Article Are coincidences real?

[geordief]

Salmon Rushdie was interviewed by Anderson Cooper last night and said he had a very similar (similar to what transpired)dream a few days before his attack which almost put him off attending the event where he was knifed almost to death. (I think he said he discussed it with his wife but decided it was "just a dream")

Hope your radiation therapy goes well for you zinj.

[Zinjanthropos]

Salmon Rushdie was interviewed by Anderson Cooper last night and said he had a very similar (similar to what transpired)dream a few days before his attack which almost put him off attending the event where he was knifed almost to death. (I think he said he discussed it with his wife but decided it was "just a dream")

Hope your radiation therapy goes well for you zinj.

I find Rushdie’s surname quite coincidental for a guy who suffered an assassination attempt.

Thanks geo. I had my radiation during Valentines week in February. Got through it ok. Speaking of coincidences, not sure if this is one. I haven’t talked to you in a long time and today you mentioned my rad treatment, the same day I received my 2nd hormone injection. Weird. Coincidence?

While I’m at it, the same day I finished radiation therapy I asked if I could ring the bell, a custom for patients who finished their sessions. Tech told me that the bell wasn’t working properly because someone had somehow managed to damage it to the point where it didn’t sound much like a bell. I asked if I could try anyway and they said go ahead. I gave the cord a whiplike pull and the bell sounded loud and crisp like normal. So sharp that other techs and nurses came over to have a look themselves. Somehow my pull had fixed the problem. Coincidence?

Coincidences seem to have followed me around my whole life.

[Zinjanthropos]

Couple days ago took my wife to hospital. Her retina detached in June and again 6 weeks later, this time requiring OR surgery. So we’re back for a checkup and I’m allowed to go in with her while doctor examines.

It was early morning and I thought to myself, perhaps I should switch my phone from audible chime to vibe so as not to disturb the doctor. My thought was someone might call or text. I do the switch and it wasn’t more than 15 secs later that someone texted me. It was my brother asking me how my wife was doing. He had no idea we were in the examination room at that moment, he didn’t even know she had the appt that day.

I’ve heard of identical twins being somewhat on the same wavelength. When something is happening to one the other seems to know. Could that have happened here or is it just coincidence? Did I switch notification mode because I somehow knew someone was typing a text message to me at that moment?

[Magical Realist]

Coincidences are real and meant to be imo. When I first moved to Portland OR in 1998, I decided to look up an old boss and his wife I used to work for in the early 80's. So I got on my webtv and found a phone number connected to him. I called the number and got ahold of both of them. But after a few minutes of catching up, Shirley asked me why I called that number. I told her I had just run across it after a search online, and she told me it is the phone number of one of the houses my boss rents out. By sheer coincidence, they were at that house doing some cleaning up! I was as aghast as she was! Truly an impressive synchronistic occurrence!

[C C]

[...] I’ve heard of identical twins being somewhat on the same wavelength. When something is happening to one the other seems to know. Could that have happened here or is it just coincidence? Did I switch notification mode because I somehow knew someone was typing a text message to me at that moment?

[...] I told her I had just run across it after a search online, and she told me it is the phone number of one of the houses my boss rents out. By sheer coincidence, they were at that house doing some cleaning up! I was as aghast as she was! Truly an impressive synchronistic occurrence!

David Hand: This law is part of what I have called ‘the improbability principle’. The principle states that extremely improbable occurrences are, in spite of the odds against them, actually quite common. It says we should expect to see events that we might regard as incredibly unlikely – such as someone winning the lottery. The improbability principle consists of five elements, of which the law of truly large numbers is just one.

But I or anyone else wouldn't consider it amazing that someone wins the lottery. What would fit that classification is if I won it. This jibes with one of the items in the other article further down:

That’s not the way the average person would frame that question [...] When someone asks “What are the odds?” odds are they aren’t asking, “What are the odds that a coincidence of this nature would have happened to anyone in the room?” but something more like, “What are the odds that this specific thing would happen to me, here and now?” And with anything more complicated than a birthday match, that becomes almost impossible to calculate.

While an "improbability principle" seems to imply that randomly convergent events that could contingently be interpreted as "meaningful" are actually statisically common, it may require individuals with certain thought orientations, personality traits, and behavioral tendencies to either notice them or to do something that increases the likelihood of uncovering them. As another section of the article below impinges upon. Accordingly, most of them happen without our being aware them, which is why we underestimate the number or rate of them, that the "improbability principle" seems to assert is high (i.e. tending toward a norm rather than extraordinary).

“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.”

But having such preloaded "receptivity" doesn't address the coincidences that we directly generate with our spur of the moment decisions and actions (like MR's account), minus such facilitating and cognitively biased personality traits being involved or needed.
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Coincidences and the Meaning of Life
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...es/463164/

EXCERPTS: 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.

[...] To demonstrate how common unlikely seeming events can be, mathematicians like to trot out what is called the birthday problem. The question is how many people need to be in a room before there’s a 50/50 chance that two of them will share the same birthday. The answer is 23.

