Once an accident, twice a coincidence, or is it just stuff happening?

27 August 2013

Chance encounters, strokes of luck, the turn of a friendly card… Are these sorts of happenings, like say bumping into someone you haven’t seen, or heard of, in a decade in a country you’re visiting for the first time, really the long shots they seem to be?

An analysis then of chance, probability, and coincidence, such that it actually is:

The simple question might be “why do such unlikely coincidences occur in our lives?” But the real question is how to define the unlikely. You know that a situation is uncommon just from experience. But even the concept of “uncommon” assumes that like events in the category are common. How do we identify the other events to which we can compare this coincidence? If you can identify other events as likely, then you can calculate the mathematical probability of this particular event as exceptional.

Originally published Tuesday 27 August 2013, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.