Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you all may remember Joe from Forward Thinking Um, one
Speaker 1: of our sister podcasts. I actually appeared on a couple
Speaker 1: of episodes talk about monsters with you guys right least
Speaker 1: was it last October? So that was what we talked about,
Speaker 1: monsters in the future of monsters. That was really fun.
Speaker 1: That was that was a fun one. Got into some
Speaker 1: of the uh the de sci fi possibilities for the
Speaker 1: future in terms of monstrosity. And Joe's joining me this week,
Speaker 1: going in for Julie to talk about the science of coincidence.
Speaker 1: So I've got one for you. Tell me if you've
Speaker 1: heard this one before. Lincoln and Kennedy. Oh, yes, you
Speaker 1: know this. I was first exposed to this in middle
Speaker 1: school when a teacher of mine get gave us a
Speaker 1: list to these like it was some kind of really
Speaker 1: important fact we needed to learn. But yeah, how about this.
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, two American presidents, both
Speaker 1: were elected to Congress in the year forty six. Lincoln
Speaker 1: in eighteen forty six, Kennedy in nineteen forty six. Both
Speaker 1: were elected president in the year sixty, Lincoln in eighteen sixty,
Speaker 1: Kennedy in nineteen sixty. Each of their last names both
Speaker 1: contains seven letters uh. And then there's this whole list
Speaker 1: of coincidences that keeps going. They were both shot in
Speaker 1: the head, they were both assassinated by Southerners. They were
Speaker 1: both succeeded by Southerners. Their vice presidents were Southerners. Both
Speaker 1: vice presidents were named Johnson. What are the odds? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember this being rolled out, perhaps in a history class,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know that the list would start about
Speaker 1: these coincidences, and I would kind of tune out after
Speaker 1: the first one or two. Um. And I guess that
Speaker 1: that kind of boils down to the type of p
Speaker 1: in the world, Like there there are people out there
Speaker 1: who just tune out after the first coincidence or two,
Speaker 1: and then there are those who obsess about it and
Speaker 1: see this as as something something really crucial and something
Speaker 1: really telling about these two men, about the history of
Speaker 1: this nation, et cetera. That might be the difference between
Speaker 1: this Robert, because I did not tune out. I was
Speaker 1: my mind was blown to uh, to borrow from a
Speaker 1: popular phrase. Yeah, I I sat there in my desk like, wow,
Speaker 1: what are the odds? You know, must be some kind
Speaker 1: of ghost spirit controlling this. It just I was amazed.
Speaker 1: There two twin souls are basically the same entity, reincarnated
Speaker 1: and and and tracked hunted by the same extra dimensional force. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Or there was some sort of like cosmic literature teacher
Speaker 1: trying to get me to observe parallels between the meaning
Speaker 1: of these two men. Yeah, it's another one of course
Speaker 1: that comes to mind is the of Thomas Jefferson and
Speaker 1: John Adams, two individuals who, of course a very interconnected
Speaker 1: in the history of the United States as well, both
Speaker 1: instrumental in drafting the Declaration of Independence, which was signed
Speaker 1: to July fourth, seventeen seventy six. Both men died on
Speaker 1: the same day, July four, eighteen twenty six, exactly fifty
Speaker 1: years to the day after the document was ratified. So
Speaker 1: that that you know that that kind of hits you like.
Speaker 1: I like that one because that one's nice and succinct.
Speaker 1: You know, what were the chances? You don't need a list, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's right there. Yeah, I mean they were they were
Speaker 1: good friends. So maybe there was you could imagine some
Speaker 1: level of synchronicity about, you know, when you're giving up
Speaker 1: and sort of handing it over to the reaper. But
Speaker 1: but the dates are are kind of compelling there. It
Speaker 1: would be even crazier, though, if I found out now
Speaker 1: that you played John Adams in a production of seventeen
Speaker 1: seventy six. No, but I was in a production of
Speaker 1: seven times. Here you go, I played Thomas Jefferson and
Speaker 1: been a production of seventeen seventy six. So we're tied
Speaker 1: into it too. There's no escaping the black hole of coincidence. Okay,
Speaker 1: I've got an even crazier coincidence. No, it's probably not.
Speaker 1: This is kind of dumb, but why do so many
Speaker 1: action heroes have the initials JB James Bond, Jason Bourne,
Speaker 1: Jack Bauer, Jack Burton my favorite? Well, I mean, what
Speaker 1: are the chances? Actually, we have no idea, do we? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I haven't read any I mean maybe there's some really
Speaker 1: deep statistical study on this out there, but uh yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe is it? Is? It? On one hand, is just
Speaker 1: possibly pure luck. And we only pick up right on
Speaker 1: there there being a j B here, a JB there
Speaker 1: because we're also not taking into account all the other
Speaker 1: j B initials out there, like like does Jim Bean
Speaker 1: factor into this, Probably not, and all of the action
Speaker 1: heroes that aren't j B s. Yeah, And then to
Speaker 1: what extent is it just completely almost subconscious, you know,
Speaker 1: because you have an action hero, and and by extension
Speaker 1: of action hero, you think of mythological hero and the
Speaker 1: symbolic power of the hero and how it resonates through
Speaker 1: through our culture and through through our our the way
Speaker 1: we view the world, and and perhaps that ends up
Speaker 1: informing it. You know, you have James Bond in your mind,
Speaker 1: and then you end up creating Jason Bourne and Jack
Speaker 1: Bauer in the same way. And I'm just purely spitballing here.
Speaker 1: You could perhaps have the mythic hercules in your mind,
Speaker 1: and then when you need to create another, you know,
Speaker 1: mythically strong hero, perhaps you go with the Hulk. That's
Speaker 1: the same kind of consonants. Yeah. We associate sounds with
Speaker 1: with ideas certainly. Yeah. Now another crazy one. And I
Speaker 1: love this one, uh, in part because it involves Edgar
Speaker 1: Allan Poe. Of course, Edgar Allan Poe only wrote one
Speaker 1: novel his entire career. You know, mostly known for his
Speaker 1: his excellent short stories, but the novel in question published
Speaker 1: an eight thirty eight the narrative of author Gordon Pym
Speaker 1: of Nantucket. I've never read it, never mean, I never
Speaker 1: read it there, but uh, the fiction of this story
Speaker 1: is you have a crew of a ship called Grampus.
