is the practice of picking out the data points, after the fact, that support whatever your claim is.  The name comes from the story of a guy traveling across Texas.  He sees an old barn with bullseyes painted on the side, and in the exact center of each bullseye is a bullet hole.  The guy sees two old-timers leaning against a fence near the barn, so he stops to talk to them.

"Who shot the holes in that barn?" the guy asks.

One of the old-timers says proudly, "I did."

"That some pretty fancy shooting.  You must be good."

The old-timer is about to reply when his friend chimes in, "Nah.  He's a lousy shot.  He got drunk one night, shot some holes in the side of his barn, and then painted the bullseyes around them."

The whole thing comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday with the comment, "Hoo boy.  Get a load of this."  The link was to the homepage of the Zion Oil and Gas Company, whose raison d'être is... well, let me give it to you in their own words:

When first visiting Israel in 1983, I believe that God gave me a scripture (I Kings 8: 41- 43), a vision (Oil for Israel) and, as a Christian Zionist and New Covenant believer (Isaiah 65:1), the calling to render assistance to the Jewish people and Nation of Israel, and to aid them in the Restoration of the Land by providing the oil and gas necessary to maintain their political and economic independence.

Zion is a testimony and a journey of faith, which began for me when I was saved, or born again, in January 1981.  This testimony is based only on God’s faithfulness to the Jewish people and the Nation of Israel (Genesis 17:1-8). 

Both of which are covenant promises and will come to pass (1 Kings 8:56; Isaiah 25:1) and not because of my faith.  It is God’s purpose and will for my life to discover the oil of Israel (Isaiah 46:9-11; Exodus 9:16). 

I was saved by faith.  It is a gift of God (Ephesians 2:8,9; Romans 10:8-9). 

Jim Spillman came to Zion Temple in Clawson, Michigan in February 1981 and taught on “The Oil of Israel“; by faith I believed it and The Great Treasure Hunt.  God used Jim Spillman first in my life to deposit the vision for the oil in my heart.

Yup, you read that correctly.  The CEO and founder of Zion Oil and Gas, John Brown, started his company because he thought he was anointed by god to find oil for the United States and Israel.  Not only that, he uses the Book of Genesis, and the account of the Great Flood, to tell him where to drill:

God creates this.  He provides the money and the place where to drill. Now why we haven't got the oil yet, I don't know.  I have never drilled one oil well I didn't expect to find oil...  He talks specifically about the land of Joseph and the blessings of the deep that lies beneath.  It doesn't say specifically oil, but there's a huge possibility it could be, let's put it that way.

In fact, the motto of the company is, "Geology confirming theology."  (If you want more in-depth information about Brown and his company, check out the article about Zion on RationalWiki.)

The only problem is that Zion's batting average so far is... zero.  They've drilled four wells in Israel, at great expense to their stockholders, and every one has been a dry well.  The result: $130 million down the drain, and a 90% loss of their stock's value on NASDAQ.

[image courtesy of photographer Eric Kounce and the Wikimedia Commons]

Unsurprisingly, given the mindset of people who would fall for this in the first place, this zero return on investment has not been as discouraging as you'd expect.  One of them, one Andy Barron of Temple, Texas, was quoted in the above-linked article as saying, "Well, I used to have a lot more money in it than I do now.  The stock I bought has tremendously decreased in value over time.  But with my belief that God is in charge of all of it and it's all his anyway, I think the upside of betting on God is pretty good."

Another supporter, Hal Lindsey (whose name may be familiar from his cheery End Times books The Late Great Planet Earth and Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth), said that even though things haven't gone well, they're about to, and furthermore, that's an indication that the world is about to end.  "Zion Oil right now is on the verge of discovering oil," Lindsey said.  "[It is a sign that] we are really on the very threshold of Lord Jesus's return."

So that's using a prophecy to support an oil drilling operation that has had zero success, and claiming that supports a different prophecy.  Which should win some sort of award for pretzel logic.

But you can bet if Zion does strike oil at some point, John Brown and his pals will shout from the rooftops about how this proves the prophecies and the Great Flood and his company being blessed by god and whatnot.  Thus the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy that I started with.  Given long enough, you can find incidental support for damn near anything, especially when you choose to ignore all of the failures.

Anyhow, that's today's exercise in wishful thinking.  All of which supports the idea that even though religion -- in at least some circumstances -- can be a decent guide to moral behavior, it's a lousy substitute for science.  Oh, yeah, and caveat emptor.  Not to mention "a fool and his money are soon parted."