Comments on: Amazing But True

By: Cos

Cos — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:44:17 +0000

Okay, I do have some stories of the kinds of coincidences you were actually looking for :) I posted several stories of coincidentally perfect timing several years ago, and your post reminded me of those.

By: Cos

Cos — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:37:03 +0000

The most remarkable coincidence I experienced the other day was one of the license plates I saw parked on a nearby street. I don’t remember it, but it was an out of state car. And of all the ~300 million license plate numbers in the United states – the overwhelming majority of which are from other states, and are less often seen in my neighborhood than local plates – the chances that the car bearing that particular plate would be parked right where I was walking were, given what information I had at the time, extraordinarily small. I never could have guessed it if I hadn’t seen it!

I’m sure the person who parked it there had ample reason to, and might very well have not considered it much of a coincidence.

Then again, maybe the DJs who played those two songs at those times, also had their reasons, and didn’t consider the timing especially remarkable, either. They just had different knowledge of the situation beforehand.

By: Al V.

Al V. — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:51:41 +0000

A friend of mine used to drive a cab in NYC. One morning he picked up a fare on the upper west side, going downtown to the financial district. While passing through the Village, my friend’s cab strikes another cab, which is running a red light. Virtually no damage, but they have to trade info a fill out an accident report, so the passenger pays his fare, gets out, and hails another cab. Around 5:00 that day, my friend drops a fare downtown, and shortly stops for another passenger. After the passenger gets in, he says “Broadway and 87th Street, and this time don’t hit anyone.” It was, of course, the same passenger.

Odds, actually not that remote. There are 11,787 yellow cabs in New York. During the day, almost all are out on the streets. If we knew the average number of taxi rides per day per person (not per cab), we could figure out the probability.

By: Al V.

Al V. — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 04:24:25 +0000

When I was 24 years old, I was hitchhiking from Butte to Missoula, Montana. I got a ride from someone, and over the course of our conversation I mentioned that I was from NYC. They only person the driver knew from NYC was his college roommate, who it turned out, I knew. From one perspective the odds are 1 in 7 million (the population of NYC at the time). However, given the number of New Yorkers I knew, and the fact that the driver and I were in the same relative age group (he was about 30), it really wasn’t that incredible a coincidence.

By: Drew

Drew — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:57:19 +0000

The more I think about probability, the less sure I am that I understand what it even means that something is incredibly unlikely coincidence in the real world. The problem is that we are trying to estimate the odds of a dice roll when we have no idea what the die look like: how many of them there are, how many sides they have, or even what numbers are on their faces. In fact, we don’t REALLY even know, and may not be ABLE to know, if questions like “is this or that feature of the universe probable or improbable?” even make sense.

This is why theologians with pat assertions about the likelihood or unlikelihood of the universe, taken from a misunderstood translation of physics into philosophy, always strike me as unimaginative: exactly the opposite of what they seem to think they are.

Yes, if the laws of the universe _that we know about_ were slightly different, we might have had a universe we wouldn’t recognize. But who is to say that the laws we know of are the only ones possible? Who is to say how much the constants could have varied, and why? Perhaps our universe is remarkable in that most have many MORE universal constants and laws and features that we cannot even imagine. Perhaps in the total number of possible universes (which is not the same idea as “multiverses,” take heed), what is so remarkable about ours is how unordered and lifeless it is. Perhaps instead of needing to wonder about the necessity of a great organizer, we really need to be trying to look to a great DISorganizer.

I don’t see how any philosopher or theologian can possibly nail down the ontological truth: doing so always seems to require making some remarkably unimaginative assumptions. Empiricism, in contrast, may not be fully or fundamentally reliable, but at least it is modest: it makes assumptions, but they happily happen to be basically the same ones that I require to treat the world around me as real. And we admit upfront that they are our best approximation, not some core truth. So, that’s okay. And then we work ourselves up from the there to figure out larger truths as best we can. And we are encouraged to stay humble, always checking our work.

But of course, without working from the top down, saying much of anything about ultimate probability and causality is really a crapshoot. For all we know, our universe is deeply flawed in such a way that we don’t have, as most possible universes would have had, nearly every event and characteristic neatly connected by incredible coincidences.

By: todd

todd — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:54:10 +0000

My wife and I recently went on a trip to South Korea. My wife has a thing for the weird way Ostrich’s keep showing up in her life. We were staring out the window of the hotel on Jeju Island and she said “hey look horse racing”. She grabbed her camera and then said “no way, those are Ostrich’s”. The next morning we were visiting an old village and she disappeared to see if she could take a picture of the Ostrich’s which were in a pen next door. She found them and was taking pictures when a gust of wind blew her Bennie off her head and into the pen. The beanie was from “Nightmare before Christmas”. She took a picture of it in the pen. Two weeks later while back in the states she went to a Christmas craft fair with her mother and was looking at ornaments when she came across a wooden ornament with an ostrich on it and decided to buy it. When the clerk turned around to help her she freaked out since he was wearing the exact same beanie she had lost.

By: CapitalistImperialistPig

CapitalistImperialistPig — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:53:23 +0000

Richard Feynman once told a story that went something like this: On the way to work today I saw a license plate that read XRD-7352. What do you suppose the odds are of that?

By: Weekend Roundup at Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 07:03:02 +0000

[...] offhand remark from a mobster inspired a thread about remarkable coincidences, and the most recent shallow pontification from the self-proclaimed “Ethicist” inspired [...]

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:43:00 +0000

I was once traveling in Europe for 4 months and staying in hostels. In Vienna I stayed in the same room with a guy from States. About a month later in Pula, Croatia, I saw the same guy in an internet cafe. About a month later after having traveled through Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, I ended up in the same room with this person in a hostel in Istanbul.

By: Wes

Wes — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:22:47 +0000

I was in Paris about 12 years ago and was checking my email at a hostel. My mom had sent an email wishing me well and she closed by saying “keep an eye out for April, she’s travelling in Europe too!” April being our next door neighbours daughter. I was in the middle of writing my reply saying something like “there are 300 million people in Europe what are the chances….” when I looked up and saw April standing at the front desk. It blew me away.