Speaker 1: They wind up adrift with no food or water, and
Speaker 1: so first they catch it toward us. They eat it,
Speaker 1: but eventually they have to draw straws to see who
Speaker 1: winds up has dinner. And uh, an individual named Richard
Speaker 1: Parker draws the short straw, so they stab him and
Speaker 1: then they eat him. And then they build a house
Speaker 1: on the boat so that they can bury him behind
Speaker 1: the wall. Yeah, I mean, you gotta play the greatest hits, right,
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets crazy. Years later, in four a
Speaker 1: yacht named the minion Net leaves England, is headed towards Sydney, Australia,
Speaker 1: and it sinks in a storm. Four men wind up
Speaker 1: adrift in a lifeboat. They catch a turtle. They eat
Speaker 1: it all right, But again you're probably thinking at this point, Okay,
Speaker 1: you know turtles, how hard are they to catch? There
Speaker 1: are lots of turtles in the world, they're all tasty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you're four men in a boat in the
Speaker 1: middle of nowhere and you're hungry, you're gonna eat it.
Speaker 1: No good deal. But then it turns to cannibalism, and
Speaker 1: this too you might think, well, what a four guys
Speaker 1: in the middle in the middle of the ocean in
Speaker 1: a little boat. They're hungry, They've only had one turtle
Speaker 1: to eat. It's kind of inevitable, right, Well, this is
Speaker 1: this is crazy. But aboard this vessel, you have a
Speaker 1: seventeen year old named Richard Parker, the same name as
Speaker 1: the individual they ate in pose novel. This guy falls overboard,
Speaker 1: drinks a bunch of seawater to quench his thirst. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so he starts going. He starts deteriorating really quickly
Speaker 1: here and they side, well, he's he's about to die.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to eat him, and they eat him.
Speaker 1: So you have these this fictional account of cannibalism seeming
Speaker 1: to inform this real life act of cannibalism years later
Speaker 1: and in almost identical circumstances. Yeah, and it's so gruesome
Speaker 1: you can really doubt that they staged it to happen
Speaker 1: on purpose. Because of the novel. Yeah, Like I can't
Speaker 1: imagine them being on the boat and someone saying, look,
Speaker 1: I read this book, and uh, there was a guy
Speaker 1: in the book named Richard Parker and they ate him in.
Speaker 1: Your name's Richard Parker. So I'm not saying we have
Speaker 1: to eat you, but come on. Yeah, it's like the
Speaker 1: worst school play every exactly Alright. So, uh, in this
Speaker 1: we're talking about coincidence, and in this episode we're talking
Speaker 1: about coincidence and the science of coincidence, how we perceive
Speaker 1: a coincidence. Uh, but let's let's get down to brass tacks.
Speaker 1: What exactly is a coincidence? Yeah, and specifically, I think
Speaker 1: we should think about what's the difference between a coincidence
Speaker 1: and just an improbable event? Um so of standard Oxford Dictionaries,
Speaker 1: definition is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without
Speaker 1: apparent causal connection. Okay, So that's sort of playing up
Speaker 1: on the like the two different things coinciding, like like
Speaker 1: the pim right, like the Gordon Pim example, or like
Speaker 1: Jefferson and Adams, you know, dying on the same day.
Speaker 1: Another way of putting it is that it's a concurrence
Speaker 1: of events that is quote perceived as meaningfully related with
Speaker 1: no apparent causal connection, um and and that quotes from
Speaker 1: a paper that we're gonna end up talking about later
Speaker 1: in this episode. But I think that's something we should highlight,
Speaker 1: is that a coincidence has a perceptual element. It's something
Speaker 1: that seems to be important to us, like it has
Speaker 1: a psychic weight. But you know it, it kind of
Speaker 1: comes back to what we're talking about earlier about the
Speaker 1: two students in the classroom. One of them is just
Speaker 1: enthralled by the Kennedy Lincoln coincidence list and the other is, uh,
Speaker 1: it's just tunes out on it. Because that that kind
Speaker 1: of comes down to how we can look at coincidence
Speaker 1: in the life. You can either say it's just pure dumblock,
Speaker 1: is just a matter of statistics, And then there's the
Speaker 1: the the view that there's something else going on here,
Speaker 1: that there is some sort of connected, connective tissue that
Speaker 1: we were just not privy to. And we have seen
Speaker 1: some very you know, thoughtful and informed study on both
Speaker 1: sides of the issue. Right there have been brilliant people
Speaker 1: throughout the years who paid way more attention to coincidences
Speaker 1: than we might today. I mean, we all experience coincidences.
Speaker 1: I would be shocked if was someone who would say, no,
Speaker 1: I've never experienced anything like a really weird concurrence. It
Speaker 1: happens every single day. It happened to us we were
Speaker 1: talking about while we were researching these podcasts, so like
Speaker 1: just strange topics coming up and seemingly unrelated episodes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, of course that kind of gets down to that,
Speaker 1: like the power of coincidence. Coincidence can can kill you,
Speaker 1: Coincidence can can make you rich. Coincidence can just be
Speaker 1: this seemingly meaningless, little connective tissue between two things. Um,
Speaker 1: and it's a trapped It's so easy to fall into,
Speaker 1: especially given how important causation and determination are in human culture. Right,
Speaker 1: And we'll get more into that later, but I mean,
Speaker 1: you you almost can't fault an individual for for thinking
Speaker 1: about these coincidences in terms of some sort of connection. Now,
Speaker 1: and you see it at every level. I mean, what
Speaker 1: is the meat cute and every romantic comedy, it's always
Speaker 1: some kind of coincidence that brings people together. And on
Speaker 1: the opposite end, you've got famous scientists who have tried
Speaker 1: to investigate, you know, what's the meaning of coincidences. I
Speaker 1: think one great example is the Austrian biologists Paul Camera.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, if if you ever have that feeling like, wow,
Speaker 1: I think everything's connected, he did too. So Paul Camera
Speaker 1: lived from eighteen eighty to nineteen twenty six and he
Speaker 1: was a proponent of Lamarckian evolution. Have you ever I'm
Speaker 1: sure you're familiar with this, the one to just give
Speaker 1: everyone a quick reminder, the idea that say giraffes, their
Speaker 1: next grow long because they're reaching for those top those
Speaker 1: top leaves, and so it's like one generation informing the next. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So normally, now what we believe is min Dalian genetics.
Speaker 1: You know, you inherit, you inherit your genetic traits from
Speaker 1: your parents germ cells, and you pass those same genetic
Speaker 1: traits onto your kids. And unless you have a certain mutation,
Speaker 1: that can be basically random. But the Lamarchian ideas where
Speaker 1: that you could you know, maybe if you work out
Speaker 1: a lot or something, your kids will be born with
Speaker 1: bigger muscles or something will strain your neck trying to
Speaker 1: reach something in this life, and in the next life,
Speaker 1: your kids will have longer necks by virtue of your
Speaker 1: your straining. Yeah, and so in one famous experiment, Camera
Speaker 1: claimed to have caused male specimens of a of an
Speaker 1: animal called the midwife toad to grow these black forearm
Speaker 1: paths that some species of male toads have, and that
Speaker 1: they used them to hold onto females during mating. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: some other scientists in the field examined Camera specimens and
Speaker 1: found that the black pads on his toads had been
Speaker 1: injected with artificial inc and so Camera denied responsibility for that.
