Turns Out, Spock Is Kinda Bad at Logic
aristarchus writes:
Damn empiricists! Ruining perfectly good myths, like Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock. Evidence reported at Wired, but that is not where it is.
Julia Galef, host of the Rationally Speaking podcast and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, is not impressed with the hyper-rational Vulcans on Star Trek.
"Spock is held up as this exemplar of logic and reason and rationality, but he's set up, in my opinion, as almost a weak caricature-a straw man-of reason and rationality, because he keeps making all these dumb mistakes," Galef says in Episode 462 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "That's the show's way of proving that, 'Aha! Logic and reason and rationality aren't actually all that great.'"
In the franchise, Spock makes confident predictions based on his superior Vulcan mind. Galef was curious to see exactly how often these predictions pan out. "I went through all of the Star Trek episodes and movies-all of the transcripts that I could find-and searched for any instance in which Spock is using the words 'odds,' 'probability,' 'chance,' 'definitely,' 'probably,' etc.," she says. "I catalogued all instances in which Spock made a prediction and that prediction either came true or didn't."
The results, which appear in Galef's new book The Scout Mindset, are devastating. Not only does Spock have a terrible track record-events he describes as "impossible" happen 83 percent of the time-but his confidence level is actually anti-correlated with reality. "The more confident he says he is that something will happen-that the ship will crash, or that they will find survivors-the less likely it is to happen, and the less confident he is in something, the more likely it is to happen," Galef says.
Spock's biggest weakness is his failure to understand that other people don't always behave "logically." He also makes no attempt to update his approach, even when his mistakes get his crewmates killed.
Fascinating.
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