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How do you guys explain really bizarre cases of synchronicity?

bluesjnr said:
Unfortunately that is what is going on - mere coincidence. That and a helping of confirmation bias.
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You beat me to it.

Coincidence + Confirmation Bias = Synchronicity

Couldn't be simpler.
 
Rrose Selavy said:
A striking coincidence I find that happens quite often is when I read a word and at the exact same time I read it the word is spoken on TV.

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My wife does this constantly. Her response is "Why does this always happen to me?" She doesn't quite seem satisfied that's it's a common phenomena and that she just makes a point of noticing every time it happens.
 
Marshmallow, how do you determine when a coincidence is a "significant coincidence"?

How do you calculate that the odds against certain events you've experienced were a billion to one?

Did you actually gather the data you needed to make such a calculation? (Or for that matter, did you even consider what such evidence would be?) If not, you're committing the confirmation bias.

I suggest you read this fine essay on coincidence (or the law of truly large numbers):

http://www.skepdic.com/lawofnumbers.html
 
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Sledge said:
I think that has to be the response to every example given. The classic example is you answer a ringing phone only to find it's the person you were just thinking of on the other end. Amazing, right? Maybe, until you think about how many times you think about someone and they don't call, and how many times you pick up the phone and it isn't the person you were just thinking about.
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Had something like that happen once as a kid. I dialed a friend of mine, the phone didn't ring, and suddenly Kevin's voice was on the line sounding out my phone number as he pushed the buttons. He had picked up his phone to call me after it connected, but before it rang. Wild.
 
Sledge said:
I think that has to be the response to every example given. The classic example is you answer a ringing phone only to find it's the person you were just thinking of on the other end. Amazing, right? Maybe, until you think about how many times you think about someone and they don't call, and how many times you pick up the phone and it isn't the person you were just thinking about.
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It's worse when it's a creditor at the other end. :(


M.
 
Brian Dunning's Here be Dragons has a nice portion on this in which he explains how the Law of Large Numbers means such coincidences have to occur. You can find Dragons on YouTube.
 
DemonDawg said:
My wife does this constantly. Her response is "Why does this always happen to me?" She doesn't quite seem satisfied that's it's a common phenomena and that she just makes a point of noticing every time it happens.
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Hmmm.
My name for it is "bi -lingual chance" or maybe "word echo/mirroring"
And it's not usually a word that you might think that could more likely "overlap" being topically in the news. It's not often necessarily a newspaper I'm reading it from or news prog I'm hearing it from..


Talking of odds, it's 14 million to one to win ouright the UK National Lottery, 80 million to 1 for the US Lottery but someone occasionally does.
Not the same person each time of course....and not promising odds for a racehorse bet.
 
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My husband and I met on an internet forum, we lived on literally the opposite sides of the world in countries neither one of us had an intention to visit. I didn't talk to random individuals on the internet outside of posting, we just did that time.

If I think of the odds of us meeting, then staying together in a very long distance relationship for about 3 years, then me emigrating and marrying him and us remaining happily married, I think I'd stand more chance of growing a second nose. But it's still just a coincidence. A very happy one, but a coincidence nonetheless.

Since I attribute this hugely improbably event to coincidence, it'd take something hugely dramatic before I started thinking supernatural thoughts.
 
Thinking about it, I rang a friend on Friday evening JUST AS THEY WERE ABOUT TO TEXT MESSAGE ME!!! :eek: Evidence of a higher power, or evidence of us both realising at the same time that my friend was supposed to have let me know where we were going for a meal on Saturday night? Clearly, mystical forces were at work.
 
Marshmallow said:
There are plenty of examples of meaningful coincidences occurring, and I have experienced them myself. In one case, even a highly skeptical friend had to admit that there was probably something paranormal going on.....
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Did they have to admit it, or did they not have a possible alternate explanation ?

What is a coincidence when it's not a coincidence ?
 
Another approach to the question. . .

Marshmallow said:
How do you guys explain really bizarre cases of synchronicity?
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This is pretty much an example of begging the question. That is, if you're trying to argue that really improbable coincidences are necessarily examples of synchronicity, and you simply call them "cases of synchronicity" you're simply begging the question.
 
There is probably something real about synchronicity. Perhaps it has to do with parallel dimensions.

It would not supprise anyone here to say I favor Jung over Freud.
 
Sledge said:
I think that has to be the response to every example given. The classic example is you answer a ringing phone only to find it's the person you were just thinking of on the other end. Amazing, right? Maybe, until you think about how many times you think about someone and they don't call, and how many times you pick up the phone and it isn't the person you were just thinking about.
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Exactly, or the mother who was worried something happened to her child on the night that the child had something bad happen to them.. when said mother probably got equally worried every single night that their child was out later than expected. I know my own mother would feel this way virtually all the time that I was late.

But the one time they are right, suddenly it's proof.
 
A lotto win is generally between 6 and 10 consecutive coincidences. There is not much beyond the probable.
 
Marshmallow said:
There are plenty of examples of meaningful coincidences occurring, and I have experienced them myself. In one case, even a highly skeptical friend had to admit that there was probably something paranormal going on.

Do a quick web search and you'll see mountains of anecdotal evidence (I'm a newbie, so I can't post links yet). Some things are too timely and specific for me to dismiss as mere coincidence, including things I've experienced myself. How do you rationalize things that are so far outside of the laws of probability?

Note: I admit that many of these occurrences are, in fact, mere coincidences, but nowhere near all of them.
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The thing is that you would expect remarkable coincidences to crop up fairly regularly. There are just so many events everyday that there are hundreds of thousands of millions to one events happening each and every day. Given how memorable these are it is unsuprising that they seem to happen a lot.


Look at this also, if I shuffle a deck of cards a deal all of them out the odds against that particular order of cards is something like 1 in 1061. This is phenominaly unlikely, but of course the cards have to be in some order and any other order is equaly unlikely. Then you get that almost every single one of those options has some arangement of cards that has some pattern to it, and you see a lot of what happens.
 
Mojo said:
What about all the occasions when coincidences don't happen? For example, I just picked up my copy of Innumeracy to find the stuff about coincidences, and it didn't fall open at just the right page.
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Hey just the other day, I was walking down the street and didn't run into someone I haven't seen since high school. What are the odds of that!
 
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