I agree that the point about the 'confused scientist' is important, even if that itself is not stated clearly enough. Here is my own reading: Imagine that a sc

I agree that the point about the 'confused scientist' is important, even if that itself is not stated clearly enough. Here is my own reading: Imagine that a scientist is making experiments of the form: Does observable variable A correlate with observable variable B? Now imagine that there are billions of observable variables and almost all of them are not correlated. And imagine that there is no better way to come up with plausible correlations to test than randomly picking variables. Then it will take a very long time and a very large number of experiments to find a pair that is truly correlated. It will be inevitable that most positive results are bogus.