Wordle synchronicities

[Magical Realist]

https://www.google.com/search?q=wordle+s...vxBSU,st:0

https://medium.com/@markperry544/synchro...4ec402b12f

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style...23491.html

[C C]

With so many people playing today's Wordle, it would be might remarkable probability-wise if somebody, somewhere, did not encounter a correlation to circumstances in their life. The larger the group participating, the more opportunities for items in the overall set of typical (as well as rare) human experiences to play out, and thereby at least one (if not more) matching with the Wordle answer.

Very faintly rubs shoulders with the generality of daily horoscopes, where certain individuals' precise situations may find a slot in the broad and imprecise (vague) prediction for _X_ Zodiac sign, especially if there is positive motivation on their part to either find or force a fit.

[Magical Realist]

Synchronicities have a penchant for alignments of words with outer events. Everyday now (it happens more than it used to)
some word I am reading online and sometimes even a whole phrase gets spoken at the same time by the TV. I'd chalk it up to coincidence were it not so frequent. And one time a friend of mine was reading a letter I had written him. At one point in the letter I said I was listening "to Beethoven's seventh, second movement ofcourse." At that exact moment the radio he was listening to began playing the second movement of Beethoven's seventh! There's just something whimsically magical about words.

[C C]

Synchronicities have a penchant for alignments of words with outer events. Everyday now (it happens more than it used to)
some word I am reading online and sometimes even a whole phrase gets spoken at the same time by the TV. I'd chalk it up to coincidence were it not so frequent. And one time a friend of mine was reading a letter I had written him. At one point in the letter I said I was listening "to Beethoven's seventh, second movement ofcourse." At that exact moment the radio he was listening began playing the second movement of Beethoven's seventh! There's just something whimsically magical about words.

I experienced a few over the past week. It's when you go several weeks or even months without anything happening, and then suddenly there's a flurry of them occurring in a short span, that it gets really freaky. When their occurrence is distributed out in a kind of semi-uniform way without the sudden spasms and dry-spells, then it "seems" easier to chalk-up to probability.

No doubt statisticians, however, would point-out something or other. Like how, if you flip a coin enough times, long streaks will arise where it's nothing but heads or tails straight in row -- interrupted by long periods where the outcomes are judged "normal". And thereby we shouldn't be surprised by "big-chunk" patterns like that when it comes to coincidences.

But it would be odd that coincidences should be an objectively distinct enough "entity" -- rather than a subjective, quirky propensity of cognition -- to be judged as conforming to the measurable chance expectations of a concrete object's behavior.
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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...e-the-odds

Statisticians who study coincidences generally believe that “ordinary” people do not know how to judge probability. Statisticians often use the birthday problem to illustrate their point: “How many people need to be in a room to have a 50% probability that any two of them will have the same birthday?” Most people guess numbers that are much too high. The answer is 23.

The first common mistake made by “ordinary” people is to misunderstand the question. We think the question is: “How many people need to be in a room for two of them to have the same birthday, like my birthday.” We assume that the birthday to be matched has already been selected.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...es/463164/

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...

[...] Beitman in his research has found that certain personality traits are linked to experiencing more coincidences—people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual, people who are self-referential (or likely to relate information from the external world back to themselves), and people who are high in meaning-seeking are all coincidence-prone. People are also likely to see coincidences when they are extremely sad, angry, or anxious.

“Coincidences never happen to me at all, because I never notice anything,” Spiegelhalter says. “I never talk to anybody on trains. If I’m with a stranger, I don’t try to find a connection with them, because I’m English.”

Beitman, on the other hand, says, “My life is littered with coincidences.” He tells me a story of how he lost his dog when he was 8 or 9 years old. He went to the police station to ask if they had seen it; they hadn’t. Then, “I was crying a lot and took the wrong way home, and there was the dog … I got into [studying coincidences] just because, hey, look Bernie, what’s going on here?”

[...] For Beitman, probability is not enough when it comes to studying coincidences. Because statistics can describe what happens, but can’t explain it any further than chance. “I know there’s something more going on than we pay attention to,” he says. “Random is not enough of an explanation for me.”

Random wasn’t enough for the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung either...

[...] But, though it makes them no less magical, life’s motifs are created not by the world around us, but by humans, by our attention.

This is an effect that the Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky calls “the frequency illusion,” and it’s not the same as a premonition. It’s just that once you’ve noticed something, your brain is primed to notice it again the next time you encounter it. A word or a concept you’ve just learned feels relevant to you—you may have seen it hundreds of times before and just never noticed. But now that you’re paying attention, it’s more likely to pop out at you the next time it whizzes by...

[Magical Realist]

Sometimes a seeming coincidence has more of a premonition feel to it than a synchronicity. Like the time I was driving and Shakespeare suddenly popped into my head. Within about 2 or 3 seconds the radio started talking about Shakespeare. Another time I was watching the animated series The Oddballs on Cartoon Network. I suddenly began thinking about the term "gravy train" and pondered how such a phrase had come about. In about 5 minutes the cartoon I was watching started talking about gravy train over and over! I don't know the time limit for viewing two events as occurring at the same time or after each other, but in either case something freaky was definitely goin on.