Speaker 1: And I guess nobody really knows whose fault that was.
Speaker 1: But the accusation here would be that he cheated, right,
Speaker 1: which is important because we'll come back to cheating. Right.
Speaker 1: But Camera wasn't only interested in toads and inheritance. He
Speaker 1: was also interested in coincidences, like he kept a diary
Speaker 1: of daily coincidences. And just one example against it in
Speaker 1: a in a paper that we're going to bring up
Speaker 1: in a bit, his brother in law tells him that
Speaker 1: he attended to concert and held both the ticket for
Speaker 1: seat number nine and the coach check ticket numbered nine. WHOA, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: But anyway, that itself doesn't seem all that interesting until
Speaker 1: you start making lists which Camera did, and he added
Speaker 1: them up over time. And I have to admit, when
Speaker 1: you add it's it's kind of like the Lincoln Kennedy thing.
Speaker 1: The first one isn't all that interesting until you start
Speaker 1: adding them together, and then it really gets your attention.
Speaker 1: There's this cumulative effect of this, like snowballing kind of attention,
Speaker 1: getting significance of coincidences that pile up on each other.
Speaker 1: So Camera organized these thoughts into a hypothesis he called
Speaker 1: the law of seriality, uh. And he posited basically this
Speaker 1: underlying force in reality that was a quote world mosaic
Speaker 1: or cosmic kaleidoscope that brings like objects and events together.
Speaker 1: So almost a kind of of emergent order, uh in
Speaker 1: the chaos yet show which I could buy into it.
Speaker 1: And we see in emergences as a major topic in
Speaker 1: understanding and intelligence, evolution, etcetera. So why not coincidence? Sure?
Speaker 1: But of course Camera wasn't the only scientist who has
Speaker 1: been interested in coincidences and who has attributed some significant
Speaker 1: role in the universe to them. Carl Young. Carl Young
Speaker 1: loved coincidences. Carl So. Carl Young was a Swiss psychiatrist.
Speaker 1: You've probably heard of him. As sort of like a
Speaker 1: he's one of the big names in psychology and psychiatry,
Speaker 1: following Freud. You know, it's like the Mantle, I think
Speaker 1: union and the big big tents. But Young was was
Speaker 1: very much into sort of interesting borderline magical esoteric ideas.
Speaker 1: So he loved the paranormal. He was interested in meaningful
Speaker 1: connections and mystical truths, eesp astrology, psychokinesis, all kinds of
Speaker 1: stuff like that, and so naturally he was really interested
Speaker 1: in coincidences. And so he wrote a book called Synchronicity
Speaker 1: and a Causal Connecting Principle. And this book was actually,
Speaker 1: uh it was I think extracted from a larger volume
Speaker 1: of his work and eventually published on its own. But
Speaker 1: I read this book when I was in college, and
Speaker 1: I remember thinking, at the time, yet again playing up
Speaker 1: on my I guess I'm susceptible to this kind of thing.
Speaker 1: I was like, I wonder if he's onto something here.
Speaker 1: It seemed really interesting. So what kind of coincidences did
Speaker 1: Young notice? Well, he gives one example. This is the
Speaker 1: one that's always cited. It's it's it's his favorite example.
Speaker 1: It's the Golden Scaub. So in a nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: I believe it was essay on synchronicity. Young told the
Speaker 1: story that he had been seeing a female patient for psychoanalysis,
Speaker 1: and Young believed basically that she was languishing because she
Speaker 1: was in sort of a prison of rationality. She was
Speaker 1: just too rational. She she wouldn't quote open up to
Speaker 1: the human side of life. For Young, I think this
Speaker 1: had a decidedly sort of supernatural tinge to it. And um,
Speaker 1: he wanted to uh and this is from a particular
Speaker 1: translation quote sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding.
Speaker 1: So one day she was in psychoanalysis telling him about
Speaker 1: a dream she'd had where someone gave her a golden
Speaker 1: scar rub. And Young claims at that very moment, an
Speaker 1: insect started knocking against the window of the office where
Speaker 1: they were, and he opened the window and he caught
Speaker 1: the insect and it was a beatle. It was a
Speaker 1: scarub type of beetle. And he said it was like
Speaker 1: a green color, but in the right light it reflected
Speaker 1: the light and looked gold. And then he presented it
Speaker 1: to her in this moment of you know, one of
Speaker 1: those there are more things in heaven and Earth than
Speaker 1: dreamt of in your fullosophy kind of moments, and and
Speaker 1: he hoped that this helped shatter her rationalism. And so
Speaker 1: I don't know if that happened to me. If I
Speaker 1: had just been talking about a beetle and then a
Speaker 1: beatle started knocking against the window, I'd probably think that
Speaker 1: was interesting. But I don't know if I designed any
Speaker 1: meaning to it. Yeah, it doesn't really smack of just
Speaker 1: Heaven sent beetle sent to you know, open up my
Speaker 1: mind and make me more you know, in love with life,
Speaker 1: because they're probably just a lot of beetles flying around
Speaker 1: out of there. Sure, but Young commented that when coincidences
Speaker 1: like these accumulate, it's what we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 1: The more of them happened, the more we take note
Speaker 1: of them, uh, and with good reason, because it's harder
Speaker 1: to explain them away by random chance. The more they accumulate,
Speaker 1: you fill up that entire diary with them, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it has weight to it exactly. So Young came up
Speaker 1: with this term synchronicity to describe the a causal connecting
Speaker 1: principle that links meaningfully significant events that couldn't be connected
Speaker 1: by physical causes. So he's not saying that there's like
Speaker 1: a there's like a you know, a ghost that put
Speaker 1: the beetle there, because that would be in some way causal. Instead,
Speaker 1: he's saying there's another force in the universe other than causality.
Speaker 1: It sort of runs parallel to causality that connects events
Speaker 1: and and creates links of significance. But it's not physics, Okay,
Speaker 1: Like I kind of in making sense of it in
Speaker 1: my own head, I thought of it in terms of
Speaker 1: this room or recording in in which case we have
Speaker 1: wires that are running outside of the walls, then running
Speaker 1: across the floor and under the table, and then there
Speaker 1: are the wires within the wall that we cannot see.
Speaker 1: And so the wires that are running outside of the
Speaker 1: walls are are kind of like causality. We can we
Speaker 1: can see them. We're in causality. We've our brain spends
Speaker 1: a lot of time making sense of cause and effect.
