This sounded to me at first like the classic probablility fallacy where a series of experiments are done, and the observer mistakenly uses past experiments to predict the outcome of a future experiment.
For example, suppose you have a normal unaltered coin. You flip it three times, and by pure chance it comes up tails each time. The fallacy is thinking that the next time you flip, there is a greater than .5 chance that it comes up heads, because it’s “due” to come up heads. In reality, since one flip has no connection to the previous flips, the next flip still has a .5 chance of coming up heads (or tails). Of course, this is only valid if it came up tails three times in a row purely by chance, and not because there is something wrong with the coin or it’s being flipped in some manipulative way.
Now my question is the following: Is one year’s hurricane season like a coin flip, with no “memory” of last year’s? Or is the fact that the weather is a continuously existing system from year to year allow the possibility of “memory”?
To further complicate the question, does the fact that weather is THE classic chaotic system (in the mathematical sense) prevent or guarantee the possiblity of memory? With my limited understanding of chaotic systems, I keep waffling back and forth.
If anything, the fact that there were two years of no strikes might mean it is less likely this year, if the reason is a persistent weather pattern. (For example, once again it is extremely unlikely Los Angeles will be hit by a hurricane).
Anyway, for the Atlantic seaboard, according to a real scientist quoted in US Escapes Active Hurricane Season, “There is no way to tell if the steering patterns, which kept the hurricanes away from the U.S. in 2000 and 2001, will be around next season.”
Yes, certainly possible (and I hope true). In which case, to bring it back to the coin flipping analalg, it would be as if the tails coming up three times was not the result of chance, but because perhaps the coin altered, such as being weighted on one side or something. In this situation, it’s not a fallacy to predict the future experiments based on the past, but the correct prediction is that the pattern of tails will continue, not that a heads roll (or hurricane) is “due”.