Oh, the Humanity!

One of the truly unpleasant by-products of a scarcely occurring sporting event such as the World Cup is the emergence of fair-weathered fans who all of a sudden catches the fever and feigns to convey this whiff of sophistication in the sport. Because it is what the culture is immersed in, their phony level of interest in the sport du jour ostensibly yields them a degree of acceptance and validation of their livelihoods, the theory goes, and lessens their probability of being ostracized. But if you bother ask a genuine fan he'll promptly tell you of his desire to not have to share this planet with any of those pretentious, hollow, conceited so-called "fans"-you know, those people who stick their finger out to see which way the wind is blowing and proceeds to ostentatiously follow in that direction.

Luckily for us human beings, we have carried the smart gene since time immemorial, and can hence see through the veil of artifice whenever it is put up. And in time, just like the incessant divers on the pitch who might initially con a referee into awarding them a free kick, the smart and fair-minded folks of this world will eventually catch on to their machinations and expose them for the frauds that they are.

Another by-product of this World Cup has been Paul the Octopus. Amid all the nauseating frenzy surrounding the oracle from Oberhausen is the largely ignored fact that the celebrity mollusk has been the beneficiary of survivorship bias: it neglects to take into account all of the other oracles' failures in their divination, so what was actually a chance event (Paul's first four prescient picks amidst a sea of numerous other failures that were disregarded after the fact) was mistakenly attributed as some sort of psychic power or a miraculous chance event.

Granted, once all the eyes were subsequently trained on him-being the lone "survivor"-Paul did correctly make all of the four remaining picks: a very plausible one in 16 probability of doing so. But despite the starlet managing to go eight for eight in his prognostications, the unfortunate occurrence of survivorship bias renders fallacious the much bandied-about fairytale odds of one in 256.

Now I don't want to seem to be piling on the little cephalopod, but there's also the European Championships in 2008 when he incorrectly predicted two of the six games-that's just one game better than tossing a coin. But that seemingly hasn't stopped any of the worshiping. It's the zeitgeist, I fear: we, the purported intelligent species, have now arrived at an age where the media makes overnight celebrities out of seemingly anyone-even octopuses-so long as they can satisfy the audiences' desire to fill their vacuous and tedious lives. This gradual turn of the cultural wheel is most lamentable. About the only thing worse is the sudden pervasion of posers in our lives.