Anthony Hopkins' amazing coincidence

[Magical Realist]

"In 1974, Hopkins starred in a film called 'The Girl from Petrovka,' based on the book by George Feifer. Not long after signing on to the film, Hopkins went to London to try to track down a copy of the book. After canvasing several bookshops, however, he couldn't find one. Frustrated and defeated, Hopkins entered the Leicester Square stop to board a train home when all of a sudden he spotted a copy of 'The Girl from Petrovka' that appeared to have been discarded on a nearby bench. Naturally he swiped it, and if the story ended there it'd be a pretty funny coincidence.

But the story doesn't end there. Two years later while filming in Vienna, author George Feifer visited the set. During a conversation with Hopkins, Feifer mentioned that he didn't even have a copy of his own book -- that he'd lent his last one (complete with his own annotations) to a friend who had lost it somewhere in London. Hopkins, puzzled, then fetched his copy, which also had notes in the margins. When he showed it to Feifer, the author confirmed that, amazingly, it was the same book."--https://www.moviefone.com/2011/01/28/ant...incidence/

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http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/01/profe..._selectall

"Back in 2000, Eugenia Zuroski, then studying to earn her M.A./Ph.D. at Brown University, purchased a copy of Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century by Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace. She wrote her name and the year in the upper-right-hand corner of the title page, but somewhere over the decade that followed, Zuroski, who is now an associate professor of English at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, lost track of her copy. “I know I moved it with me from Providence to Haverford, Pennsylvania, then to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and then up here to Hamilton,” Zuroski told Select All. “But four or five years ago I must have lent it to a student and it just didn’t come back. It happens.”

This December, she decided it was “silly” that she didn’t have her own copy of Consuming Subjects, given that she frequently recommends it to her students, “which is why I lent it out to begin with.” She ordered “the cheapest used copy available” from Amazon and thought nothing else of it. When the book arrived — shipped via Thriftbooks.com in St. Louis — Zuroski “wondered whether it would feel weird to read someone else’s copy of this book, with someone else’s underlining and marginalia.” But upon opening the cover, she realized she wouldn’t need to worry. Weirdly, the copy she purchased was the book she lost all those years back.

“I turned the book over and noticed that the original price sticker on the back looked an awful lot like the Brown Bookstore label on my copy. Then I opened it to the title page and saw my handwriting: ‘Eugenia Zuroski / March 2000,’” Zuroski says. “My heart actually started racing.” Zuroski says she doesn’t remember whom she loaned the book to and she now keeps better track of which students are borrowing her texts.

As for what the book is, you know, actually about, Zuroski says Consuming Subjects is very apropos for her recent book reunion. “It’s in part about how women’s shopping practices since the 18th century encourage us to identify with the objects we purchase.” "

[C C]

One can treat our depicted network of causes and effects as if it's something prior in rank to probability or relationships in general. Or treat the former as just special instances of correlation that are vastly more regularly occurring than others (and thus easily lending themselves to that interpretation of their being cases of causation).

Coincidences can thus be dismissed as having any significance in systems that endorse causality as fundamental. But in the view of there being nothing but correlations (with some of those relationships being more special and frequent than others), coincidences could be conceived as just less functionally important to us rather than lacking any significance whatsoever. (Even in that perspective, however, it seems unlikely that all coincidences could receive such mitigated non-trivial status.)

Judea Pearl: [...] All philosophers, "says [Bertrand] Russell," imagine that causation is one of the fundamental axioms of science, yet oddly enough, in advanced sciences, the word 'cause' never occurs ... The law of causality, I believe, is a relic of bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm..." [...] "Because causality is different," Lord Russell would argue, "It could not possibly be an abbreviation, because the laws of physics are all symmetrical, going both ways, while causal relations are uni-directional, going from cause to effect."

[...] Fortunately, very few physicists paid attention to Russell's enigma. They continued to write equations in the office and talk cause-effect [...] with astonishing success, they smashed the atom, invented the transistor, and the laser. The same is true for engineering. But in another arena the tension could not go unnoticed, because in that arena the demand for distinguishing causal from other relationships was very explicit. This arena is statistics.

[...] Galton's discovery dazzled one of his students, Karl Pearson, now considered the founder of modern statistics. Pearson was 30 years old at the time, an accomplished physicist and philosopher about to turn lawyer, and this is how he describes, 45 years later, his initial reaction to Galton's discovery:

"I felt like a buccaneer of Drake's days -... I interpreted that sentence of Galton to mean that there was a category broader than causation, namely correlation, of which causation was only the limit, and that this new conception of correlation brought psychology, anthropology, medicine, and sociology in large parts into the field of mathematical treatment."

[...] 1911 saw the publication of the third edition of his book "The Grammar of Science". It contained a new chapter titled "Contingency and correlation - the insufficiency of causation," and this is what Pearson says in that chapter: "Beyond such discarded fundamentals as 'matter' and 'force' lies still another fetish amidst the inscrutable arcana of modern science, namely, the category of cause and effect."

Thus, Pearson categorically denies the need for an independent concept of causal relation beyond correlation. He held this view throughout his life and, accordingly, did not mention causation in ANY of his technical papers. His crusade against animistic concepts such as "will" and "force" was so fierce and his rejection of determinism so absolute that he EXTERMINATED causation from statistics before it had a chance to take root.

It took another 25 years and another strong-willed person, Sir Ronald Fisher, for statisticians to formulate the randomized experiment - the only scientifically proven method of testing causal relations from data, and which is, to this day, the one and only causal concept permitted in mainstream statistics. --The Art and Science of Causal Effect (Part 1b)