Coincidence - What are the odds?

Hartski

New Member
Stumbled across this fantastic article about coincidences and the underlying statistical and psychological factors. I'm looking at pattern / number recognition / cypher claims and some relevant debunking examples.

Sorry if posted before or in the wrong area.

My CTer is currently looking at coded number patterns correlating from the date, and the amount of times the resulting numbers then appear in news.
It generally goes something like: 29.3.16 = 48= 12=(3) 29.3.36 = 68 = 14 = (5)

Therefore lots of 3s and 5s in the resulting news.....

I'm looking at probabilities and perceived coincidence.


Though “What are the odds?” is pretty much the catchphrase of coincidences, a coincidence is not just something that was unlikely to happen. The overstuffed crate labeled “coincidences” is packed with an amazing variety of experiences, and yet something more than rarity compels us to group them together. They have a similar texture, a feeling that the fabric of life has rippled. The question is where this feeling comes from, why we notice certain ways the threads of our lives collide, and ignore others.

Some might say it’s just because people don’t understand probability. In their 1989 paper, Methods for Studying Coincidences, the mathematicians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller considered defining a coincidence as “a rare event,” but decided “this includes too much to permit careful study.” Instead, they settled on, “A coincidence is a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.”

From a purely statistical point of view, these events are random, not meaningfully related, and they shouldn’t be that surprising because they happen all the time. “Extremely improbable events are commonplace,” as the statistician David Hand says in his book The Improbability Principle. But humans generally aren’t great at reasoning objectively about probability as they go about their everyday lives.

For one thing, people can be pretty liberal with what they consider coincidences. If you meet someone who shares your birthday, that seems like a fun coincidence, but you might feel the same way if you met someone who shared your mother’s birthday, or your best friend’s. Or if it was the day right before or after yours. So there are several birthdays that person could have that would feel coincidental.

And there are lots of people on this planet—more than 7 billion, in fact. According to the Law of Truly Large Numbers, “with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen,” Diaconis and Mosteller write. If enough people buy tickets, there will be a Powerball winner. To the person who wins, it’s surprising and miraculous, but the fact that someone won doesn’t surprise the rest of us.

Even within the relatively limited sample of your own life, there are all kinds of opportunities for coincidences to happen. When you consider all the people you know and all the places you go and all the places they go, chances are good that you’ll run into someone you know, somewhere, at some point. But it’ll still seem like a coincidence when you do. When something surprising happens, we don’t think about all the times it could have happened, but didn’t. And when we include near-misses as coincidences (you and your friend were in the same place on the same day, just not at the same time), the number of possible coincidences is suddenly way greater.
Content from External Source
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the-true-meaning-of-coincidences/463164/

Any other good statistical examples?
 
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A video by the Exposing Pseudoastronomy podcast examining claims of artificial structures on Mars. It's an outstanding primer on probability. 15 minutes long.

 
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