Confirmation Bias

So here’s an eerie coincidence… I have some time off later this week, more than I’d planned for. And this morning I was looking for things to do with that time. And my plans were leaning towards hiking up the Stawamus Chief.

Then the Chief decided to get a little closer to the angle of repose. Fortunately this doesn’t seem to have hurt anyone.

Kind of amazing that it happened on the same day as I was making my plans. Stuff like this is what convinces people that there’s magic underlying the world. That they have psychic powers, that prayer works, that dogs know when their owners are coming home.

A string of similar coincidences briefly had me convinced I was a Jedi. I was twelve. Luckily that’s one of the easier paranormal beliefs to outgrow.

Confirmation bias is funny that way. It doesn’t matter how many times this doesn’t happen… you don’t really remember those times. I’m sure that a glance at my search history would reveal that I’ve made tentative plans to hike up a whole bunch of mountains that I’ve never gotten around to, and I’m even more sure that a glance at the landscape would reveal a whole bunch of rockfalls that happened without me noticing. Falling down is, after all, what sheer cliffs all do eventually. Even the hardest ones.

And sometimes it doesn't take much effort to figure out why the coincidence happened. In this case it's even easier than most... Squamish was on my mind already because of a big dock fire there, and just last night I read news reports of the dangerous fumes from it closing the school.

Anyway, I still have Friday off, and I don’t think I’ll let a little thing like rocks falling (and fires, and fumes) stop me from heading up some mountains. Now rain falling, that’s another story. We’ll see how it goes.