Speaker 1: But then there's this idea that there might be some
Speaker 1: other force at work within the walls. We can't see it,
Speaker 1: we're not we're not privy to it. It's exact in
Speaker 1: an ins and outs, but it's it's making things interconnected.
Speaker 1: It's it's these connections are popping up throughout our life,
Speaker 1: throughout the times game. Yeah, causality connects events in the
Speaker 1: physical realm, and according to Young, synchronicity would connect events
Speaker 1: in sort of like the psychic meaningfulness realcom that it
Speaker 1: was this force it makes things have meaning and shows
Speaker 1: us meaning by bringing unlikely events together. Okay, so this
Speaker 1: would be kind of like in um, you seen Interstellar? Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: so there's the whole bit in there about love. Is
Speaker 1: this uh, this connecting force like that seems to line
Speaker 1: up rather closely with this idea of synchronicity. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that makes sense. So coincidences obviously have this power
Speaker 1: over us. They captivate us, they seem significance. They make
Speaker 1: us wonder if there is some kind of magical or
Speaker 1: super psychic force at work. And sometimes it can be
Speaker 1: hard to tell because we don't know how to analyze coincidences.
Speaker 1: You know, like there when something happens, like you get
Speaker 1: a number nine from the coach check and then you're
Speaker 1: in seat number nine. There's really no reason to ask
Speaker 1: why something like that happened, but you can perhaps ask,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, did anything significant actually happen? Indeed, now
Speaker 1: we've talked about the the sort of supernatural end of
Speaker 1: the pool, the idea that there is some sort of
Speaker 1: of intrinsic synchronicity connecting these these events. And now we're
Speaker 1: gonna we're gonna look at a more critical and more
Speaker 1: skeptical side of the pool. Right, So, several times so
Speaker 1: far in this podcast we've referred ahead to a paper,
Speaker 1: and this is sort of a classic paper in statistics
Speaker 1: and mathematical analysis of coincidences, and it's called Methods for
Speaker 1: Studying Coincidences. It was published by the Journal of the
Speaker 1: American Statistical Association in December nineteen nine. I think it
Speaker 1: had been given at a been given as a presentation
Speaker 1: in a couple of years before. But it's by Percy
Speaker 1: Diaconis and Frederick Moss Stellar, and they were I believe,
Speaker 1: Harvard mathematicians, and Diaconis and moss Stellar offer four main
Speaker 1: categories of explanation for seeming examples of synchronicity. You know,
Speaker 1: they refer to camera, they refer to young and they say,
Speaker 1: what what do we make of these events? And and
Speaker 1: how can we tell if something is actually going on
Speaker 1: that's worth noting. So the first of the options is
Speaker 1: that there is an actual causal link. It's not a coincidence,
Speaker 1: because there's a cause that to seemingly disparate events happen together. Uh.
Speaker 1: The second one is psychology. It's something about the way
Speaker 1: our brains work, the fact that we're noticing what seemed
Speaker 1: to be coincidences, and will definitely have more on that later.
Speaker 1: Another point is what they call the multiplicity of end points,
Speaker 1: and this is going to be about how how we
Speaker 1: count something as a hit. And then the last one
Speaker 1: that they site is called the law of truly large numbers,
Speaker 1: and that's going to be about statistical context. So I
Speaker 1: think we should go back and look at causes first.
Speaker 1: So when something happens that's seemingly just a huge coincidence,
Speaker 1: you should always consider the fact that there might be
Speaker 1: a cause that's more obvious than you realize. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: would of course be the birthday problem, right, which is
Speaker 1: a problem that that people will encounter just everywhere, right
Speaker 1: and in your workplace, at school, et cetera. I mean
Speaker 1: we can encounter it right here in the podcast Chamber
Speaker 1: Joe Win your Birthday July six, Minds October six, whoa synchronicity?
Speaker 1: Are you serious? I'm serious? Were sixteen sixteen. Okay, what
Speaker 1: happened when you were sixteen? What city were you in? Oh, Paris, Tennessee.
Speaker 1: I was in Tennessee too when I was sorry, I
Speaker 1: was in fatal Tennessee. But still Tennessee, Tennessee. Man, something
Speaker 1: weird is going on. Yeah, or but but worth noting
Speaker 1: here is notice how we're we're singling in on the hits.
Speaker 1: We totally missed the same day birthday by by many months,
Speaker 1: but we're counting as a hit because we both had sixteen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so here's the birthday problem. Let's say you're in a
Speaker 1: subway car and you're riding around with some random strangers,
Speaker 1: and because you are extremely rude, you start getting people's attention,
Speaker 1: getting them to take their headphones off, and you you
Speaker 1: ask the strangers in the car all of their birthdays.
Speaker 1: That's not rude, that's just good manners. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a nice breaker. Okay, Yeah, you might want
Speaker 1: to know if today's their birthday, and you should offer
Speaker 1: them this cake that you found on the ground. Exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So how many people would you have to ask before
Speaker 1: It's more likely than not that you'd find two people
Speaker 1: with the same exact birthday. Well, let's see three sixty
Speaker 1: five days in a year. Uh, so you'd think, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I need a talk to three d sixty five people, right,
Speaker 1: or maybe twice that. Yeah, I mean I'm not good
Speaker 1: at doing math like that immediately, but that's where I
Speaker 1: would have gone the first place in my head. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's got to be like one in three sixty five
Speaker 1: times two or something like that. But no, the answer
Speaker 1: is twenty three. Okay, But we're not going to take
Speaker 1: the time to explain all the math. You can go
Speaker 1: look that up online. It is well documented. Uh, this
Speaker 1: is a classic problem. If you ask twenty three people
Speaker 1: in a room, in a train car, whatever, you have
Speaker 1: reached the fifty fifty odds that two of them will
Speaker 1: have the same birthday. And one of the key points
Speaker 1: here is that you're not starting with the specified birthday.
Speaker 1: You're not saying how many people do I have to
Speaker 1: ask before I find somebody with my birthday? You're just
Speaker 1: trying to find one match, right, Yeah, in this group
Speaker 1: of if you ask twenty three people, odds are two
Speaker 1: of them will have the same birthday. What if you
Speaker 1: want to find three people with the same birthday, that's
Speaker 1: got to be astronomical, right I would think so. I
Speaker 1: mean you think that would just multiply it. Yeah. No, Actually,
Speaker 1: if your train car can hold people, chances are in
Speaker 1: your favor you reach odds again if you ask a
Speaker 1: D eight. So that just shows that the statistical probability
Speaker 1: of in this case, this is a birthday match occurring,
Speaker 1: he's actually uh, far greater than we we we may
Speaker 1: get a credit at the surface. Yeah, I think the
Speaker 1: point is that we are often surprised by events that
Speaker 1: are not statistically unlikely at all, Like they just don't
Speaker 1: match our intuitions. Basically, we we have exaggerated intuitions for
Speaker 1: how unlikely some things are, especially it turns out particular
Speaker 1: types of things, for example, things that happened to us.
