Why do many Smart People believe in stupid things
‘Feluda reading a book on numerology, raising his eyebrows occasionally in both amazement and appreciation. It was a book about Dr. matrix. Feluda caught me looking at him, and smiled. “You’d be astonished to learn the power of numbers, and the role they play in the lives of men like Dr, Matrix. Listen to this. It was a discovery Dr. Matrix made. You know the names of two American Presidents who were assassinated, don’t you?”
“Yes, Lincoln and Kennedy, right?”
“Right. Now tell me how many letters each name has.”
“L-i-n-c-o-l-n — seven. K-e-n-n-e-d-y –also seven.”
Feluda, or Prodosh Chandra Mitra, is a fictional Bengali private investigator starring in a series of Bengali fictional detective novels and short stories written by Indian Bengali film director and writer Satyajit Ray.
The above is an excerpt from the the story ‘The key’, taken from ‘The Complete Adventures of Feluda, Volume 1’ . It is an English translation of a Feluda’s adventure story ‘Samaddarer Chabi’.
Feluda is often accompanied by his cousin Tapesh (affectionately called Topshe by Feluda), who serves as the narrator of the stories. From the sixth story, Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress), the duo are joined by a popular thriller writer, Jatayu (Lalmohon Ganguli).
Alas Feluda failed understand the reality behind these so called miraculous incidents, what disturbs me more was that he did not even quest to find the truth.
Let us do that.
Lincoln and Kennedy Coincidences: A quest for the truth
In the book Magic number of Dr Matrix page 40 talks about miraculous coincidence between Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy. Let me list them and discuss one by one.
1. Lincoln was elected president in 1860. Exactly one hundred years later, in 1960, Kennedy was elected president.
Rationalist view: A lot of the similarities are about dates that are exactly 100 years apart. This is no great shock; as U.S. Presidential elections happen every four years, so there are only 25 elections in a century, and every President has at least one other President elected exactly a century before and/or after. Lincoln couldn’t possibly have been elected President in 1857 or 1858 or 1859 or 1861 or 1862 or 1863, because no presidential elections were held in those years. Likewise, Kennedy couldn’t possibly have been elected President in the non-election years of 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962, or 1963. So, even though both men were politically active at the national level during eight-year spans when they might have been elected President, circumstances dictated that the only years during those spans when they both could have been elected were exactly one hundred years apart.
But this century-centric nature of the Lincoln-Kennedy legend starts to fall apart very quickly when you look at what should be the most important dates: Lincoln and Kennedy died 98 years apart, not a century; and they were elected to the terms in which they died 96 years apart, not a century, conveniently omitted from in the book.
2. Both men were deeply involved in civil rights for Negroes.
Saying that Lincoln and Kennedy were both “particularly concerned with civil rights” is like saying that Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Bajpayee were both “particularly concerned with war,” or that Dr Monmahan Singh and P. V. Narasimha Rao were both “particularly concerned with economics.”
Those weren’t subjects Lincoln or Kennedy had evinced a particular overarching interest in; those were issues they were forced to deal with due to events currently taking place in the U.S. which were beyond their control.
3. Both men were assassinated on a Friday.
The probability that both killings would have occurred on the same day of the week is one on seven, just little less than getting a 6 when you role a dice , which is one on 6. (No, the probability is not one in forty-nine; that’a common mistake made by statistical novices.)
Friday is a day when presidents are often out in public giving speeches. Assassins also drew guns and/or fired at Andrew Jackson and Gerald Ford on Fridays. But to come up with that little stat, I had to cherrypick the data. Assassins drew guns and/or fired at Teddy Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan all on Mondays; and at FDR, Harry Truman, and George W. Bush all on Wednesdays.
4. Each wife had lost a son while living at the White House.
Another statement that, while literally true, encompasses events that were completely different in circumstance and nature.
All of Lincoln’s children were born before he entered the White House, and the Lincolns actually lost two children, not just one (although only one died during Lincoln’s tenure as President). Edward Lincoln died of tuberculosis in 1850, just before his fourth birthday, and the Lincolns’ eleven-year-old son Willie succumbed to typhoid at the end of their first year in the White House.
