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A GenePoool.com Essay
Coincidences
Let's try something. Go find a deck of cards.
Got it? Good. Draw one card.
Ready?
I drew the six of spades. What did you get?
Assuming I have enough readers out there (an admittedly generous assumption) one of you also drew the six of spades.
Wow. What a remarkable coincidence!
But is it a coincidence? Is it even remarkable? Is ANY coincidence truly worthy of the word remarkable?
Coincidences make great stories. We remember them for a long time, tell our friends, pass around our favorite ones. The most storied one I can remember is the connection between Kennedy and Lincoln. For example, that both were assassinated on a Friday, in front of their wives, by men with three names. They were elected one hundred years apart, and both were succeeded by men named Johnson. Lincoln was shot in the Ford Theater and Kennedy was shot in a Ford. There's a lot more, but I think my point is made; it's a pretty interesting collection.
But is there more to it than that? Is it fair to assume some sort of higher order involved here? After all, that sort of thing couldn't ALL be attributed to chance, could it?
Well, yes and no. There's more than just chance at work here, and there is definitely a higher intelligence behind it, but, frankly, WE are that higher intelligence.
We look for patterns. It's in our nature to do so. We look for effects to explain the causes we see before us because that's how our minds work.
The other day I ran into a friend on the subway. She boarded the train at a different stop. Imagine the odds that I would board that train and that car at that time. Remarkable? Maybe. But I ride the train every day, and with hundreds of people who boarded at different spots than I did, and yet I still end up on the same car with them. The odds are equally low that I would ride in the same car with any one of them and yet, I have to share a car with SOMEone.
Now consider how many people I might know well enough to have a conversation with versus how many people fit in each subway car, multiplied by the number of times I ride the subway. With these theoretical numbers in mind it's not only possible that I'll run into someone I know; given enough time it's very likely.
In the card game example I began with, if I were to focus only on the instances in which the six of spades was drawn I might conclude that something truly mystical has taken place. But what I'm really doing is plucking a pattern out of a random event.
Take a look again at the Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences. Two historical events took place involving tremendous amounts of information for us to compare. We have found the commonalities in both cases and made note of them, but in doing this we have ignored the instances where there is NO match. Do we care that their wives' names were different, or that Kennedy and Lincoln were not born on the same day, were not the same age, were shot with different kinds of weapons at different ranges? We do not. And when we list what the two incidents have in common while ignoring what they don't have in common, we are transforming what might be an amusing set of random connections into a magical, seemingly inexplicable pattern.
Let's say you have a coin that you're willing to flip a hundred times. As I think most of us understand, there is a 50% chance you will get Heads on any given flip. If we go through the trouble to record each coin flip, what will we see? Will every Head be followed by a Tail, followed by another Head and another Tail? Of course not; that wouldn't be random at all. Instead, there are bound to be long periods in which Heads comes up repeatedly, as well as frequent streaks of Tails. This is perfectly in keeping with our original 50% probability. If we examine our record and focus only on, say, one streak of seven consecutive Heads, we might consider this remarkable, especially if we decide to ignore the other ninety-three coin tosses. We might even brag about having tossed seven consecutive Heads, which we certainly did do. We're plucking a pattern out of the random.
Or, look at it another way. Take 1200 people, and have all of them flip a coin. By chance, 600 will have come up Heads. Send the other 600 home, and have your remaining group flip again. This time, you should have roughly 300 Heads, and again, you send the 300 who came up Tails home. If you keep doing this until you have only one participant left, that one participant will have flipped Heads ten times consecutively. The only way this could possibly be considered remarkable is if you pretend he didn't perform this trial with 1199 other people.
You might wonder how on earth anyone could actively choose to forget the overall test size when assessing something like this, but we do it every day. How many things to we hear, see, smell, touch or taste in a given week? How many different people do we come into contact with in that time? How many things to we do? If, out of the tremendous amount of weekly interactions we partake in, we do NOT encounter something we might consider remarkably coincidental, it would be surprising. It's there when we look for it, and more, it's there BECAUSE we look for it. We're looking for patterns in the randomness. Discovering a pattern after an event has already taken place is a foolish exercise, especially when our requirement is to find an unspecified pattern.
Another method we use to justify the overall strangeness of an event is to calculate the odds against such an event taking place. This is another useless exercise.
We've all seen the statistical odds regarding the lottery. We are told, for example, when buying a ticket, that we're facing 30,000,000 to 1 odds. This is true; the odds of me winning with my ticket are 30,000,000 to 1, but that's because I'm choosing a specific result prior to the drawing. But the odds of SOMEone winning is 1 to 1. We go to interview the winner, and quote our statistic again: the odds were 30,000,000 to 1 that THIS PERSON would win. We're doing the same thing I did when I originally bought the ticket. It's hardly remarkable; somebody had to win.
If I go to my 1200 coin flippers and sucessfully pick out which one of them will flip ten consecutive Heads in advance, I would be doing something remarkable, because the odds are against that one person flipping ten consecutive Heads. But again, someone has to do it. It's highly improbable that any one of them will do so BEFORE we start flipping, but to impose the same odds after the fact is a waste of time simply because it was inevitable that somebody would be successful.
But ultimately, coincidences are the result of our own memories. We will, quite unconsciously, remember the hits and forget the misses. If I'm thinking about someone and seconds later the phone rings and they're on the other end, am I psychic? Or have I forgotten the times when I thought of that person and the phone did not ring? It's just a coincidence, and a none too remarkable one at that.
Which is my whole point. Coincidences are the unremarkable result of favorable statistical odds, combined with our instinct to construct cause/effect heuristics, and our memories, which will not recall unremarkable events precisely because they are not memorable.
So, did anyone else get the six of spades?
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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