Speaker 1: This is a funny thing. We're we're way more surprised
Speaker 1: about coincidences that happened to us than coincidences that happened
Speaker 1: to other people. Oh yeah, because we're all the center
Speaker 1: of our own stories, right, we're going to be We're
Speaker 1: more interesting, We're more invested in this one. Um. I
Speaker 1: mean just to come back to back to the statistical possibilities,
Speaker 1: I mean, just thinking back to how we both were
Speaker 1: like whoa sixteen whoa Tennessee. But when you really break
Speaker 1: it down, like the chances of us scoring the same day,
Speaker 1: I mean the same date within a month, that's what
Speaker 1: one and thirty one chance for the most part, and
Speaker 1: Tennessee what we could say, Well, we're both living and
Speaker 1: working in Atlanta, so there's probably a reasonable chance that
Speaker 1: we would come from a southern state, of which there
Speaker 1: are I mean, but not that many. There's very many
Speaker 1: literature majors from Tennessee end up in Atlanta. That's not unusual, yea. Um,
Speaker 1: but so hey, there could be another cause though. So
Speaker 1: that's just the apparent cause. The cause that's um readily available,
Speaker 1: you just haven't looked at the math. There could also
Speaker 1: be a hidden cause. When something appears to be a coincidence,
Speaker 1: it's not actually a coincidence because there's an actual causal
Speaker 1: link that you don't know about. Um. The classic example
Speaker 1: of this would be cheating and gambling. Yes, this is
Speaker 1: where a person rolls a dice, right, Yeah, So so
Speaker 1: you roll a pair of dice, you know, a hundred
Speaker 1: times in a row. And let's say you you roll
Speaker 1: a seven nineties six out of those hundred times. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the more the more every time you roll when
Speaker 1: you get the same number he gets, that gets even
Speaker 1: more astronomical. That have happened? How could that possibly have happened? Well,
Speaker 1: obviously if there's a hidden cause, which is the dice
Speaker 1: are loaded so that they will turn up a seven
Speaker 1: pretty much every time. So there you go. You don't
Speaker 1: have to be a god to do it. You just
Speaker 1: have to be a cheater with with a pair of
Speaker 1: loaded diet exactly. And another example comes to mind. This
Speaker 1: was going back to Carl Young. Carl Young was associated
Speaker 1: with the physicist of Wolfgang Polly, and Paully was famous
Speaker 1: for coming up with the Poully exclusion principle, which is
Speaker 1: important in quantum mechanics. I don't remember exactly what it
Speaker 1: does right now, but it's something that's right. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he um. So he was a known physicist and it
Speaker 1: did really important work. But Paul, I think, was also
Speaker 1: sort of interested in the you know, strange synchronicity type ideas,
Speaker 1: and Polly, in addition to the Polly principle, which is
Speaker 1: an actual principle of science, was known for the Polly effect,
Speaker 1: which is a more anecdotal effect. But the story goes
Speaker 1: like this everywhere Wolfgang Polly went, machines broke. Ah. This
Speaker 1: is the classic watch stopper scenario. Yeah, so he would
Speaker 1: show up in a lab somewhere to test out some
Speaker 1: equipment and what do you know, the equipment and working today.
Speaker 1: Can't figure it out, And then he'd leave the lab
Speaker 1: and suddenly it'd start working again. Uh. We don't know
Speaker 1: how many of these stories are actually true, but this
Speaker 1: is a popular anecdotal legend, and we'll just accept that
Speaker 1: it's true for the purpose of the conversation that everywhere
Speaker 1: he went it seemed like stuff wouldn't work. In fact,
Speaker 1: there was even one anecdote I read about where some
Speaker 1: people were working in a lab and their equipment stopped working,
Speaker 1: and they joked, is you know Wolf going here? Is
Speaker 1: as he'd come down the hall. Uh. And then later
Speaker 1: they found out that he just happened to have been
Speaker 1: changing trains in that city on that day at the
Speaker 1: time that their equipment malfunction. He has some long reaching effects.
Speaker 1: So whether or not that's true, right, let's go ahead
Speaker 1: and settle now on. But but if it were true,
Speaker 1: you could perhaps look for actual hidden causes. It might
Speaker 1: not be a synchronistic coincidence that you know that the universe,
Speaker 1: the the Unice, the Unice Mundi is trying to tell
Speaker 1: Wolfgung Polly something about his relationship with machines or something.
Speaker 1: It could be perhaps that Polly had a habit of
Speaker 1: scuffing around his office carpet before heading into the lab,
Speaker 1: and that led him to discharge a lot of static
Speaker 1: electricity which could break some really delicate instruments. Or Polly
Speaker 1: is just really clumsy. Yeah, And of course it's also
Speaker 1: not taken to account all the machines that are not
Speaker 1: breaking in Polly's life, right, it's literally everything he touches.
Speaker 1: Does it just fall apart and rust, you know, before
Speaker 1: his very eyes? Or is it just oh this thing broke?
Speaker 1: How could that happen? How get a machine and this
Speaker 1: little device made by human? How could this possibly stop working?
Speaker 1: You know? So you end up that you end up
Speaker 1: honing in on those instances where it doesn't work, right.
Speaker 1: And it's also i think probably not communicating the reality
Speaker 1: about lab equipment, which is that it probably breaks all
Speaker 1: the time, and there's a lot of it. Any lab
Speaker 1: is going to have a lot of equipment, and all
Speaker 1: of it has a half life, and and and a
Speaker 1: death point. Yeah. Um so, so yeah, that's the idea
Speaker 1: of the hidden cause. And then, of course those are
Speaker 1: just some hypothetical examples we're offering. The true hidden cause
Speaker 1: would be the one we haven't even thought of, you know,
Speaker 1: the cause that's an actual physical causal link that's causing
Speaker 1: things to malfunction in police presence, but we can't even
Speaker 1: guess what it is it might be there. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I think we should move on to another one of
Speaker 1: the points that Diaconis and Mostell are making their paper,
Speaker 1: which is the quote multiplicity of end points or the
Speaker 1: sort of like the cost of close point. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: if we have already illustrated close counts and coincidence, Like
Speaker 1: when we're talking about birthdays, we were looking for the
Speaker 1: same day in the same month, but we settled for sixteen.
