The Frequency Illusion

How the cognitive bias takes hold

Just as I thought I’d got falling birth rates out of my system (History Compressed, Jan 31, 2026), “birth” in one form or another started popping out of every page I read.

You know that feeling when someone uses a word like existential, as in “I don’t believe Islam is an existential threat to the West” and you wonder to yourself why the hell they put that word “existential” in there. What does it even mean, anyway? Just when you thought you could agree (or not) to the proposition that Islam is a threat to the West, now you’re not completely sure. So, the only way out is to reply, “Yes, but do you think it’s a kinetic threat?” (Which is another word that keeps popping up now.)

It isn’t just words. I was served by a young female in a shop yesterday who had a ring through her nose, like a pig. And it’s the season for runny noses. Then, walking home I couldn’t help but see women everywhere with spike piercings and nose rings. Farmers put rings through the noses of pigs to stop them digging up the ground with their snouts. I wondered whether these girls were wearing nose rings to avoid being kissed, which as we know leads to fornication and giving birth.

There it was: “birth” again.

Safely back home, and catching up with the news, I read that one in three pregnancies in the UK are now terminated by abortion. That’s a sure way to reduce the birth rate, I guess. But in Canada now, one in twenty deaths are by medically assisted suicide, so there are still people being born who don’t want to be. Or maybe they just don’t want to be born in Canada.

As a birth control measure, this “taking the sex out of it” thing with nose rings may well be working. Okay, I’m being facetious. In the USA last year 2.6% of all live births resulted from In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) where the closest a man gets to a woman is in a petri dish. In the UK 3.1% of births begin that way and in Australia 1 in 16 births are via IVF. The principal driver is the decline in fertility of both men and women, exacerbated by the age at which women are answering nature’s call to procreate. That age is now a decade-and-a -half longer than it was 30 to 40 years ago. Lifestyle and career choices get in the way. The procedure is not cheap, nor is it guaranteed to work, which explains why it is predominantly white, educated middle class women who can afford it.

See how the Frequency Illusion works? It’s a Cognitive Bias which occurs when something enters your awareness and your mind starts scanning for it everywhere. Then it turns into a Confirmation Bias when each new sighting reinforces your belief that you’re seeing it everywhere, creating a self-confirming loop.

Before I drop the subject of birth I just want to tell you about this discussion I overheard on the topic of embryo screening, otherwise known as preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) of embryo DNA during the IVF process. You want to know what will be the biological sex at birth? No trouble. Looking to identify single-gene disorders, chromosomal abnormalities or structural issues. Yes, that can be done quite reliably within limits. But if you’re seeking answers as to likely height, eye colour and intelligence you’ll be disappointed; though Polygenic Embryo Testing (PGT-P) looks more deeply into the hundreds to thousands of genetic variants and some US-based companies may provide predictive estimates of probability with modest success. Interestingly, some providers will calculate risk estimates for psychiatric traits like schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder. Nice to know.

What I got out of this discussion was that the major reproductive medicine societies were careful not to endorse services that had the potential to “exacerbate inequalities, discrimination or the commodification of children”: eugenics, in other words. This was prominently denounced as being “unethical”.

We used to have an adage in my old marketing days which we applied when designing a client’s image. If he’s a little suspect — a bit of “a wide boy” as we’d say — then dress his company up like an establishment law firm. If he’s a tad boring and straight down the middle, dress him up as an entertainer. I can’t help but think that these medical societies that trumpet ethics fall into the first category.

To hell with ethics, this is about money and human nature, and things are all about to change.

My perfect baby

My reasoning is simple. The people availing themselves of these expensive services are predominantly white, middle class educated women. They have the dosh and they’d unhesitatingly lift the birthrate if sex, height, eye colour, good looks and a high IQ were guaranteed. And if the service providers could pull off their prediction of traits with a high degree of certainty of outcome, they wouldn’t hesitate. While the traits in question are polygenic, involving hundreds or thousands of genetic variants, the specialists currently need to limit themselves to “potential” scores only. But hold your horses. Help is coming in the form of individual genome sequencing interpreted by AI.

The first human genome sequencing was completed in April 2003 at a cost of $5 billion in today’s terms, and the first gap-free complete genome was achieved in 2022. Now any individual can have their whole genome sequenced for as little as $100. That’s about 3 billion DNA base pairs, providing comprehensive data on genetic variants, ancestry, health risks and more. The “ethical” reproduction experts will still say that traits are too variable to allow the calculation of characteristics in any meaningful way. And they’re right, it’s beyond human calculation. But it’s well within AI calculation, and they’re working on it already. Just look at what AlphaFold has done to protein structure prediction, revolutionizing drug discovery.

I have no doubt that young, white, educated middle-class women who can afford it will be ticking the sex, height, eye colour and IQ boxes within this decade. They may even be able to select for susceptibility to political indoctrination, which will be very important to them because that is the class of women that we overwhelmingly identify by another example of the Frequency Illusion: the “white liberal female”. They’re everywhere, and they’d want their babies to be there too.

I wonder if my mother, given the opportunity, would have availed herself of such services. Not that she could have afforded it, but if she’d had the foresight to scan for behaviour genetics and found a marker for “suicidal ideation when confronted by bureaucracy” I wouldn’t be here today.

A.I. Fabler

February 10, 2026

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