This doesn’t directly relate to any particular skeptical topic, but it seems to come up somewhat obliquely in reference to many different ideas, so I thought it’d be good to gather a few thoughts into one place.
It’s a common mantra among some people that “There are no coincidences”. What this generally means is that, whenever something seems serendipitous, or appears to have come about by chance in a particularly orderly way, or contains an unlikely pattern reminiscent of something else, or is in any other way quirkily coincidental, then you can bet that there’s something deeper going on, something we’re not seeing but which has caused things to align themselves in such a pattern, something that deliberately made things this way. Anytime something seems oddly out of place, or circumstances are just a little too “convenient”, you should be suspicious, and try to find out what’s really going on under the surface. There are no coincidences.
My position, however, is that if there really were no coincidences, this would be the most phenomenal coincidence imaginable.
Well, think about it. Imagine there are no coincidences. Not a single one. If you ever get talking to someone at a party, and find out that you both have the same birthday, then the two of you must have been brought together for a reason. It’s impossible for anyone to ever just stumble across any one of the millions of other people who were also being born around the same time that they were (or even on the same day on a different year), simply by chance. It could only happen when some underlying force makes it happen.
Of all the thousands of fleeting thoughts that pass through a person’s head each day, nobody could ever find any possible correlation between the vague and unprompted recollection of a person or place they haven’t thought about much in a while, and a phone call or other physical reminder of that same person or place, unless the thought was deliberately put in your head by some force that knew you were about to get that phone call. It could never happen that your idle musings just happened to overlap with reality by chance.
Out of the entire human history of bits of fruit that have gone slightly mouldy, or bits of cheese that have got burnt, not a single splotch of scorched dairy or unripe tomato could ever possibly have naturally curved itself into a pattern that sorta kinda looks like a person’s face a bit. You only need to look at the ubiquity of emoticon smileys to realise how low the human brain’s threshold is for spotting another human face (more on pareidolia soon), but even so, any simple pattern with elements that seem to remind us of facial features, like a couple of dots for eyes and a bit of a curve for a mouth, could never ever have simply come about by a random process of creating splotchy patterns, like burning a bit of cheese or letting mould grow in a tomato. It must have been placed there for some deliberate purpose.
Nobody could ever stand in front of an audience of people who are all hopeful to hear some good news about their dead relatives, and just happen to guess that the name John might mean something to someone. If anyone in a crowd of several hundred people is called John, or knows someone called John, or ever did know someone called John, then there’s no way it could just be a coincidence that a psychic happened to pick that specific name. Clearly whenever someone has such knowledge, it can only be through true spiritual intuition and guidance.
However often millions of people check their bank balances, at no point will any of them ever discover that the number happens to be in some numerical sequence that stands out to us, like £666.66, or £1234.56, or any of the other uncountable ways we could find patterns in such a string of digits. It’s just not plausible that a massive sample of random numbers constantly fluctuating up and down in varying degrees could ever land on any of the possible results that look pleasing to us. It must be portentous of something.
Oh, and those Rorschach inkblot tests? No way is it a coincidence that a bunny with a chainsaw was staring right at me in three consecutive cards. Whatever I’m getting an image of amidst the random visual “noise” of the inkblot, someone must have put it there deliberately.
Coincidence can clearly take an extremely wide range of potential weirdness, and at the mundane end we’re unsurprised to bump into them all the time. I don’t freak out about cosmic synchronicity every time I meet someone who shares my first name; it’s a pretty common first name, so obviously it’s going to happen a fair bit. Less likely is that I’ll find someone who shares my birthday, but 1 in 365 (ish) still isn’t exactly suspicious, and you only have to put 23 people in a room together to make it more likely than not that some of them will share a birthday.
On the other hand, there can be some big coincidences, that really do seem too good to be true, too profound and improbable to be simply down to chance. Lightning is a perfectly natural phenomenon, but if a bolt of it came crashing down through my roof and vaporised me the very moment after I declared “I swear, I was only holding that porn for a friend, and may God strike me down where I stand if I’m lying,” then this might raise even the most skeptical of eyebrows. If such an unlikely coupling of events did coincide, then we might really be persuaded to look for a deeper cause, which could have brought things about more plausibly than plain luck.
But the very fact that you can see a difference between the nature of these two situations – the former of “Hi, I’m Steve,” “Hey, me too”; the latter an impeccably timed lightning bolt – clearly demonstrates that some kind of judgment call has to be made here. We all expect some level of freaky coincidence to just happen, and we have every reason to expect the random noise of any media to produce some unlikely-seeming patterns now and then. Look far enough into the digits of pi, and you might find your telephone number. Flip a coin often enough, and eventually you’ll get ten heads in a row. Nearly every week, someone in the country overcomes millions-to-one odds and wins the lottery. And if any of these is simply a silly example, and your personal preferred coincidence is much less frivolous, then you’re performing some sort of evaluation to determine the weirdness, and to assess just how implausible the “coincidence” explanation is.