Speaker 1: You know, we were looking for the same Tennessee town
Speaker 1: and oh my god, we accidentally went to the same
Speaker 1: high school and didn't realize it. But we'll settle for
Speaker 1: just the same state. And that's what we're doing. We're
Speaker 1: we're constantly looking for these these little coins as to
Speaker 1: line up, and we'll settle for something that's close. And
Speaker 1: if you settle for close the statistical possibilities just blow up,
Speaker 1: such as with the birthday situation. Um, if you want
Speaker 1: to uh to, uh to, if you want to hit
Speaker 1: a near birthday match with a group of people, so
Speaker 1: make sure you're back on the back in the train
Speaker 1: car and you're willing to to settle for all right,
Speaker 1: let's see who on this train car has a birthday
Speaker 1: within a day of each other. You know, we'll settle
Speaker 1: for a close match. Then you only seven people are
Speaker 1: needed for that chance. So yeah, so so coming down
Speaker 1: from from a perfect match to a near match just
Speaker 1: opens it up tremendously. And then, of course, when you
Speaker 1: think about the accumulation effect that we were talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: it makes it much easier if you are accumulating close matches.
Speaker 1: You keep building up close matches, and over time they
Speaker 1: start to look significant because they just turned into hits
Speaker 1: in your memory. You know, you don't remember, well, that
Speaker 1: was kind of close. You remember there's a hit, and
Speaker 1: then another hit, and then another hit, and some of
Speaker 1: these might be actual hits, some of these might be
Speaker 1: close hits, but they all kind of blend together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this brings to mind like cold readings and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and the whole psychic game right where you throw out,
Speaker 1: oh i'm i'm I think there's somebody named Joe in
Speaker 1: your life, and you know I have an uncle Joseph.
Speaker 1: There you go, close becomes a perfect match and then
Speaker 1: in the blink of an eye, and then that is
Speaker 1: how you reckon your memory. Okay. Then, also when studying coincidences,
Speaker 1: that this is another category of of Diaconis and Mustellar.
Speaker 1: There's the law of truly large numbers. And this is
Speaker 1: a point about context. So let's say somebody encounters of
Speaker 1: an event that is truly incredibly unlikely for a person
Speaker 1: to experience. So it's not one of those things with
Speaker 1: a hidden cause. It's not one of those things where
Speaker 1: the odds are actually, you know, much more probable than
Speaker 1: you realize. It's truly unlikely. You still have to consider context.
Speaker 1: You have to consider this event against the vast number
Speaker 1: of uncounted dice rolls of human experience that it is
Speaker 1: nestled in. So here's an analogy. Let's say you're talking
Speaker 1: to a professional poker player and she tells you one
Speaker 1: time she was playing five card poker and she was
Speaker 1: dealt a royal flush on the opening bet. Of a
Speaker 1: hand then to trade any cards. She just got a
Speaker 1: royal flush. Now, the odds of being dealta royal flush
Speaker 1: are about one in six fifty thousand. I think it's
Speaker 1: like sixty nine thousand or something like that, about one
Speaker 1: and six. But you wouldn't say to this poker player, oh,
Speaker 1: you must be lying or like you know, or you
Speaker 1: must have been cheating in this game, because you understand
Speaker 1: that the anecdote is in context. If she's a professional
Speaker 1: poker player, depending on how long she's playing, she might
Speaker 1: have been dealt hundreds of thousands of hands in her life.
Speaker 1: And on top of that, she's one player out of many,
Speaker 1: and maybe not everybody has had that experience. So when
Speaker 1: considered in context, really improbable events start looking like, oh, okay, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the one chance in however many. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is kind of the you know, it's bound to happen
Speaker 1: eventually clause Right, Like ive enough people are trying a
Speaker 1: given thing, it's gonna line up. The monkeys are going
Speaker 1: to compose the complete works of Shakespeare with thin enough time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there are improbable events, but there are just a
Speaker 1: lot of chances to achieve them. There are seven point
Speaker 1: three billion people on Earth today and according to the
Speaker 1: Population Reference Bureau, there is an estimated a hundred and
Speaker 1: eight billion people who have ever lived. So considering that
Speaker 1: if there's an event that has a one in a
Speaker 1: million chance per year of occurring in somebody's life, let's
Speaker 1: say it's I don't know what the actual chance of
Speaker 1: this is, but having a baseball bat thrown over a
Speaker 1: wall and it hits you on the head or something, Uh,
Speaker 1: it should still happen to seventy three hundred people every year,
Speaker 1: just given the population of the Earth, that that is
Speaker 1: the probability. If there's a one in ten billion chance
Speaker 1: of something ever occurring in a human's life, it should
Speaker 1: still have happened to at least ten people in human history.
Speaker 1: And it it kind of comes back around to the
Speaker 1: idea of synchronicity, the union idea, because even though we're
Speaker 1: we're talking about about real numbers and uh, and just
Speaker 1: our sort of our inability to really make statistical sense
Speaker 1: of the actual odds of things, uh, those actual odds
Speaker 1: of the computation of those odds, they kind of exist
Speaker 1: within the wall. They kind of exist outside of our
Speaker 1: perception and our understanding of life in the small sense
Speaker 1: in the individual sense. So in a way, uh, the
Speaker 1: synchronoy city lines up well with with it with the
Speaker 1: statistical likelihood of things happening. We're just we're just not
Speaker 1: privy to it. Yeah. I think that connects back to
Speaker 1: the fact that there is a personal significance for us,
Speaker 1: even if there is not a statistical significance. Again, it's
Speaker 1: not surprising that somebody won the lottery. It would be
Speaker 1: really surprising if you won the lottery. That's not actually
Speaker 1: objectively surprising, it's just surprising to you, which of course
Speaker 1: brings us to psychology. Yeah, and we save this for
Speaker 1: last because I think this might be the most significant
Speaker 1: of all of these factors. And this is the fact
Speaker 1: that sometimes it's not even the numbers. Sometimes it's not
Speaker 1: even the data. It's just that we are wired to
Speaker 1: bow at the altar of coincidence. It's how our brains work. Indeed,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's just how we survive. That's how we
Speaker 1: make sense of the stimuli in our environment, that's how
Speaker 1: we form our memories, and that's how we plan for
Speaker 1: the future. Yeah, So let's look at some psychological phenomenon
Speaker 1: that that are sort of related to our tendency to
Speaker 1: take note of coincidences and maybe a tribute to them
Speaker 1: more magical significance than they might actually have. Uh, how
Speaker 1: about you even heard of the batter main Hoff phenomenon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the frequency illusions. This is I guess the
Speaker 1: famous example of this would be you just learn a
Speaker 1: new word, you know, you either encounter in a book
Speaker 1: and he's like, WHOA, I don't know that when you
Speaker 1: look it up and your rather taken with it, and
Speaker 1: then it seems to pop up everywhere you just learned
Speaker 1: about it, and it's all around you. So it's like
Speaker 1: discovering a flower exists for the first time you've never
Speaker 1: seen before, and then suddenly it seems to be growing
Speaker 1: in every pot across town. Yeah. Yeah, And so the
Speaker 1: weird name actually comes from a West German terrorist organization,
Speaker 1: doesn't have anything to do with them. Really. I read
Speaker 1: that the origin of this was that the phenomenon supposedly
Speaker 1: got its name because a message board user somewhere online
Speaker 1: told the story of encountering information about the bad or
Speaker 1: mine Hoff gang and then just suddenly seeing that again
Speaker 1: within like twenty four hours. Um, and I'm sure this
Speaker 1: has happened to you. It's happened to me all the time.
