Coincidence?
Yes, I already know what you are thinking. I’m a mentalist, right? Coincidence? What’s’ so unusual about it? You are thinking there’s nothing particularly paranormal about coincidence. Science, skeptics and psychologists have taken the concept apart and dissected it down to its constituent elements. It’s been already explained away and nothing worth debating. Yet despite such drab things as facts to the contrary, I’m not as easily convinced that coincidence is just an accidental event as some of my skeptical friends.
As a performing mentalist, I get the chance to play around with terms and concepts like coincidence, synchronicity, worm holes and other wild thinking. It’s all part of the plausibility factors I work to invoke to get the audience to buy into what I do. Some might even suggest that sensitizing an audience to these ideas creates a “psi-conducive” awareness that might even allow such things to happen in rare instances. In my travels I picked up the line: “Coincidence is a word scientists use to explain what they can’t explain.” Sounds like bull huh? Well okay. Engrained habits die hard. That line worked for awhile, but now I think I know better. Or do I?
Throughout the history of parapsychology there have been examples that have gone far beyond just the standard cause and effect one-time moments most of us have experienced and wondered about. Odds, probability and chance play into this in mathematical ways I can’t even begin to comprehend. Hey, I’m a magician! I do tricks. I suggest. I transpose. I transubstantiate. I take apart. I recombine. Is it any wonder that weird unplanned things happen now and again? And they do. There are so many of these coincidental synchronized events chronicled in the history of stage mentalists and magicians, a whole television reality series could be put together on just that subject alone. Do magicians and mentalists have a greater penchant for imaginative conceits and are we simply deluding ourselves like the worst of the psychics or do we just think weird stuff all the time? Does fate play some part in these moments of seeming transcendence? And what is fate anyway? It’s not a scientific construct. So is there anything going on besides just a condition of facts coinciding? Maybe it’s just me. It’s hard to tell. These bizarre moments are by no means confined to performers whose job it is to simulate them. A standard example from BBC radio writer Joan Aiken:
” Wires get crossed, perhaps. The boss of a friend of ours left his office early one day and went home, calling at a fish-and-chips shop on the way. Close to the fish-and-chippery was a phone box and, as he passed it, the phone rang. He picked up the receiver. It was his own secretary, at his office, telling him about an urgent job. By mistake, instead of his phone number, she had dialed his National Insurance number next to it on the index card … which happened to be the number of the call box …”
I know the standard riff skeptics say to this: “Well, …what if the phone had rung and he hadn’t picked up the receiver?” Point is: he did. That he did is what makes that situation a coincidence. But it gets better. Things more complex than this simple coincidence pattern have manifested for many people, including myself:
One night many years ago, I was booked doing walk around close-up magic to warm-up the crowd at The Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach for Jay Leno. I would roam around the main room doing this and that before Jay came out and did his routine. That night I was working a card trick where I ask someone to “think of a card.” I have always preferred “think of” card bits because they seem more powerfully “mental” than more sleight of hand methods and thereby to my way of thinking – more impossible. In these “experiments” the spectator doesn’t pick a card, they merely think of any card. This is totally random and it could be any card that I will work with. I will never forget the next hour that passed after I asked the first person that question. They responded with, “Okay, …the Nine of Spades.” Fair enough. I did my bit with the Nine of Spades, finished with that table and went across the room to another random spectator. I asked the same question and was given the same answer, the Nine of Spades. Okay. Now we have simple “coincidence” and that’s all. No big deal. It was a little weird to have the same card come up twice in a row, but not that amazing.
I went back into the crowd and this time switched to a “pick a card” routine where any card is pulled from the deck randomly by the spectator and I proceed to identify it by any of dozens of methods. The card chosen by the spectator was once again the Nine of Spades. Okay. I’m thinking to myself, that’s weird. Not exactly paranormal, just a little bizarre. But I’m starting to wonder a bit. Of course, in my character of Mr. Magic, I couldn’t very well blurt out, “Wow, …that’s really weird, the Nine of Spades again!” It wouldn’t have made any sense to anyone but me. It was a personal thing happening in my head and I was the only one to whom it would be anything other than just one of those stories. I shrugged it off like most of us would and went on deciding I needed to mix things up, get as far away from that side of the room and try again. I went to a farthest, noisiest corner I could find away from the rest of the room I had already worked and (asking for trouble) picked the most inebriated person I could find and asked them to think of any card in the deck. They screwed up their face in concentration and eventually named the Nine of Spades. I’m not making this up. It happened.
