Karma


Abstract:
It doesn't go around, just regresses to the mean.

Body:
A couple weeks ago a fundamentalist Christian preacher was on campus shouting at passersby, identifying them as whores, sloths, drunkards, and other types of sinners. One time when I walked by, he was giving a sermon about good deeds and argued that karma existed. And that got me thinking, by accident he's right: karma exists, although not exactly as the corrective force as he imagines.

For every bad thing that happens, on average, there will be a good one to "counteract" it. Imagine a scale measuring events from 0 to 1, where 0 is very bad and 1 is extremely good. Assuming such events follow the normal distribution, we can expect regression towards the mean to "correct" for excessive good and bad. Of course, for small samples, even for several peoples' lives, we may find they suffer from a rare string of bad or good events, but on the whole we should expect to see events near the 0.5 mark. So the ancient belief in karma is really just accidental statistical thinking, with the caveat that karma-belief may increase the probability of belief in the law of small numbers.

Posted: Mon - February 19, 2007 at 06:42 PM         |    

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