the vampire math fallacy in action, again

I don't understand the attraction of "vampire math." It's clearly fallacious, and it leads otherwise reasonable people to make goofy claims. Case in point: Joe Carter.

At first glance this seems so obvious as to be unworthy of notice. Since we humans do, in fact, continue to exist, it shouldn't be surprising that vampires (and other V-class objects) do not exist. But this begs the question of why humans exist and V-class objects do not. Their existence is, after all, as probable (or improbable) as the existence of humans. And the non-existence of any V-class objects is as statistically improbable as the aligning of dozens of independent physical constants that give rise to life.

The anthropic principle could therefore be restated as claiming that the existence of human life requires both (a) the alignment of several cosmological, chemical, and physical constants and (b) the non-existence of all V-class objects. The probability that each of these stochastically independent events could align precisely as they have, without any intervention, is roughly 0 -- in other words, it can't happen. The evidence therefore points to "fine-tuning" of these conditions.

As I point out on Joe's site, the range of conceivable V-class objects is infinite; thus, it's impossible to calculate their probability, or improbability.

Whenever you have the urge to invoke vampire math, resist it. Please.

more dubious vampire math

You'd think the editors of Skeptical Inquirer would've seen through this one:

If we factor in the human birthrate into our discussion, we find that, after a few months, the human birthrate is very small compared to the number of deaths due to vampires. This means that ignoring this factor has a negligibly small impact on our conclusion. In our example, the death of humanity would be prolonged by only one month.

Sadly, this argument deserves to be called the Vampire Math Fallacy.

Two words: vampire hunters.

vampire math and young earth creationism

Shockingly bad math proves that vampires aren't real:

Efthimiou sup­posed that the first vam­pire arose Jan. 1, 1600, around the be­gin­ning of a cen­tu­ry dur­ing which some of the first im­por­tant mod­ern writ­ings on vam­pires ap­peared. The re­search­ers es­ti­mat­ed the glob­al pop­u­la­tion at that time, based on his­tor­i­cal re­c­ords, as 537 mil­lion.

As­sum­ing that the vam­pire fed once a month and the vic­tim turned in­to a vam­pire, there would be two vam­pires on Feb. 1, four the next month, and eight the month af­ter that. All hu­mans would be vam­pires with­in 2½ years. “Hu­mans can­not sur­vive un­der these con­di­tions, even if our pop­u­la­tion were dou­bling each mon­th,” which is well be­y­ond hu­man ca­pa­ci­ties, Ef­thi­mi­ou said.

It's the same fallacy that presumes that if population growth is constant, then humans must have existed since only a few thousand years ago, a favorite argument of young earth creationists. The tidy calculation ignores the intervening variable: vampire hunters. They keep us safe--but not from bad assumptions.