Coincidences

[ekim]

It's amazing, because I was only this morning listening to Tim Minchin comment that 'to assume that your one-in-a-million event is a miracle is to seriously underestimate the number of things that there are.'

I'm sure that has to mean something, right...?

O.

Now that's a coincidence.  I was just about to say that!  Can you remove yourself from my quantum entanglement please?!

[Sriram]

It's amazing, because I was only this morning listening to Tim Minchin comment that 'to assume that your one-in-a-million event is a miracle is to seriously underestimate the number of things that there are.'

I'm sure that has to mean something, right...?

O.

Who said anything about a 'miracle'?!  What's a miracle anyway....could you define please?!

[bluehillside Retd.]

ippy,

In a city as large as London what would be the odds be on that happening?

Not outlandish, especially given the proximity of many law firms to each other around the law courts.

The point though is that you're essaying here a variant of the lottery winner's fallacy: the lottery winner thinks, "Wow, I won against 14 million-to-one odds, that's remarkable" whereas Camelot calculates the odds of someone winning as pretty much one, only they don't care who that winner will be so all they think is, "so what?".

Similarly, had you thought over breakfast, "I wonder what the chances of running into the other secretary are today", the odds would be fairly long. What actually happened though was that you wondered at it only after the event. You could just as well have bumped into your uncle Fred who emigrated to Canada 30 years ago, found a fifty pound note on the street, or spotted a ring in the grass that your wife had dropped the previous summer. Very uncommon things happen all the time - try dealing a deck of cards and calculating the odds against the sequence that you get for example - but the danger is to assume that there was some special design or purpose beforehand when in fact what we tend to do is to retro-fit significance to the event.

Or to put it the other way, when you saw the other secretary you were the lottery winner and the universe was Camelot.

That incidentally is why the OP is so daft: the odds against the sequence of a randomly dealt deck of cards is 52!, yet any kid can deal a set of cards and produce a sequence of the same improbability perfectly within any normal mathematical expectation.

[Dicky Underpants]

Sriram and Rose,

Don't take any of it too seriously! The human mind loves to romanticise  its existence, and stories like this (and religious stories) are much more romantic than believing that the universe/life is nothing more than the result of the properties of matter. 

Hi Len

My best friend's name is Martin. I've just met a beautiful Italian waitress called Martina (I think she studied drama in Italy). I'm wondering whether this is a 'sign' that she should become one of my best "friends" too
(she's about 35 years younger than I am)

[ippy]

ippy,

Not outlandish, especially given the proximity of many law firms to each other around the law courts.

The point though is that you're essaying here a variant of the lottery winner's fallacy: the lottery winner thinks, "Wow, I won against 14 million-to-one odds, that's remarkable" whereas Camelot calculates the odds of someone winning as pretty much one, only they don't care who that winner will be so all they think is, "so what?".

Similarly, had you thought over breakfast, "I wonder what the chances of running into the other secretary are today", the odds would be fairly long. What actually happened though was that you wondered at it only after the event. You could just as well have bumped into your uncle Fred who emigrated to Canada 30 years ago, found a fifty pound note on the street, or spotted a ring in the grass that your wife had dropped the previous summer. Very uncommon things happen all the time - try dealing a deck of cards and calculating the odds against the sequence that you get for example - but the danger is to assume that there was some special design or purpose beforehand when in fact what we tend to do is to retro-fit significance to the event.

Or to put it the other way, when you saw the other secretary you were the lottery winner and the universe was Camelot.

That incidentally is why the OP is so daft: the odds against the sequence of a randomly dealt deck of cards is 52!, yet any kid can deal a set of cards and produce a sequence of the same improbability perfectly within any normal mathematical expe

I omitted to say that the other secretary was best friends with my opponents, do you reckon that you could factor that in and if you did would you need one of those CIA's Cray computers to sort out the odds.

What about my bro teaming up with my wife's family in Oz, whatever next.

The milkman was something I heard on good old BBC Radio 4, so it must be true.

I did hear about a mathematical formula that can be used to recognise random patterns, apparently during WW2 the powers that be placed a grid over a map of London, the registered each V1 strike and this revealed to them a random pattern that fitted the theory they had about the guidance system used by the V1s.

As you probably can see how my comprehensive knowledge of anything mathematical, enabled me to fully understand this now useless info, wot i eard, anyway it was something like that, Radio 4 again.   

ippy

[Leonard James]

Hi Len

My best friend's name is Martin. I've just met a beautiful Italian waitress called Martina (I think she studied drama in Italy). I'm wondering whether this is a 'sign' that she should become one of my best "friends" too
(she's about 35 years younger than I am)

I'm sure it is, Dicky! But tread carefully ... remember this is a Leap Year!

