Deadput wrote:Caelus wrote:So how many coincidental similarities would there have to be be before the similarities were no longer considered coincidental?
When their actually homages and not just coincidences
So, again, you're saying that we know something is a coincidence because it's not an homage, and we know that because we know it's a coincidence.
I don't even actually like the movies, but you guys are driving me nuts. You're using "coincidence" as a preclusion rather than a conclusion.
If you have a concurrence, naturally you should wonder if the concurrent events are correlated with one another. If you can find no evidence that the incidents are correlated, you can reasonably conclude that they're
only concurrent - they are coincidental (or, you might say, you "fail to reject the null hypothesis"). Fair enough. It doesn't make sense, though, to eliminate a large portion of your 'data' from your 'analysis' on the premise that the concurrent events are coincidences. You're eliminating evidence based on a presumption about the conclusion you're trying to arrive at in the end.
Let's say I was looking at two research papers (or maybe two short stories or comic books - the medium doesn't really matter, what matters is we have an old one and a new one). The new one has a dozen different things that are very similar to the old one, so I suggest that the new one is based on the old one. The author pulls out a dozen other research papers, and says that clearly paper #2 is not ripping off paper #1, because each of the dozen things that is similar between paper #2 and paper #1, is also similar between paper #2 and one of the other dozen or so papers - the fact that it has so many similarities to this previous research paper is coincidence. Should I be convinced that paper #2 isn't plagiarized from paper #1? And by extension, if the author had said upfront that paper #2 was based on paper #1, and gave full credit, would I have cause to dismiss that claim?
Basically, (to return to Ryan's example) in order to prove that the face on mars is a matter of imagination we should have to
send a $154 million probe to take better pictures demonstrate that people are just as likely to see faces in a series of randomly selected ambiguous shapes (e.g., ink blots) as in a series of photos of Mars.
So, in the context of the movies, to conclude that the similarity between the movies and the precedent Transformers properties is coincidental, we'd have to be saying that the points of similarity are not only shared with other science fiction properties, but that the movie takes no more cues from the Transformers series than it does from any other single series. In other words, to conclude that the similarities between the movies and the preceding series are a matter of chance, rather than design, we should be able to choose any science fiction series
at random and see roughly the same number of similarities.