(Scene: A dead woman lies on top of a car, having fallen or jumped from a tall building. She’s dressed in an angel costume. Two detectives arrive at the scene.)

Charlie Crews: It’s a dead angel.

Dani Reese: It’s a dead woman with a pair of fake wings.

Charlie: How do you know?

Dani: Well, I know the wings are fake because I can see the harness right there.

Charlie: Maybe she’s a real angel with fake wings.

I’ve been meaning to share this for a long time. It’s dialogue from a TV show called Life (Season 1, Episode 5, aired October 24, 2007.) I love it so much. It captures a beautiful sense of life, and for people like me who are absurdly geeky about clean reasoning, fallacies, etc, it’s actually an example of good logic, suggestive of how you’d avoid the representativeness heuristic (if we assumed angels exist, which I don’t, but I don’t care – I love the sense of life in that line, the metaphysical optimism.)

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Joe Duarte grew up in small copper mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology in 2015, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. For more from Joe, visit his new publication Valid Science.

You can also find him on 𝕏 and contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.