Can anyone help me with this fable? (I guess you'd call it that.)

[raccoon]

I read once a fable about a missionary and a tiger hunter, both of whom had been to India. The hunter said something about the number of tigers he'd seen, the missionary said he hadn't seen any. And the missionary said something similar, maybe relating to poverty, and the hunter hadn't seen whatever it was.

The moral of the story is that we see what we look for.

I've googled and can't find it.

[arcadian]

1. Well, if you lived on a small island in the Pacific

I'm sure you really wouldn't care that much about anything, except fishing.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. -Rumsferatu

[Sal Minella]

2. Carl Sagan (I think it was) illustrated this with space exploration.

If we know, or believe, that all planets must be composed of scrambled eggs, and our space exploration consists of sending out a scrambled egg detector, we are going to look at the results and say, "Nope, nothing out there. Just empty space."