Speaker 1: This actually happened to me while I was researching these
Speaker 1: podcasts were recording today. So in the other podcast we're
Speaker 1: recording today, Uh, there's a mention of Prince Cheep, a
Speaker 1: island off of the west coast of Africa, and I
Speaker 1: had when I when I got to them in the research,
Speaker 1: I realized I had just been reading about that island
Speaker 1: for the first time, like less than twenty four hours before,
Speaker 1: for completely unrelated reason, not related to astronomy or anything. No,
Speaker 1: but see, Yeah, you see those kind of weird littal
Speaker 1: coincidences pop up, yeah all the time, And uh, I've
Speaker 1: often found that to be the case too, seemingly unrelated episodes,
Speaker 1: but there'll be some little thread that connects them. Um.
Speaker 1: You know. Another example the frequency illusion that I often
Speaker 1: see is I'll I'll come across like a new concept
Speaker 1: or a concept I wasn't that familiar with, and I'll
Speaker 1: do a deep dive in in it for a podcast
Speaker 1: podcast such as h super Normal Stimuli was a big one,
Speaker 1: and after I researched it, I was just I was
Speaker 1: just seeing it everywhere like it it kind of a
Speaker 1: topic like that of you know sufficient depth. It kind
Speaker 1: of changes the way you look at the world and
Speaker 1: then you see reflections of it just all around you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh and and so it can be something as
Speaker 1: simple as a as a word. It can be something
Speaker 1: that's you know, a particular place, a particular you know,
Speaker 1: a particular band, a particular work of a literature, or
Speaker 1: it can be uh, you know, a philosophical mindset suddenly
Speaker 1: because you're aware of it, you're hyper aware of it,
Speaker 1: you're excited about it, You're going to see it in
Speaker 1: the rest of the world. Yeah, um, yeah, And there
Speaker 1: there could be lots of reasons. One could be that
Speaker 1: hidden causal connection. You know, there are actually reasons that
Speaker 1: you're investigating similar stories around the same time or reading
Speaker 1: similar material that might use a new and unfamiliar word
Speaker 1: around the same time, because you have interests and drives
Speaker 1: that are sort of unified by time. Uh. Also, the
Speaker 1: authors of the paper we were talking about earlier, have
Speaker 1: they have their own sort of mathematical analysis of this,
Speaker 1: don't they? And they sort of explain how it's not
Speaker 1: that unusual that you should, you know, at a certain point,
Speaker 1: after acquiring a word for the first time, see it again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's just sort of expected to happen. Yeah, they're just there.
Speaker 1: There's a finite number of words, so you're going to
Speaker 1: see them again. Um. And of course this plays into apophenia. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is uh. This is a term comes to us
Speaker 1: from German scientists Claus Konrad, who coined apophenia from the
Speaker 1: Greek appo away and uh uh and Finian to show
Speaker 1: in n He was studying acute schizophrenia, during which connections
Speaker 1: and meanings seem to web together around unrelated details. So
Speaker 1: this is the basic idea here is we're always looking
Speaker 1: for patterns and signals from our environment. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: how we think, that's how we live, that's how we survive,
Speaker 1: particularly when it comes to assessing threats. Okay, um, And
Speaker 1: so we have we often have this tendency to perceive
Speaker 1: patterns and connections in random or meaningless data. Um. For instance. Uh.
Speaker 1: One example that comes to mind here is you have
Speaker 1: some sort of silly police drama. On right, they're looking
Speaker 1: at a map of the city and they have little
Speaker 1: pins showing where the crimes are at. And then what
Speaker 1: do they see. They see like a pentagram rights some
Speaker 1: sort of order. And of course in the show. It
Speaker 1: always makes sense, right, Like the the Satanic Killer actually
Speaker 1: is trying to kill people so that his crimes look
Speaker 1: like a pentagram in a map. But you can see
Speaker 1: that pentagram without any planning at all or some other symbol. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you want to see that pentagram in the planning,
Speaker 1: you can see that pentagram in the planning of just
Speaker 1: about anything. Um. But what this basically breaks down to
Speaker 1: is a false positive in statistics, a type one error
Speaker 1: in cognition. And this is something that plays into religion, gambling,
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory, and just are and also our need to
Speaker 1: see faces everywhere. Right, it's the reason we see uh,
Speaker 1: figures in the constellations in the sky, right. I mean
Speaker 1: i'd say very few people these days actually think that
Speaker 1: the stars were arranged to look like a figure from
Speaker 1: Greek myth. Yeah, because you think whoever was doing it
Speaker 1: would do a better job. I mean, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: not very good. It's kind of a crappy portrait, but
Speaker 1: you know people saw it. Yeah, yeah, they saw the
Speaker 1: pattern and we just can't help but see. Patterns were
Speaker 1: pattern recognition engines, as we've mentioned before here. And there's
Speaker 1: the thing is there's an evolutionary advantage for us pattern
Speaker 1: recognition apes in making that type one air because essentially
Speaker 1: you have you have you have a type one air
Speaker 1: and you have a type two right false positive, false negative.
Speaker 1: And the classic example is that of you know, rustling
Speaker 1: in the bushes on the on the prehistoric savannah, right,
Speaker 1: because there's a possibility that a big cat is about
Speaker 1: to spring out of those rustling bush bushes and kill us.
Speaker 1: Or it could be the statistical noise of wind. Exactly.
