How do you guys explain really bizarre cases of synchronicity?

[Lanzy]

Wow, just got another one three minutes ago, My wife got a bill from the vet for an emergency visit she made with our Jack Russell Blaze. It wasn't her as I had already paid the bill. It was another woman with her exact name, with the same breed of dog, with the name Blaze, living on the same road we do, that took her dog in for an emergency the same week. The vet admin had typed the address wrong, instead of 1057 it should have been 1507.

The big difference? her Blaze weighs 17 lbs, ours weighs 42 lbs.

 

[shandyjan]

I often say when someone calls 'heck I was just thinking of ringing you'. Maybe they think its strange, but I know its a white lie because I actually should have rung earlier or the day before or something, but forgot.

 

[fromdownunder]

I might as well tell my tale here (loosely repeated here from the first thread I ever started on this Forum). This event happened back in the early nineties. My daughter and I started talking about a movie one evening, which we had both seen a number of years earlier. We could remember the plot, but not the name. It started to become annoying.

So I grabbed a movie guide, not Leonard Maltin's, another one, sitting next to me, (no coinicidence there - it is always on a coffee table sitting next to me), and said I will find it. I closed my eyes, opened the book, pointed, and then looked at where I had pointed. Yep, you have got it - it was the movie we were both thinking and talking about.

Odds of around 15,000 to 1, so not too bad for a first try. Never been able to repeat it since though, although I have never fogotten the name of the movie since then (and neither has she - we still occasionally joke about my "paranormal" event) - One Night Stand, set in the Sydney Opera House with a group of teenagers the night an Atomic War starts.

Norm

 

[Starthinker]

Not quite sure what it actually IS that you did there.



I have to say that many of those anecdotes do not have any proof that they happened, so I could explain the coincidence as being made up.

Exactly, I made it all up.

 

[quarky]

..and do they differ from a married sperm?

I assume any sperm that are married would be gay, and not interested in the whole egg deal.

 

[quarky]

With 6 billion plus people, its safe to say that something really weird happens to one person everyday.
It would be extra weird if it kept happening to the same person, though if there were 6 billion plus Earths like ours, it seems less unlikely.

Everything feels bizarely unlikely to me; every mundane occurrence. The sychronicity stuff is constant; we notice it when it gets 'showy', much like we notice numbers like 2000, and ignore 487.3

Like another poster, I've had several experiences of a stranger coming up to me and greeting me like we were close frriends...because I look so much like this other guy.
I got to thinking that that would be an easy and somewhat fun prank to play on the public. Such pranksters could explain lots of too coincidental phenomena.

My personal favorite was when walking down a street in a town, past a phone booth with phone ringing. I picked it up on a whim, and it was for me. The guy had dialed the wrong number.

 

[Brian-M]

Now if you're asking what are the odds that a single sperm specified in advance is the one that "gets in" and becomes part of the zygote, you can calculate that by the number of sperm.

You also need to factor in the probability of fertilization occurring at all, which is about 25% during ovulation, so...

(1/180,000,000 sperm) * 0.25 = 0.00000000138888889

Or about 1 in 720 million of a pre-specified sperm achieving fertilization.

Disclaimer: Numbers used were gathered from searching the internet, and may not be accurate.

 

[quarky]

You also need to factor in the probability of fertilization occurring at all, which is about 25% during ovulation, so...

(1/180,000,000 sperm) * 0.25 = 0.00000000138888889

Or about 1 in 720 million of a pre-specified sperm achieving fertilization.

Disclaimer: Numbers used were gathered from searching the internet, and may not be accurate.

Compared to an average man's total life's sperm output, the odds of a pre-ordained sperm finding an egg become monumentally poor.

 

[MRC_Hans]

I've seen several different versions of this legend with different items in the list of strange coincidences that supposedly occurred involving the car. None have ever included any traceable attribution.

Typical legend material. And, since few people can remember the details, even the different lists of coincidences are seen as a confirmation.

And yet, there somehow was a trained ballistics expert present who was able to confirm that it was, in fact, the same bullet--before the science of ballistics even existed. Now THAT is a coincidence of supernatural proportions!

Good point! So even IF the account was entirely precise, and he was hit by a bullet when blowing up the tree, nobody can know if it was that bullet. After all, in a gunhappy society, a big old tree may very well have numerous bullets in it.

Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

Compared to an average man's total life's sperm output, the odds of a pre-ordained sperm finding an egg become monumentally poor.

The point in this, and of many other 'strange coincidence' accounts is that post-hoc probability is generally irrelevant.

Someone once used the example of the probability of rolling a dice and getting 20 sixes in a row (this was an evolution discussion, but that's another matter). However, the catch is that you are defining the goal post hoc, and you arbitrarily assign is as 20 sixes. In fact, if you roll a dice 20 times, whatever result you get is exactly as probable (or improbable) as 20 sixes.

Hans

 

[quarky]

The point in this, and of many other 'strange coincidence' accounts is that post-hoc probability is generally irrelevant.

Someone once used the example of the probability of rolling a dice and getting 20 sixes in a row (this was an evolution discussion, but that's another matter). However, the catch is that you are defining the goal post hoc, and you arbitrarily assign is as 20 sixes. In fact, if you roll a dice 20 times, whatever result you get is exactly as probable (or improbable) as 20 sixes.

