We were given the task to watch a show based on ‘The System’, where we see a person called Darren Brown introducing ‘The System’ to the viewers. ‘The System’, he claims, is a way to predict the winning horse of the horse race. He pushes his own belief of ‘The System’ onto a randomly chosen participant, which happens to be Khadisha. Brown randomly chose Khadisha by sending her an anonymous email to a person who has to record in gambling. He sends the correct predictions of the winner of the horse race five times in a row and convinces Khadisha to put in a large amount of money for the sixth race. This shows that ‘The System’ illustrates Inductive Reasoning.
Inductive Reasoning is one of the features of science that are observations that go from a simple statement to a universal understanding, and it is usually believed in after having a repetitive observation. Khadisha’s confidence of ‘The System’ is entirely based on inductive reasoning, since ‘The System’ has predicted the right winner of the horse races 4 times in a row, this makes her believe that ‘The System’ will be true the fifth time. If the results were not accurate e.g. the first two times, Khadisha wouldn’t have believed in ‘The System’ and would not have taken part betting in the next race. However, just because ‘The System’ was right the first few times does not mean it will be right the next time. This means that most of the participants believed in ‘The System’ until there was some Falsification.
Falsification is the next feature of science where the scientific facts can’t be found verifying them, but falsifying them. In other words, it needs proof to falsify a statement – otherwise it’s not a fact. So far in ‘The Truth is Out There’, there has been nothing to falsify Khadisha and the audience’s belief of ‘The System’ since there has been no evidence to ‘falsify’ the theory yet. However later on in the show, Brown reveals the truth of ‘The System’. The viewers of the show as well as Khadisha were lead to believe that she was the only participant of the show, which made ‘The System’ seem 100% fool-proof. Brown later reveals that Khadisha was one of the 7700 participants on the show who were not mentioned until Brown revealed the ‘truth’ of ‘The System’. Khadisha was the only one that didn’t experience falsification but the other participants did, since the predictions for them were incorrect. This is evidence to show that ‘The System’ is a deception and that inductive reasoning is logically flawed.
Occam’s razor is the third feature of science where the simplest explanations are the best and that the more complicated explanations are most likely to go wrong. The ‘simplest’ explanation of ‘The System’ is that it doesn’t exist. If it did exist, everyone would know ‘The System’, since it’s been broadcasted all over UK on channel 4, and that everyone would end up rich, which results to the extinction of horse races.
The fourth feature of science is ‘Paradigm shift’. This is a change in theory that can be around for some time. In ‘The Truth is Out There’, the experts are being convinced that ‘The System’ could possible exist by Brown claiming that ‘The System’ is highly improbable, not impossible.
Brown also reveals to Khadisha and the viewers, the secret behind the working of the show. When we truly understand the work of ‘The System’, we also understand that Khadisha was simply allocated to the winning horses and that she didn’t win because of ‘The System’. At the end of the show, Khadisha lost, since she was assigned to the losing horse, which results her to lose the £4000 she used up just because she had a lot of confidence in ‘The System’ before Brown reveals the ‘truth’ behind it to her. However, it turns out that Brown actually placed the £4000 on the actually winning horse, and not the one ‘The System’ recommended. This once again, confuses the viewers and Khadisha herself, leaving us to wonder, “How the hell did he do it?”
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