Cock up trumps conspiracy is one of the more endearing philosophies from the UK: Karl Popper, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and others would approve.
I think Tversky and Kahneman’s framing example of Linda the Bankteller applies. I don’t know how to do one of those cool links in the text which Peter manages to do, but hopefully the usual search engines will help out.
On the subject of operating tips for the site if you want to add a comment and not logged in, logging in takes you back to the home page and not the thread you were reading?
While I understand the conjunction fallacy, I don’t follow how it applies here. Could you elaborate please?
Bookworm only that the probability of entropy (read cock up) dominates that of conspiracy, at least in the world of physics.
Ironically career earnings (speech writer, financial PR, policy wonk) for an arts graduate with an undergraduate understanding of Foucauldian deconstruction, dominate that of the poor statistician designing the polls. Which might be interpreted as a conspiracy in itself.