Speaker 1: A false positive just gets you hot and bothered over
Speaker 1: nothing and maybe a good laugh. I thought it was
Speaker 1: a tiger and it was just wind. But a false
Speaker 1: negative that gets you killed. Yeah, so obvious. There's obviously
Speaker 1: a selection pressure to favor false positives. Yeah, exactly. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, so that just plays into how we think
Speaker 1: and how we behave as humans and are overwhelming tendency
Speaker 1: to see the pattern when there isn't one, to see
Speaker 1: the connective tissue between events, in this case, when there
Speaker 1: isn't any right. So yeah, and so in that way
Speaker 1: a coincidence can represent a pattern to us, we start
Speaker 1: thinking what does it mean? Yeah, I mean, and there's
Speaker 1: likely a connection between apophenia and creativity This is a
Speaker 1: theory that was put put forth by Swiss neurologist Peter
Speaker 1: Bruger Uh in a two thousand one book, Hauntings and
Speaker 1: Poulter Guy's Multi Disiplinary Perspectives. And he was studying apophenian
Speaker 1: patients suffering from psychotic episodes that were beginning to find
Speaker 1: spontaneous meaning and random aspects of their life. And his
Speaker 1: research revealed that high levels of dopamine disposes his patients
Speaker 1: to find meetings, patterns, significance where there was there was none.
Speaker 1: So creativity apophenia, Uh, you know, it's what is creativity.
Speaker 1: But ultimately, you know, finding new patterns, new connections, new
Speaker 1: ways to arrange existing ideas and motifs uh into something new,
Speaker 1: right of course, Yeah, I mean we often see that
Speaker 1: as sort of the core of the creative principle. It's
Speaker 1: you know, understanding like, oh, this is connected to this
Speaker 1: other thing. Very often the connections you see between events
Speaker 1: or objects or ideas and say a literature class or
Speaker 1: something like that, are they are still psychic phenomenon. It's
Speaker 1: something that we are putting together out of our need
Speaker 1: defined meaning, that's right, and a lot of times that
Speaker 1: meaning that we need to find. You know, we we
Speaker 1: already have our our minds made up about what that
Speaker 1: meaning is. This brings us to confirmation bias, which of
Speaker 1: course is always a big one. This, of course is
Speaker 1: the idea that we have a tendency to search for
Speaker 1: or interpret information in a way that confirms your preconceptions
Speaker 1: about life, about about basically anything, which leads to statistical
Speaker 1: errors that cloud your decision and problem decision making a
Speaker 1: problem solving ability. Yeah, so this would come into play
Speaker 1: if say you are already looking for a pattern of coincidences,
Speaker 1: say you've had to like to sort of synchronous strange
Speaker 1: events happen in one day, you're looking for a third
Speaker 1: and that's going to bias the way that you sample data.
Speaker 1: It's probably going to make you look for things that
Speaker 1: are sort of a close hit is something you might
Speaker 1: have ignored otherwise to confirm your pattern hypothesis that there's
Speaker 1: gonna be something in line with this second thing. You know,
Speaker 1: it's the same like people dye in threes ideas just
Speaker 1: thinking of that. Yeah, like you, if you're lucky, you'll
Speaker 1: get like to a list celebrities dying at the same time.
Speaker 1: But then often like that third one has to be
Speaker 1: like a radio star for the days. You know, it's
Speaker 1: something that doesn't really match up, but you'll take it.
Speaker 1: It's totally fleets the prophecy exactly right. It's confirmation bias.
Speaker 1: You're you're bringing it in because you've got to make
Speaker 1: it fit the pattern. Yeah, it's kind of like when
Speaker 1: you listen to an episode of This American Life and
Speaker 1: like the they have the theme for the show, and
Speaker 1: like the intro hits the theme, the second segment really
Speaker 1: hits the theme. The third segment and the second third segment,
Speaker 1: you know they mostly hit this theme, and that last
Speaker 1: one you're kind of like, I don't know close enough,
Speaker 1: close enough to close out the show, but you're really
Speaker 1: kind of strayed from the overall theme. Um. But then
Speaker 1: that's pretty much how we approach life in general, whether
Speaker 1: you're talking about belief in UFOs, ancient Egyptians and alien tech, Bigfoot,
Speaker 1: or or you know, office conspiracies or whatever it happens
Speaker 1: to be. If you're looking for something to be true, uh,
Speaker 1: you can find it. That So it plays into scientific analysis.
Speaker 1: You have a you know, a theory you want and
Speaker 1: you want to see it proven out, and you subconsciously
Speaker 1: scow your the results of the experimentation in your favor. Uh,
Speaker 1: you want to love that new movie that just hit
Speaker 1: the theaters, so you wind up looking for reasons to
Speaker 1: love it and focusing more on that and being perhaps
Speaker 1: a little less critical than you normally will. And then,
Speaker 1: of course there's a racial aspect too, right you You
Speaker 1: if you happen to distrust members of another racial group,
Speaker 1: you wind up focusing on the evidence that supports your
Speaker 1: existing distrust rather than evidence that challenges it. Oh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people are definitely likely to oversample stuff that confirms their
Speaker 1: bigotry or biases. So yeah, if if you have a
Speaker 1: preconceived stereotype, you're looking to make things fit evidence that
Speaker 1: doesn't fit it, you just kind of like, yeah, that's noise,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. Yeah, I mean, for the most part,
Speaker 1: you're kind of maintaining the castle of you know, fortress
Speaker 1: sanity and fortress worldview and uh and and so you
Speaker 1: want to to focus as much on the stuff that
Speaker 1: keeps the walls up as possible. Yeah. Of course this
Speaker 1: all works perfectly because post addiction is largely a result
Speaker 1: of the brain's task of continually integrating sensory stimuli and
Speaker 1: reconciling conflicting information into a unified vision of reality, a
Speaker 1: unified story again in which we are the central character. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean that's just simply how our memory. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you always see the the pattern of clue is
Speaker 1: left by the mystery writer once you've had the ending revealed.
Speaker 1: You might not notice it while you're going through the
Speaker 1: novel to the first time. So there you have it. Coincidence. Um.
Speaker 1: We we've kind of hit some of the the more
Speaker 1: you know, fringey ideas of what could be happening with
Speaker 1: this perceived synchronicity in life and what is actually going
Speaker 1: on when it comes to the statistics of the world
Speaker 1: around us and the way we perceive our world. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one of the authors of that paper we talked
Speaker 1: about earlier, Percy Diaconis, he had this quote that I
Speaker 1: saw in an interview or said, probability isn't a fact
Speaker 1: about the world, it's a fact about the observers and knowledge.
Speaker 1: And I think that's number one that seems very true,
Speaker 1: but also it's um, it's a good way of informing
Speaker 1: this discussion we've had about what coincidence means when you
Speaker 1: actually examine probability and statistics. Very often, the real magic
Speaker 1: is happening inside our heads, in our in our quest
Speaker 1: to construct meaning in sort of are are actually the
Speaker 1: great links that we go through mentally to weave events
Speaker 1: together and produce tapestries of significance in our lives. So
Speaker 1: think about that the next time you know, some of
Speaker 1: these little coincidences pop up in your life and you
Speaker 1: start drawing those imaginary lines in the in the world
Speaker 1: of synchronicity. Hey. In the meantime, if you want more
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