I'm very intrigued by coincidence. Ever since I started trying to live life based on complete rationally I've been puzzled by how many coincidences I encounter and often at the degree to which they seem improbable – which used to made me look for supernatural answers. Well, since no one has found evidence of any supernatural forces, we'll have to find another way of reconciling human experience and reality.
The first class of reconciliation that I encounter is due to the human brain being poorly setup for probability estimation. A great example of this is the “Birthday Problem” - which can be simply stated by this bet:
"You're at the back of a
line of about 25 people. Your friend says, 'Wanna bet two of these
people has the same birthday?' You think to yourself, "there are
365 days in a year it's got to be on the order of a 25/365 chance –
so yes I will take that bet!" The problem is that it's actually over
a 50% chance that two people will have the same birthday. Click the
link to find out why."
The second class of reconciliation is psychological. A personal anecdote is in order here:
I contacted an old roommate
of mine to get lunch, and the day before the lunch was planned I
thought I saw him driving a new Mustang. When I arrived at the lunch
the next day, without me telling him – he said that he thought he
saw me driving a new BMW 335i the day before.
At first, I thought “wow, how strange for us to have made the same mistake at the same time”, but it's very easy to see what happened. We both are into cars, and we both were roommates and hence knew each other well. We haven't seen each other in a while and, as men, of course we're wondering how we're competing against each other. You see, I know Ryan always was into Mustangs, and I knew he had a good position at a good company - so I thought I saw him in a car that fits that mold. He, likewise, knew that I love turbo cars and also that I'm an asshole - so he did likewise.
The third class that I can think of is due to increased connectedness. Here's another story:
I had a dream about one of my friends from France recently, and she contacted me the day after - before I had a chance to tell her. I told her about the dream, and we both remember this happened before also.
I saw a pattern, and the explanation is actually quite simple. I received a postcard the day before the dream from a mutual friend from Spain – this got me thinking of my European friends. That explains the dream, but not the message. Well, it turns out that the Spanish friend had recently returned to Europe (the postcard was mailed from the airport), and my French friend was wondering how the trip went. Almost the exact thing had happened earlier as well. Due to our interconnectedness, we have a much increased chance of coincidence.
A fourth class I've been wondering about is related to thought trends. I forgot the exact occurrence, but often I've heard multiple people use the same word which was uncharacteristic of their normal vocabulary. I always thought this was a coincidence, but really in my cohort we generally are consuming the same media, and this leads to trends in our thoughts and yes our vocabulary as well.
Anyone have any other classes of coincidence?
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