If you find conspiracy in every purported coincidence – literally any time two or more artefacts “coincide” – then you’ll never have the time to notice anything else. What’s important is to have enough of a mathematical understanding to distinguish genuine weirdness – where random chance truly becomes less likely to have caused something than deliberate intent – from the times when slightly kooky stuff just happens in an entirely expected way. We all make those judgment calls. It’s just a matter of whether you’re sufficiently informed and equipped to make them well. Actually looking at the odds and figuring out how suspicious to be of something is always better than trusting your gut and going with what feels more likely. Just ask Monty Hall.
Draw a circle, put lots of very small dots within the circle. draw wiggly curved lines of varying length coming from each dot and eventually cover the circle so that it is hard to distinguish the dots. At every point the lines cross is a chance for a coincidence. If none of these lines crossed it would be truly remarkable and yes a coincidence.
Two years ago after my divorce I was on a website…my profile was up for about 3 days max and then I opted out. During the 3 days, I had a young man contact emphasis on young “24” to get to know me better and meet up for drinks…I responded, thanks but no thanks you are not in my age range. Fastforward 2 years, this same young man approached me during my walk home from the bus, he just moved into my neighbor 5 months ago, noticed me on the train and wanted to meet me. Our initial meeting he lied about his age and after I googled him – I found he is the same young man that contacted me through the dating website. Coincidence?
Yes.
I once saw a man at an airport that I thought was “Joe”. i approached him with hand extended only to finally notice it was not “Joe”. I loaded into the L.A. to D.C. flight and a week later, the real “Joe” was next to me. He had moved to Chicago and was on a connecting flight going there–hadn’t seen him since, nor for years before. Coicidence? These things happen to me frequently. I have more……..
– “Coi[n]cidence?”
Yes.
Don’t confuse coincidences with accidents. And mind the trajectories.
On morning, I had a dream about a really close friend whom I parted with due to some circumstantial differences. In the dream he said that he is coming over to my house in 30 seconds….The dream actually woke me up and I kind of felt happy & wierd all day. That same evening I had to drop my kids to a birthday party. My husband decided to take my car and asked me to take his car and get gas in it on my way back. When I left home, my thought was I’ll stop at the gas station after dropping the kids…but since I had some time I stopped by before dropping them. As I’m entering the credit card & pin, my friend (mentioned earlier) is filling up his car at the opposite pump from me and he comes over to talk to me. I was shocked and so was he. We had a cordial talk and then we left. While I was driving I remembered my dream and thought that was wierd. There is more to this but….Coincidence?
Yep.
Whether or not you believe in coincidences is first and foremost related to whether you have education or not. A number of studies in sociology and anthropology shows that the higher education a certain society has the greater understanding its inhabitants have for the concept of coincidences. Those who have had the opportunity to study mathematics and in particular statistics and probability theory have the greatest understanding for coincidences. On the other hand… in societies where they lack basic education (especially in the Third World) people will tend to see all kinds of patterns where there are none and to attribute meaning to unrelated events or phenomena, i.e “since I thought of my mom and mom called me five seconds later, that must MEAN something”.
The one with education and knowledge would wonder – how often do this person think of his/her mom… and how often does mom call? When you know these two parameters then it is really simple to calculate how often it will happen that this person thinks of his/her mom and that mom calls right after having that thought. Then you have the probability for this event to take place.
The one without education will think that there is some invisible hand/god-like character/conspiracy or similar “greater meaning” that made mom call right after having this thought.
Unfortunately there are also a lot of people living in the Western World who got the chance to go to good schools who still don’t understand the concept of coincidences. And the reason why they don’t understand is because they were not interested enough in learning the basic things in school. Hence, they think and reason like many do in the third world, which is truly sad…
[…] about this? I’m doing some motivated thinking here, as if I needed to defend the idea that coincidences happen without there being some sort of supernatural, paranormal force behind it […]
Of course their is no underlying meaning to coincidence. There are so many people, animals, objects etc that all interact with one another, of course coincidence will occur.
As the initial article pointed out, if there were no coincidences, then this would truly be the ultimate coincidence.
Most coincidence are not as improbable as first thought.
Imagine you were after a new wristwatch. You are feeling rich, so you think maybe I’ll get an antique watch. When you find a watch you like the look of, you discover it bears the same initials on the back as your own. You would probably be inclined to think that this was truly remarkable (which it would be) and monumentally improbable (which it wouldn’t be)
You can roughly calculate the probability.
Date of watch and where manufacturing took place and first sale if watch has any documentation.
Then you need to know amount of people in the area at the time of first sale who were old enough and rich enough to purchase a watch and had the same initials as yourself.
With these figures you could roughly calculate the chances of it bearing your initials. Obviously there are other factors to consider which could also be calculated.
But the figure arrived at would probably be hundreds to one rather than the hundreds of thousands to one that was first thought.
Anyone who tries to assign deeper meaning to coincidence has lost the plot and is probably religious. They seem to grasp at anything they can get there hands to prove their fairytales.
Love and peas
I passed on the street a guy who lets just say was very special to me, his name was john but i allways call him mark john, and the numbers 444 keep repeating themselves to me(have for years) I went to public library after my run in with him, picked a book to read and was searching for a stool to sit on to read finally i found a stool at the end of the walkway to sit, as soon as i sat down my eyes went directly to this book said 444 big letters i thought no-way then looked to left of book said MARK and book to right said JOHN!! what are the odds of that. what does it mean???