[Dicky Underpants]

I'm sure it is, Dicky! But tread carefully ... remember this is a Leap Year!

Well, I don't think I'll be doing much leaping at my age, much though the spirit might be willing .

By the way, re the reference to "Lallies" on the Christian forum, one of my close friends has the surname "Lally". But one has to remind oneself - as another friend of mine once said - "of all the coincidences which don't happen"

[Leonard James]

Well, I don't think I'll be doing much leaping at my age, much though the spirit might be willing .

Deleted as inappropriate. 

By the way, re the reference to "Lallies" on the Christian forum, one of my close friends has the surname "Lally". But one has to remind oneself - as another friend of mine once said - "of all the coincidences which don't happen"

Indeed! They outnumber the ones that do, enormously! 

[Nearly Sane]

Well, I don't think I'll be doing much leaping at my age, much though the spirit might be willing .

By the way, re the reference to "Lallies" on the Christian forum, one of my close friends has the surname "Lally". But one has to remind oneself - as another friend of mine once said - "of all the coincidences which don't happen"

Just to note one of my close friends also has the surname Lally.

[Aruntraveller]

Just to note one of my close friends also has the surname Lally.

Also to note that Lallies is Polari for legs.

[Nearly Sane]

Also to note that Lallies is Polari for legs.

That's how this all started.

http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=10333.7975

[Aruntraveller]

That's how this all started.

http://www.religionethics.co.uk/index.php?topic=10333.7975

oic. Hadn't read that on t'other thread.

[Nearly Sane]

I was posting elsewhere a video taken in Kelvingrove Art Gallery today where there is an organ recital and the organist played Life on Mars, as I was doing that Pointless was on the TV with a round called songs with Life in the title and as I pressed Send they read out Life on Mars.

[Jack Knave]

I like this story about Jung in this article on it

And the one about the plum pudding below it is intriguing 

🌹

That doesn't sound like synchronicity to me but I would have to look it up to make sure about the elements that constitute synchronicity.

[Jack Knave]

Hi everyone,

Here is an article of today from CNN about 'Synchronicity'.

http://us.cnn.com/2015/12/29/us/odd-coincidences-synchronicity-the-other-side/index.html

******************

Royce Burton was teaching history at a New Jersey university when he decided to tell his class about a frightening experience he had as a young man.

He was a Texas Ranger, patrolling the Rio Grande in 1940, when he got lost in a canyon after dark. He tried to climb out but lost his balance just as he neared the top of a cliff. Suddenly Joe, a fellow Ranger, appeared and hoisted him up to safety with his rifle strap. Burton thanked Joe for saving his life but lost contact with him after both men enlisted in the military during World War II.

Burton was in the middle of sharing his story when an elderly man appeared in the doorway. It was Joe, the fellow Ranger. He had tracked Burton down 25 years later and walked into his classroom at precisely the moment Burton was recounting his rescue.

"I'll have Joe finish the rest of the story," Burton said, without missing a beat as the astonished classroom witnessed the two men's reunion.

You could call Burton's story an amazing coincidence, but James Hollis calls it something else: "synchronicity" -- a meaningful coincidence.

Synchronicity is an odd term, but it's a familiar experience to many people. Someone dreams of a childhood friend he hasn't heard from in years and gets a phone call from that friend the next day. Another person loses his mother and hears her favorite song on the radio on the day of her funeral. Someone facing a terrible personal crisis is the accidental recipient of a book that seems written just for him or her.

"Everybody has stories like that," says Hollis, a Jungian analyst and author who knew Burton and shares his story in the book "Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives." "We live in a haunted world where invisible energies are constantly at work."

Hollis, the Jungian analyst, readily concedes some coincidences exist apart from synchronicity. But he says there are other odd coincidences that go beyond mathematical possibility. You just can't explain them away. He says these strange stories reveal "the spectral presence" of some kind of energy that deliberately infiltrates people's daily lives.

Try to explain why these coincidences occur, and few agree. Even Jung struggled to grasp the implication of synchronicity -- some say he had at least three different definitions of it, and his followers disagreed about its meaning.

Says Williams, the disbeliever: "I don't think anyone has had a bead on the absolute truth."

So what are we left with? Puzzling stories of falling babies, plum pudding and odd coincidences that can shape people's lives -- and even haunt them.

******************

Cheers.

Sriram

I'm not sure that that is synchronicity as Jung defined it just coincidence due to the fact that there are billions of people in the world and the odds are therefore increased for these things.