“Oh, those guys and their birthdays really get me mad,” says Bernard Beitman, a psychiatrist and visiting professor at the University of Virginia, and author of the forthcoming book Connecting With Coincidence. That’s not the way the average person would frame that question, he says. When someone asks “What are the odds?” odds are they aren’t asking, “What are the odds that a coincidence of this nature would have happened to anyone in the room?” but something more like, “What are the odds that this specific thing would happen to me, here and now?” And with anything more complicated than a birthday match, that becomes almost impossible to calculate.

[...] “A coincidence itself is in the eye of the beholder,” says David Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge. If a rare event happens in a forest and no one notices and no one cares, it’s not really a coincidence.

I told Spiegelhalter my Cedar Point story on the phone—I couldn’t help it. He collects coincidences, see.

[...] He says he’d categorize mine as “finding a link with someone you meet.” “But it’s a very different sort of connection,” he says, “not like having lived in the same house or something like that. And it’s a very strong one, it’s not just like you were both at the theme park. I love that. And you remember it after all this time.”

And the craziest thing is not that I found someone’s money and then that I was in a room with him a year later, but that I found out about it at all. What if he hadn’t brought it up? Or “you might not have heard him if you’d been somewhere slightly away,” Spiegelhalter says. “And yet the coincidence would have been there. You would have been six feet away from someone who lost their money. The coincidence in a sense would have physically occurred. It was only because you were listening that you noticed it. And so that’s why the amazing thing is not that these things occur, it’s that we notice them.”

“This is my big theory about coincidences,” he continues, “that’s why they happen to certain kinds of people.”

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.”

[...] Beitman, like Spiegelhalter, is interested in sorting and labeling different kinds of coincidences, to develop categories “like an early botanist,” he says, though his categories are more expansive and include not only things that happen in the world but people’s thoughts and feelings as well. In our conversation, he divides coincidences into three broad categories—environment-environment interactions, mind-environment interactions, and mind-mind interactions.

[...] Environment-environment are the most obvious, and easiest to understand. These coincidences are objectively observable. Something, or a series of things, happens in the physical world. You’re at a gin joint in Morocco and your long-lost love from Paris shows up. I found some money and a year later I met the person who lost it.

[...] Mind-environment coincidences are premonition-esque—you’re thinking of a friend and then they call you, for example. But unless you happen to write down “I am thinking of so-and-so [timestamp]” before the call happens, these are cool for the person they happen to, but not really measurable. “We banned premonitions from our site,” Spiegelhalter says. “Because, where’s the proof? Anybody could say anything.”

[...] And then the final category, mind-mind, of course, is straight-up mystical. One example of this is “simulpathity,” a term Beitman coined to describe feeling the pain or emotion of someone else at a distance. His interest in this particular type of coincidence is deeply personal.

[...] When someone sees a pattern in a coincidence, “there’s no way I can say ‘Yes, that was definitely a chance event,’ or ‘There was an actual causal mechanism for it,’ because I’d have to know the world perfectly to be able to say that,” Osman says.

Instead what we do is weigh whether it seems likelier that the event was caused by chance, or by something else. If chance is the winner, we dismiss it. If not, we’ve got a new hypothesis about how the world works.

[...] we have psychology to explain how and why we notice coincidences, and why we want to make meaning from them, and we have probability to explain why they seem to happen so often. But to explain why any individual coincidence happened involves a snarl of threads, of decisions and circumstances and chains of events that, even if one could untangle it, wouldn’t tell you anything about any other coincidence.

[Magical Realist]

we have psychology to explain how and why we notice coincidences, and why we want to make meaning from them

In my experience extraordinary coincidences tend to pop up when I'm NOT looking for them. It's when it's the farthest thing from my mind and I'm engaged in just the everyday "flow" mode of half-conscious busyness that they make their appearance. And usually even after noticing it I have no explanation as to WHY it occurred. I was not particularly helped by it. It didn't relay some universal truth to me. It's like its mere unlikely happening was the whole point of it. A change of consciousness from one state to another, resulting in a wakeful sense of surprising affirmation of some overall harmonizing force in my life.

[Syne]

Of course coincidences are real. But they are rarely meaningful, aside from the purely subjective injection of personal meaning.

[Zinjanthropos]

Intend to think coincidence only if I’ve had a personal thought or chat with someone else then have an event happen that’s related to either.

Many years ago my best friend and our wives were driving up a country road. My friend and I were talking about a former soccer coach (Nigel) we had and his drinking exploits. We turn and start up another road and notice a guy staggering along the roadside. Long story short, it’s Nigel who apparently was so drunk the night before, was dumped at side of road where he slept the night. That one I’ll always remember. Ya, we gave him a lift.

[Magical Realist]

Sometimes there's such a thing as bad synchronicity. That's when some ass is tailgaiting you on the freeway. You slow down to piss them off. When you exit they exit too. You drive down the avenue and they are still there. And when you pull into the doctor's office for your appt guess what? They do too! That's when you get out of your car as fast as you can to avoid making eye contact, the universe just having a good laugh!

[Magical Realist]

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