I saw a TED talk the other day which featured Keith Barry, a magician. The video was interesting for me for I have a certain interest for magic (I went through a phase in which I memorized a ton of magic tricks... I hardly remember any of them now). Growing up, I loved to watch David Blaine perform tricks that made it hard to conceive of any explanation other than magic. Everyone likes to come up with their own theories on how these guys pull of their tricks, but a more important question we should be looking at is: how do we not reach the wrong answers? Anyone can take guesses, but how do we know which answers are right or wrong? How do we not reach false conclusions?
In this TED talk, Barry shows a video clip which depicts him driving blindfolded with a passenger. He claims that he is able to drive because he is looking through the passenger's eyes. He then goes on to explain that if someone tried to guess how he pulled off the trick, they would probably be way off-base because he directs attention at the wrong things. If he wants you to focus on his right hand, he looks at his right hand. If he doesn't want you to see something, he's going to completely ignore it and direct your attention elsewhere.
I see two general reactions to these sorts of magic tricks. One is the shocked reaction usually accompanied by "maybe it is magic" thinking. The other is to get irritated by the trick and start offering ways it could have been done. They'll go off about how the magician is a "fake" and then they'll say that "obviously" X, Y, and Z is happening which is how he pulls it off.
This angry feeling is actually a feeling of frustration because how the trick was performed is unknown, which tends to annoy us humans. Because of this irritated feeling of the unknown, people are very willing to commit the jump fallacy -- to jump to a conclusion based off no evidence or logical backing. The frustrated viewer in the example of the driving blindfolded trick may say that there is a secret camera inside the blindfold or something of a sort.
In order to reach an accurate conclusion, the evidence and/or logic must yield itself to the conclusion. For example: given the facts that ice is below 0 degrees Celsius and anything below 0 degrees Celsius is freezing, ice must be freezing. Here's where the problem lies: if a factor is left out, people make up whatever comes to mind and treat it as fact. In this case, we were given two distinct facts, and we were able to say "since A = B and B = C, A = C." Specifically, because ice is below 0 degrees (A = B) and because anything below 0 degrees is freezing (B = C), then ice must be freezing (A = C). So let's leave out a factor. Let's pose a question: is "unknown" freezing? Well, we know that anything below 0 degrees Celsius is freezing and anything above 0 degrees is not, but because we do not know what "unknown" is, we cannot draw a logical conclusion. Even if we were to guess that it was freezing and we happened to be correct, we would not have drawn a logical conclusion -- we would have guessed and gotten lucky.
The purpose of performing magic tricks is to shield the audience from what is actually happening. Thus, the audience guessing the trick is not going to yield the best results. Guessing how a professional magician performs a magic trick is extremely difficult for someone who has never even studied or paid attention to how magic tricks are performed. What you have to remember is that magic tricks are not magic -- they are regular human beings who attempt to deceive their audience in a sufficient way. The concepts are certainly capable for a human being to understand and even to figure out, but the typical audience member of a magician cannot reach the truth about how the trick is performed.
So how do we solve the problem of the unknown? How do we figure out what the truth is? If you are not given enough facts, don't draw a conclusion. Such conclusions are not based off logic and may very well be wrong. But how is that harmful? So what if people generally believe in a conclusion that has no evidence or logic to support it? The reason this is harmful is because it prevents us from discovering the truth. If you already know where potato chips come from, why would you want to research it? Suppose, for example, that there were institutions dedicated to indoctrinating people from their youth to believe in the "Nutrition of McDonald's" and any questioning of the "Nutrition of McDonald's" must be silenced and shunned. How, then, will we ever know that eating nothing but McDonald's food is really the best health choice? I don't have to know exactly what nutrition is the best in order to say that the "Nutrition of McDonald's" is not based off any fact or logic, and, in order to discover an actual solution to nutrition, we must use reason and evidence. The indoctrination of the "Nutrition of McDonald's" would effectively be halting all progression in the discovering of nutrition.
This jump fallacy applies to many situations: people love to take to a political ideology because it's just "obvious" or claim that there must be spirits/psychics/whatever crazy stuff because they just can't conceive of another conclusion. They spew out a statement and a conclusion without a road to get to one another. For example, the statement "people kill each other, so we need a government" is incomplete. Where is the connection between the "need" for government and people killing each other? A closer to complete statement would be "people kill each other and government prevents people from killing each other; ergo, we need a government to stop people from killing each other." However, even this statement is taking factors as fact with no logical backing. In what circumstance is this statement referring to "people kill each other"? Is the statement referring to a society absent or present of a government? Furthermore, the word "need" denotes that the exclusive solution to people killing each other is a government. What, then, is a government? A government is an entity which claims a monopoly on force on an arbitrarily chosen geographical location which funds itself by extorting funds from the masses within its territory. This statement of "need" requires the necessary logic to back up that all other conceivable options to this system of "government" cannot possibly function as a better detriment to crime. In truth, it would be incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to logically come to the seemingly simple conclusion: "people kill each other, so we need government."
To accept a concept such as "government" to be virtuous without any logic or evidence is a dangerous path to dismiss potentially infinitely superior solutions. In the same sense, accepting a concept such as "god" does not allow for exploration in the path of morality.
Too often, people associate the unexplainable to irrational explanations. If we can't explain how a magic trick is done, that doesn't make it magic. If we can't explain the mysteries of the universe, that doesn't mean that there is a god. If we can't explain to the core how people will go about their day in a voluntary fashion, that doesn't mean we need institutionalized violence. The abundance of knowledge in this universe is incredible. A person could go to school for his entire life and not fully understand the concept of teeth -- a tiny part of the body, which is a tiny part of the world, which is a tiny part of the universe. There is no possible way for one human being to absorb all knowledge -- it is perfectly acceptable to not be omniscient! The way we do not reach false conclusions is by refraining to pretend as if we know something when we have no logical explanation to arrive at that conclusion.