JFK and his wife, on the other hand, were the rare Presidential couple still young enough to be bearing children after entering the White House, and a premature child born to Mrs. Kennedy in 1963 died two days later.
Other substantial differences not mentioned: The Lincolns had four children, all boys, only one of whom lived past his teens. JFK and his wife had three children, two boys and a girl, two of whom survived well into adulthood.
5. Both men were killed by a bullet that entered the head from behind.
This “coincidence” is another one which is exceedingly trivial in nature. The only type of shots which reasonably assure a dead victim is a head shots, so two assassinations committed by head shots aren’t the least bit coincidental — especially when one considers that since both Lincoln and Kennedy were shot from behind and while seated, their assassins had no other practical choice of target.
And the “coincidence” here is even less surprising when we note the substantial differences: Lincoln was killed indoors with a small handgun at point blank range; Kennedy was shot outdoors with a rifle from several hundred feet away.
6. Lincoln was killed in Ford’s Theater. Kennedy met his death while riding in a Lincoln convertible made by Ford Motor Company.
The name Ford as business is not uncommon. There are even hotels and bakery named after Ford. So this is a mere coincidence and is hardly surprising.
There’s actually far more differences between the assassinations:
- Lincoln was shot by a handgun from a point blank range and Kennedy’s bullet came from a rifle shot hundreds of feet in the distance.
- Lincoln was shot indoors at a theater during the evening and Kennedy was seated outdoors in an automobile during the middle of the day.
- Lincoln was shot in Washington, D.C. and Kennedy was killed in Dallas.
- Lincoln was fifty-six when he died and Kennedy was forty-six.
- Kennedy’s assassination was seen by millions of people, both live and on television and continues to be viewed online, when in comparison, practically no one saw the murder of Abraham Lincoln.
Also, Lincoln was seated in the balcony of the theater and since he was shot from behind, it’s believed that no one in the audience even saw the shooting take place.
7. Both men were succeeded by vice-presidents named Johnson who were southern Democrats and former senators.
Dwayne Johnson, Ben Johnson, Don Johnson, Jimmie Johnson, Jimmy Johnson, Jack Johnson, Beverly Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson are all famous Hollywood stars. Can we conclude that people whose last name is Johnson has a probability of becoming Hollywood star?
Johnson is the second most-common name in the United States.
So both Lincoln and Kennedy’s successors had the last name as Johnson, this “coincidence” should be no real surprise to anyone.
8. Andrew Johnson was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908, exactly one hundred years later.
Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson had birth dates 100 years apart. But Snopes reports that, yet again, the hundred-year coincidence shouldn’t surprise anyone. “There’s nothing ‘coincidental’ about events merely because they somehow involve the number 100,” the publication explains. “If we sifted through all the Lincoln/Kennedy data, we could produce multiple instances of events involving the number 17 or 49 or 116, but nobody would consider those ‘coincidences’ because they don’t yield nice round numbers that have any significance to us.
And once again, let’s consider all the differences between the two Johnsons, such as that one hailed from North Carolina while the other was from Texas, or that one supported slavery while the other championed civil rights, or that one was never elected President in his own right while the other won the biggest presidential landslide in history, or that one was impeached while the other wasn’t, or that one became President at the end of a war while the other became President at the beginning of a war.
9. The name of Lincoln’s private secretary was Kennedy and the name of Kennedy’s private secretary was Lincoln. Lincoln’s secretary, Kennedy, warned him not to go to Ford’s Theatre. Kennedy’s secretary, Lincoln, warned him not to go to Dallas.
This is one is not even a coincidence; it’s simply wrong. John Kennedy did have a secretary named Evelyn Lincoln (who may or may not have warned him about going to Dallas), but one searches in vain to find a Lincoln secretary named Kennedy. (Lincoln’s White House secretaries were John G. Nicolay and John Hay.)
