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Jan 3, 2019 · Certain people are more coincidence-prone than others, but all of us can learn how to cultivate them. “The more you notice the events, the more they happen,” says mathematician David Hand. Want the world to feel like a more magical place? Try these strategies: 1. Pay attention. Coincidences happen to people who are mindful and notice things.
- Truly Large Numbers
- Beware The Black Swan
- When Laws Come Together
- It’S A Lottery
The second law of the principle, the law of truly large numbers, says that even an outcome which has a tiny chance of occurring becomes almost certain if you give it enough opportunities. For example, if you generated a random sequence of eight digits, you’d be amazed if they just happened to form your birth date. But if you look through the infini...
A fourth law, the law of the probability lever, tells us that if we slightly change the circumstances or assumptions we can dramatically change the probabilities. A classic example of this is the so-called ‘black swan’ phenomenon in the financial sector, where dramatic market crashes seem to occur much more frequently than they should. But this is ...
Last year, I was invited to give a talk about the improbability principle in Bournemouth, a town I’d lived in when I was a child. By coincidence, the venue was in Coronation Avenue, a road I’d walked along every weekday for some years, on my way from my home to my junior school. I hadn’t been back to Bournemouth since I was a child, and it seemed a...
Professor Hand explains why we overestimate our chances of winning the lottery – and underestimate the chances of being struck by lightning Generally, people don’t have a very good feeling for very small probabilities. My guess is that, say, one in one thousand is sufficiently small that people will regard it as equivalent to one in a million. Perh...
Can coincidences be explained by science? - BBC Science Focus Magazine.
Aug 22, 2018 · The sceptic (often psychologists, statisticians) is focused on characterising coincidences as the result of merely chance occurrences out in the world, that are then, through irrational...
Dec 29, 2015 · Probability ensures that in a random selection of 23 people, he says, there is a 50% chance that at least two of those people celebrate the same birth date.
Nov 4, 2016 · Mazur argues that most of the coincidences we experience -- like stumbling into a close friend halfway around the world, meeting someone with the same birthday, or even dreaming of an event before it happens -- can be explained by simple mathematics.
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Oct 1, 2008 · Wrong. You had a one in three chance to start, but now that Monty has shown you one of the losing doors, you have a two-thirds chance of winning by switching. Here is why. There are three...
