How Unlikely Are Coincidences?

Abbey Laine — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:52:09 +0000

We think that we have an intuitive understanding of what kind of event is likely to happen naturally and which events might have some kind of supernatural explanation. A mathematician named J.E. Littlewood formulated a way of connecting unusual events with probability. It’s called Littlewood’s Law, and it states that we can expect to witness an event that we would normally call a miracle about once a month.

In other words, we witness untold thousands of events during our daily lives and we single out those that we think could not have happened as a matter of course. There is another way of looking at this question. It’s called the Law Of Truly Large Numbers and it says that we can expect to see lots of unusual events if we are a witness to a large enough number of events. So if you have not seen an unusual event lately, it is because you are locked into a routine that exposes you to a narrow spectrum of events.

We have already looked at the Jeane Dixon Effect which refers to the fact that if someone who promotes his or her self as a psychic makes a large number of predictions, then some of them are bound to come true.

Here is a video on probability:

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How Unlikely Are Coincidences?