The more important point is that since Presidents are frequent recipients of assassination threats, they rarely make any public appearances without somebody’s warning them of potential danger. Lincoln received “an unusual number of letters about plots to kidnap or assassinate him,” said to have numbered at least eighty, yet none of those plots were enacted. Nor does anyone think to mention other attempts at kidnap or assassination that were not preceded by any recorded warnings to the victims. (Lincoln was shot at on at least one other occasion.)
Yes, Lincoln was warned not to go to Ford’s Theatre by people concerned for his safety, just as he had been warned not to visit Richmond a week earlier, and just as he had been warned not to attend his own inauguration in 1861. Obviously, only one of the myriad of warnings he received throughout his four years in office was on the mark. Likewise, Kennedy was warned not to visit San Antonio the day before his trip to Dallas and (undoubtedly before a host of other appearances as well), but only the last warning he allegedly received is considered significant, because it coincidentally happened to come true. As various “psychics” have demonstrated, if you make enough predictions, one of them is eventually bound to come true; the public remembers only that and forgets about all the others failed predictions.
10. John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839. Lee Harvey
Oswald was born in 1939, one hundred years later
Another coincidence that is no coincidence because it’s plain falsification of information: Booth was born in 1838, not 1839. His birthday is typically fudged by a year to make it fit a predetermined pattern.
11. Both assassins were Southerners who held extremist views.
John Wilkes Booth was undeniably a Southern sympathizer, but he was born in Maryland, which (along with Delaware) was the northernmost of the border slave states and remained part of the Union throughout the Civil War. Additionally, Booth spent a good deal of his life in the North and “thought of himself as a Northerner who understood the South.”
Oswald was nominally a Southerner by virtue of his having been born in New Orleans; he spent his youth being shuttled between Louisiana, Texas, and New York before finally joining the Marines. But Oswald’s “Southerness” is of no real import, because, unlike Booth, Oswald was not motivated by a regional affiliation.
12. Both assassins were murdered before they could be brought to trial.
Another superficial similarity with much more significant underlying differences.
After Booth shot Lincoln, he fled the scene and eventually (with a co-conspirator, David Herold) crossed the Potomac River from Maryland into Virginia, eluding capture for a total of eleven days before federal troops finally discovered him to be hiding on a farm belonging to Richard Garrett and surrounded the barn in which he and Herold were sleeping. The two men were ordered to surrender: Herold complied, but when Booth failed to drop his weapon and come out, the barn was set ablaze. A trooper named Boston Corbett, who was watching Booth through a gap in the barn’s siding, shot the assassin. Whether Corbett can be said to have “assassinated” Booth is problematic — the deeply religious Corbett sometimes claimed that he had shot Booth because “Providence directed” him to do it, or because he “did not want Booth to be roasted alive,” but he also testified that he shot Booth because he “saw [Booth] in the act of stooping or springing and concluded he was going to use his weapons.”
Oswald left the warehouse from which he shot Kennedy and was arrested in a movie theater a little over an hour later by police officers who had no idea who he was. (Oswald was initially arrested only for the murder of Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit, whom he shot while in flight; his connection to the Kennedy assassination was not established until later.) Oswald was captured alive and remained in custody for two days before being gunned down by Jack Ruby, a private citizen.
Other differences: Booth was shot in the back in the neck and lived for another three hours; Oswald was shot in the abdomen and died within minutes of his arrival at Parkland Hospital.
13. Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and fled to a warehouse.
Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theater.
This is coincidence is both inaccurate and superficial.
Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and fled across state lines before being trapped and killed in a tobacco barn several days later.
Oswald shot Kennedy from (not in) a textbook warehouse, then remained in Dallas and was caught and taken alive in a movie theater a little over an hour later.
14. LINCOLN and KENNEDY each has seven letters.
This is the most trivial of coincidences, especially when one considers that the average length of presidential surnames is 6.64 letters.
Some US presidents whose last name consist of seven letters are Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, A. Johnson, Harding, Kennedy, L. Johnson, Clinton.
