The World Trade Center and the number Eleven

Many people enjoy a good numerology coincidence, judging from the popularity of the following list. Within hours after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, this list spread rapidly across the internet, flooding email inboxes, message boards, and making itself at home on hundreds of websites.

Perhaps in recalling the shock from watching video replays of the planes crashing into the buildings, the mind numbing horror of it, and the seeming senselessness of this monstrous attack on American civilians, it is not so surprising that many people are emotionally primed to wonder about these coincidences. Considering the circumstances, it is without a doubt a fascinating list.

However, to attach any significance to this list beyond its amusement value is to commit a cognitive error. My peeve is with people who promote this error, this fallacy, who attempt to persuade others to buy into the mistaken notion that these coincidences demonstrate some kind of synchronicity, or who use this list to further their own crackpot agendas. For example: Uri Geller, Victor Zammit, Lee Carroll, Sally Faubion, and others.

The first thing to notice is that this list contains factual errors. Curiously, even after several months, these errors have still not been corrected on the websites of Zammit, Carroll, or Faubion. I leave readers to draw their own conclusions about what that says about these people.

And this leads directly to the next thing to notice about this list, the things that are missing from it. For example:

It doesn't take much investigation to notice that the vast majority of relevant facts do not add up to eleven. That list was fabricated using only a small number of carefully selected items that add up to eleven and discarding the majority of facts about the World Trade Center attack, the ones that aren't elevens. Such a list is based on a statistical fallacy, a numerical illusion.

Robert Carroll, Professor of Philosophy at Sacramento City College, comments on such coincidences in this excerpt from The Skeptic's Dictionary:

And according to Hoax Watch editor Kevin Christopher of CSICOP:

Here are some additional resources addressing this issue:

For an example of the bizarre lengths some people will go with this numerological mumbo jumbo, check out this open letter to President George Bush from Keikhosrow Emami dated November 29, 2001:

Some people, though, will persist in making an error of cognition, of seeing something that isn't there in this list of elevens, and refuse to acknowledge that it is nothing more than a clever and amusing set of numerical coincidences. For them, perhaps Dave Pawson said it best in this widely circulated email: