16 July 2015
Greece and the Oracle
by John Watson
Rain Gods fall into two distinct categories. In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, Douglas Adams’s character Rob McKenna achieves Rain God status because, wherever he is, it rains. That is one sort of Rain God. The other sort is, well, me or, at least, probably me. My claim to the title lies not upon my ability to make it rain but on the fact that I can always tell whether it is going to rain or not. Always? The fact that one cannot see into the future makes it impossible to prove that I am always right but I’ve been right in predicting rain four times in a row now and I think that’s fairly good evidence…
According to the Meteorological Office climate data, at least 1 mm of rain has fallen on 29% of the days in the last thirty years. Approximating slightly, that means that the chance of rain on any particular day must be 3/10. If we factor in the laws of mathematics, the chance of having rain on four particular days must be 3/10×3/10×3/10×3/10 or just over 8%. There it is then, an 8% chance, which means that there must be a 92% chance that it is not coincidence but some form of divine intervention. Many an American preacher has claimed a direct link with the Almighty on less evidence than that.
This would be relatively harmless if I left it there, but of course I can’t. Like a child who has been given a drone for Christmas I am anxious to test out my gift as soon as possible. Could I predict tomorrow’s stock market prices? Could I predict the winner of the 4:20 at Kempton Park? If the security services employed me they might be able to do without all that surveillance since I would always know what was going to happen and would be able to warn them in time to prevent it. The possibilities are endless. Before giving up the day job, however, I decided to do a few test runs and the results were not as satisfactory as I would have liked. Apparently my gift doesn’t allow me to predict numbers or anything which would be remunerative. Still, that leaves the field of political prediction so I thought that, following in the footsteps of the Delphic Oracle, I would try my luck on Greece. There seem to be some obvious questions which would do as a test:
“Would there be a fudged deal under which matters would be “resolved” on a basis which would put Greece under more strain than its people can live with?” We know the answer that one now.
“Has that system been tried before?’ The Treaty of Versailles comes to mind.
“Will Syriza lose democratic credibility by going outside the mandate afforded to them by the referendum?” The answer to that one seems obvious too.
“What are the colonels of the Greek army doing now?” That is the thousand dollar question.
