Read the following passage:

The ùber philosopher Bertrand Russell presents a particularly toxic variant of my surprise jolt in hisillustration of what people in his line of business call the Problem of Induction or Problem of InductiveKnowledge—certainly the mother of all problems in life.

Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is thegeneral rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its bestinterests," as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.

What can a turkey learn about what is in store for it tomorrow from the events of yesterday? A lot,perhaps, but certainly a little less than it thinks, and it is just that "little less" that may make all thedifference. The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds youcan be the one that wrings your neck.

Let us go one step further and consider induction's most worrisome aspect: learning backward. Considerthat the turkey's experience may have, rather than no value, a negative value. It learned from observation,as we are all advised to do (hey, after all, this is what is believed to be the scientific method). Itsconfidence increased as the number of friendly feedings grew, and it felt increasingly safe even though theslaughter was more and more imminent. Consider that the feeling of safety reached its maximum when therisk was at the highest! But the problem is even more general than that; it strikes at the nature ofempirical knowledge itself. Something has worked in the past, until—well, it unexpectedly no longer does,and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.

FIGURE 1: ONE THOUSAND AND ONE DAYS OF HISTORY

A turkey before and after Thanksgiving.

It would appear to a quoting dilettante—i.e., one of those writers and scholars who fill up their texts withphrases from some dead authority—that, as phrased by Hobbes, "from like antecedents flow likeconsequents." Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearlof wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship's captain:
But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident. . . of any sort worth speaking about. I haveseen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wreckednor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.
E. J . Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS
Titanic
Captain Smith's ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked-about shipwreck in history.