No mention is made of the fact that the two men’s first names contain different numbers of letters, and that Kennedy had a middle name (Fitzgerald) while Lincoln had none.
15. ANDREW JOHNSON and LYNDON JOHNSON each has thirteen letters.
The full name of the two presidents were Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
But the middle name of Lyndon Johnson was omitted to make it look better that both had thirteen letters in their names.
16. JOHN WILKES BOOTH and LEE HARVEY OSWALD each has fifteen letters.
Neither their first nor last names have the same number of letters. And why should it be significant that both assassins had the same number of letters in their full names when the same wasn’t true of Abraham Lincoln and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, or of Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Baines Johnson?
Once again, perhaps we should focus on the substantive differences between the two men: Booth was born into a prominent family and, like his father, was a well-known, popular, gregarious actor. Oswald was born (and lived most of his life) in near poverty-level circumstances, never knew his father (who died two months before Oswald was born) and was an obscure, moody malcontent who never had any close friends or a steady job. Oswald was married with two children; Booth had neither wife nor offspring. Oswald enlisted in the Marines, but Booth kept a promise to his mother not to join the Confederate army.
Numerology is a Pseudoscience and is harmful for the society
Enough of debunking this so called Lincoln-Kennedy mysterious coincidence. The point is that it’s easy to make just about anything sound extraordinary if you take it out of context, most especially if all you’re doing is looking for numbers that match or non-unique things like names. As an exercise, pick any two random events, and think about all the possible numbers and names that could be connected to the events or to the people involved, plug them all into a database and search for matches.
This is called cherry picking of information. Cherry picking is selective extraction of points in an argument in order to refute or affirm them while ignoring others which will not support the claims(s) being made.
Just think what you could do if you took all the facts and figures associated with the RMS Titanic and the RMS Lusitania, their captains, their owners, locations, or anything else that might yield matches.
The whole study of numerology, looking for meaning in the numbers connected with our lives, is a pseudoscience. Just think how much of numerology would collapse if the same conclusions were re-examined using a binary or hexadecimal numbering system, or even Roman numerals. It’s much less interesting if you say that Lincoln was elected in 744 and Kennedy was elected in 7A8.
Believers say they see their numbers everywhere, and that this confirms that numerology is real. However, the frequent appearance is coincidental. People are likely to remember seeing their numbers and forget seeing other numbers. In other words, a person whose number is seven will remember seeing lots of sevens while disregarding all the sixes, eights and other numbers he encounters. People are also more likely to remember the numerical attributes that apply to them while disregarding the ones that don’t. This phenomenon is known as confirmation bias.
The problem is not that some of the numbers may be wrong, and it’s not even that the numbers might be cherry picked or taken out of context. The problem is that numerologists fail to explain the reason behind their claim, why they are claiming certain things, how they got to know about it.
It would be wonderful if the Numerologists themselves explained how exactly their theory and claim works. How anyone’s name can possibly affect the future, or the total of the digits of their dates of birth have anything to do with their good fortune? In fact, it is the claimant’s duty to explain and establish their claim. But no, they will not do so.
In this era of cut-throat competition intensified, people will do anything before going into a new venture. So these practices – Reiki, Vaastu, Stone-therapy, Numerology, Name-ology(!) and such are thriving. These practitioners themselves are struggling to make money by cheating people. Their best targets, let me tell you, are the -‘Moneyed Fools’. Why do they advertise and open chambers if they could predict or influence their own future?
There is this challenge issued -anybody who can prove accurately under fool-proof conditions the authenticity of Reiki, Vaastu, Astrology, Numerology etc will be paid Rs.25 lakhs as prize money. And also our organization – Rationalists’ and Humanists’ Forum of India, will close down in such an instance. Many have tried, but found excuses to vanish at the last moment.
Famous People Believing in Miracle
To someone with common sense, supernatural phenomenon is a joke, superstitious nonsense. But many famous, smart people have been involved with spiritualism and miracle activities.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
RATIONALIST DEBASHIS 