secrets-of-mental-math-malestrom

Chapter ∞
Epilogue: How Math Helps Us
Think About Weird Things
by Michael Shermer
As the publisher of Skeptic magazine, the executive director of
the Skeptics Society, and a Scientific American editor with a
monthly column entitled “Skeptic,” I receive volumes of mail
from people who challenge me with stories about their unusual
experiences, such as haunted houses, ghosts, near-death and
out-of-body experiences, UFO sightings, alien abductions,
death-premonition dreams, and much more.
The most interesting stories to me are those about highly
improbable events. The implication of the letter writer’s tale is
that if I cannot offer a satisfactory natural explanation for that
particular event, the general principle of supernaturalism is preserved.
A common story is the one about having a dream about
the death of a friend or relative, then a phone call comes the
next day about the unexpected death of the person in the dream.
What are the odds of that? I am asked.
Here is where math comes in to play in our thinking and reasoning.
I don’t want to pontificate about how mathematics in
school teaches students to think critically, because that has