Spock is famous for logic. Ask anyone, even people who aren t necessarily
Star Trek fans, and they ll tell you that the half-human, half-Vulcan science officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise is the guy who s always looking for the most logical, rational way to tackle any problem, whether we re talking about discovering new life and new civilizations or just trying to figure out what to have for lunch. But does that approach always serve Spock well? One expert says no, and she has the data to prove it.
In her new book
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don t, Center for Applied Rationality co-founder Julia Galef attempted to tabulate just how successful Spock s logical way of living actually is in various
In the franchise, Spock makes confident predictions based on his superior Vulcan mind. Galef was curious to see exactly how often these predictions pan out. “I went through all of the Star Trek episodes and movies all of the transcripts that I could find and searched for any instance in which Spock is using the words ‘odds,’ ‘probability,’ ‘chance,’ ‘definitely,’ ‘probably,’ etc.,” she says. “I catalogued all instances in which Spock made a prediction and that prediction either came true or didn’t.”
The results, which appear in Galef’s new book
The Scout Mindset, are devastating. Not only does Spock have a terrible track record events he describes as “impossible” happen 83 percent of the time but his confidence level is actually anti-correlated with reality. “The more confident he says he is that something will happen that the ship will crash, or that they will find survivors the less likely it is to happen, and the less confident he is in som