Hans

yup. that's what I meant by the equal unlikliness of everything.

 

[HeyLeroy]

To help out marshmallow
www.strangecosmos.com/content/item/143960.html
www.2spare.com/item_51964.aspx

Just a couple of the cases in Marshmallow's link:

The James Dean car:

a) A seriously damaged car is not unlikely to fall apart during transport.

b) Racing, especially old Porches, is inherently dangerous. I read somewhere that a disproportionate number of Porche owners were killed in their car.

c) Garage fires are not exactly rare. And here I ask for the first, but not last time: Is this documented? Because if the garage burnt with the car in it, I'm more than a little puzzled about how it can have much history after that.

d) So, it wasn't burned after all?

e) So it was moved about a lot over several years. Not unlikely that it should be involved in some accidents.

f) After all it had been through, it is not too surprising that it should break up one day.

(snip)
Hans

I'll admit, I tried looking into these as well.

There's a snopes page on Dean's car; http://www.snopes.com/autos/cursed/spyder.asp

There are conflicting legends regarding the car. It seems they're unverifiable.

The second story from that first page:

A falling baby, saved twice by the same man

In Detroit sometime in the 1930s, a young (if incredibly careless) mother must have been eternally grateful to a man named Joseph Figlock. As Figlock was walking down the street, the mother's baby fell from a high window onto Figlock. The baby's fall was broken and both man and baby were unharmed. A stroke of luck on its own, but a year later, the very same baby fell from the very same window onto poor, unsuspecting Joseph Figlock as he was again passing beneath. And again, they both survived the event. (Source: Mysteries of the Unexplained)

Two seconds on google returned this:

Miscellany, Oct. 17, 1938
Monday, Oct. 17, 1938...

Coincidence In Detroit, year ago, Street Sweeper Joseph Figlock was furbishing up an alley when a baby plopped down from a fourth-story window, struck him on the head and shoulders, injured Joseph Figlock and itself but was not killed. Last fortnight, as Joseph Figlock was sweeping out another alley, two-year-old David Thomas fell from a fourth-story window, landed on ubiquitous Mr. Figlock with the same results.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,848363,00.html

No mention of it being the same baby.

 

[CurtC]

Once in college I was studying late in the evening, and for no apparent reason thought about my grandmother and hoped she was OK. My grandmother was elderly, but overall pretty healthy, so there was no reason I should have suddenly worried about her health.

Then, just after I had thought all this, the phone rang.

It was a wrong number.

My grandmother lived several more years.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

I wonder what happened to Mr. Marshmallow ..

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Compared to an average man's total life's sperm output, the odds of a pre-ordained sperm finding an egg become monumentally poor.

But again, that's only if you specify a pre-ordained sperm. (How do you even do that?) When you ask the question, "What are the odds against the sperm that made YOU fertilizing the egg?", you're committing the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. You're essentially drawing a circle around the bullet hole and asking what are the odds against hitting that little spot.

As Brian mentioned, the odds of any sperm fertilizing the egg is about 1 in 4 (per ovulation, right?).

That's a better number in understanding human fecundity and why there are nearly 7 billion of us.

If I deal a 5 card poker hand, I know 100% sure, I'll end up with some combination of 5 cards. The odds against any specific combination of 5 cards are 2,598,960 to 1. So take a deck and deal out 5 cards. Wow! No matter what combination of 5 cards you dealt, you've just dealt a hand that was a less than 1 in 2.5 million chance! It's a miracle!

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

yup. that's what I meant by the equal unlikliness of everything.

But that's only because you're asking a post-hoc question. The odds in this case of rolling the die 20 times is 1:1. Same as the odds in my example of dealing out a combination of 5 cards (1:1--you know ahead of time you will for sure have a 5 card combination). The odds of fertilization, as Brian provided, is 1 in 4.

Only if you can specify in advance which sperm will fertilize the egg or what combination of 20 rolls of the die or which combination of 5 cards will be dealt do these extremely long odds have any meaning.

Since you really cannot possibly specify a sperm ahead of time (or "pre-ordain" one, as you say), those very long odds are meaningless in the case of your question.

 

[fromdownunder]

As another example, if there are 31 people gathered in the room, there is a 95% chance of two of them sharing a birthday.

But if you have 365 people in a room, there is only a 63% chance of one of them sharing your birthday, although the chance of two people in the room sharing A birthday is 100%.

Norm

 

[quarky]

Cool.

(the sperm thing was a crummy joke, but it could be simulated such that there was a pre-determined sperm.)

 

[Prometheus]

....
But if you have 365 people in a room, there is only a 63% chance of one of them sharing your birthday, although the chance of two people in the room sharing A birthday is 100%.

Norm

Wouldn't you need 366 people for the likelihood to really be 100% (367, if one of them was born on February 29)?

 

[Rodney]

The point in this, and of many other 'strange coincidence' accounts is that post-hoc probability is generally irrelevant.

Someone once used the example of the probability of rolling a dice and getting 20 sixes in a row (this was an evolution discussion, but that's another matter). However, the catch is that you are defining the goal post hoc, and you arbitrarily assign is as 20 sixes. In fact, if you roll a dice 20 times, whatever result you get is exactly as probable (or improbable) as 20 sixes.

Hans

So I guess if someone throws 20 sixes in a row you won't question whether the dice is fair.