The Coincidence Audit: my PhD dissertation, now with aliens

Description: A comic version of my dissertation about coincidences, hidden causes, and human rationality. Apparently, summarizing a 300-page dissertation in a blog post was only the first step. The next one involved an alien inspector, two teenagers, and a device called the Belief-o-Meter 😉

In my earlier post, I explained what my PhD was about: why the same odd pattern can look like random noise to one person and evidence of a hidden cause to another. This time, I tried telling that story as a comic which even my 13yrs old son could enjoy.

Download the comic (PDF, 21 MB) or open the PDF in a new tab.

The Coincidence Audit follows Inspector Odds, sent to Earth by the Galactic Council of Reason to investigate whether humans are rational. In Prague, he meets Max, who tends to dismiss unusual patterns as chance, and Tess, who sees signs everywhere. Together, they work through the questions, experiments, and findings of my dissertation.

The central idea is that discovery and superstition may sometimes rely on the same reasoning machinery. In the tasks I studied, people were often quite good at reading the evidence. The difference could lie in what they considered plausible before that evidence arrived.

The comic also keeps the uncertainties, including an experiment that could not give a clear answer. Apparently, even an alien inspector cannot fix a weak manipulation check. If you prefer your Bayesian reasoning with speech bubbles and a flying saucer, this version is for you 🛸

Note on how this was made: I used Claude Code (Opus 5.5) to turn my dissertation summary into a comic script and detailed image prompts, and Codex (GPT-6.1 Sol) to generate and refine the illustrations using OpenAI’s image generation, check the lettering, insert the original research charts, and assemble the final PDF. Neither tool was around to help with the actual PhD 😉