Mark Gagnon

Now, this looks downright prophetic.

And some people even called it that.

Oh, this is a vision.

Maybe he had a premonition.

Maybe there was some type of miracle of foresight.

Maybe God talked to him.

But here's the rational pushback.

Robertson was a former merchant marine officer who knew a lot about ships.

He knew that the shipbuilding industry was producing larger and larger vessels.

He knew icebergs were a hazard in the North Atlantic.

He knew the regulations about lifeboats hadn't been, you know, keeping pace with ship size.

He essentially extrapolated current trends into a plausible disaster scenario.

science fiction writers do this all the time.

The specific details that match, the name, the month, the iceberg, those are striking.

But consider how many thousands of novels have been written that made predictions that didn't come true.

We just don't remember those ones.

So the base rate of failed predictions is enormous.

So for every Robertson, there are hundreds of writers whose disaster novels just didn't match reality.

And that is what we call confirmation bias.

We notice the hits and forget all the misses.