Puppycow;8674774...to have a general belief that coincidences never happen seems bizarre. Coincidences happen [I said:
Indeed, nothing galvanized my view on this more than practicum in forensic engineering. Yes, you learn investigative theory and observational methodology. But when you actually go out on accident scenes and realize that you're interested in only one causal chain among the several dozen irrelevant ones that were halted by the accident -- all of whose evidence is intermingled with what you want to see -- you realize that coincidence is mostly a psychological thing.
It goes hand-in-hand with the "there are no accidents" position.
That's the duality of forensic engineering. On the one hand, we understand that there is such a thing as a "normal accident," simply because the complexity of what we're trying to do outpaces our ability to understand and control it. No matter how safe you make a system, it will always be operated in a way that accepts a certain risk of failure.
Shipping is always my favorite example. Despite our numerous advances in shipbuilding and navigation, the accident rate for heavy-tonnage shipping remains fairly constant over the past 50 years and longer. Why? Because the safety margins provided by new technology end up getting used to expand production capacity and reap more profits. Where a ship 75 years ago would have had to creep carefully through the fog in a confined harbor, and radar- and GPS-equipped ship can run the same harbor at higher speeds, leading to more ship traffic per unit time and more commerce.
Hence accidents, in the form of preventable failure, will always continue to happen. It's human nature. But yes, in many cases you can look at something that first appears to be coincidental and, with careful investigation, unravel the unforeseen causes and effects. And many of those end up being putatively preventable and predictable.
So that's the engineering take on it. You can always do better, and you should. But at the same time life is remarkably complex and will disorganize itself in ways you can't predict.
In the broader sense, "There are no accidents" as an explanation for, say, Kennedy's assassination leads the conspiracy-minded to attribute all manner of meaning to the presence or absence of certain observations they would consider to be connected.
What else would you call it when someone's desperate to ascribe intent to phenomena without any reason to do so?
Or, stated otherwise:
Another old saying in the same vein is "everything happens for a reason".
You call such people conspiracy theorists. As I mentioned, coincidence is a psychological phenomenon because the determination of coincidence is subjective.
If I wash my car and it rains later that day, that's an unfortunate coincidence. For
me. For those who didn't wash their car, and on all the other days it rained, there is no "coincidence" in the sense of there being no need to explain some salient combination of events. Raw coincidence, literally defined as the occurrence in similar time or space of two or more circumstances or events, happens all the time, as previously noted. Those events become a coincidence only because of the meaning and significance we attribute to them, often only because some outcome gets our attention.
For them, the gravity of the outcome requires inordinate intent or significance in the causal chain. And often we have a vested interest in one leg of the coincidence. For example, if you shred evidence of tax evasion and throw it out, you'll be more attuned to the homeless man on that day as he paws through your trash looking for recyclables. How often has he done that? But on
that day you might be more suspicious.
It ultimately comes down to expectations. We normally expect things to go right. We expect to be happy. We expect good news. Those things tend not to stick in our medium-term memories. When bad things happen according to a normal schedule, this violates our expectations. That artificial increase in salience compels us to look for causation, and to suggest without much evidence that the causation must be intentional because we don't want to accept that excrement just happens.