My magician mind began to spin wild conspiracy thoughts. There had to be an explanation. I thought the club owner might have put everyone in on a big prank and was messing with me. Maybe the back of tonight’s ticket stub read: “Say the Nine of Spades if the magician asks you.” I was getting a bit spooked but bounced back to the opposite side of the room, being careful to avoid anyone near any areas I might have been overheard before and opted for the “pick a card” bit again. Guess which card came up? Yep, the Nine of Spades! I realized that the prank hypothesis wouldn’t have covered how two people had now taken totally random cards from a shuffled deck and came up with the Nine of Spades. I must have looked quite pale as I finished with that table.
I reasoned maybe the two “pick a card” folks were just as they were, simply random choices that could fall under standard two event coincidence. That would have made them not that statistically incredible, but adding in the other three “think of a card” people and it was starting to feel like the Twilight Zone. That was five Nine of Spades in a row in the span of around twenty-five minutes. My head was spinning with bewilderment. The nearby cocktail waitress was watching me looking adrift and, convincing myself it couldn’t happen again, I asked her to quickly pick out a card. It couldn’t happen again, but it did. That made six! I just couldn’t figure it. I took a needed break and after collecting myself, stopped by the owner’s office where he and his assistant (who are usually much too busy to even notice I’m there) were busy as usual. I mumbled something to them about there being a joke on me tonight and they looked blankly back at me as if I was crazy. I decided to stop by the Green Room, where Jay and the other comedians hung out. I shuffled my cards nervously, carefully looking them over to make sure they weren’t somehow daubed or marked with mustard or ketchup that might have caused the Nine of Spades card to be more thick, stuck or stand out from the rest. I found no solution to my befuddlement. Jay asked why I looked so shaky and I told him what had been happening. Laughing at my predicament, he took the cards from me, shuffled them three or four times and said,”…If you go back out there and the Nine of Spades comes up again now, … even I’ll be impressed.”
I wandered back out into the crowd in a bemused sensation of dread, afraid to offer anyone a card, but uneasily resolved to do one more “pick a card any card” routine. What could be the chances? Things like this aren’t supposed to happen. It throws off my timing! I picked a table, approached rather sheepishly and in almost a whisper, uttered those now detestable words, “Pick a card any card.” To my chagrin, the card chosen wasn’t the Nine of Spades! It was some other card I don’t remember. I do remember that I was momentarily rendered speechless. The spectator must have wondered why the look on my face was so joyfully flabbergasted. To him it was just a stupid pick a card trick. Apparently (as many believers might conjecture) Jay had taken the “whammy” off the cards and broken the spell. Seven times being “the charm” in this case. Who knows what really happened that night. I realize that there is a chance that selective memory could conceivably be a critical factor in relating all this. I swear the facts related are essentially true and how I remember it happening. Six of one and six of another and then bingo – nothing. And BTW, I was stone sober that night. Interestingly enough, the Nine of Spades has hardly ever come up when I have been performing card routines since that night. It’s almost as if I used up all the chances for that particular card to turn up in one hour of my lifetime. What a crazy superstition that is, right?
How do we explain things like this or can we? What’s the probability, math guys? Give me a formula that explains it clearly. It may seem only slightly odd to you, to me this was an authentic event that left me wondering to myself more than once or twice, …who was fooling who?
Of course we can dismiss the whole thing and say, so what? It ultimately means nothing and like coin tossing, has no relevance to magic, skepticism or life’s big questions. Such anecdotal tales are of no scientific value or proof of anything. It’s a blip on the radar screen and absurd. It was just a card trick and doesn’t prove or disprove anything. And we would be right. But still a blip is a blip.
I’m interested in investigating verifiable situations where a “coincidence” happens this way. If you remember Bill Murray in “Ground Hog’s Day,” the feeling I had that night was analogous. When the odds seem incalculable (if that term is even appropriate) and the specific information repeats itself again and again in a short time frame, the “coincidence” becomes something altogether different from the norm. Am I alone here? Probably not. Can you share one of your experiences and your explanation?
As John Paulos points out in his book “Innumeracy”, the probability of any specific event is phenomenally low but the probability of an improbable event happening is high. Each time you deal a hand in blackjack for example, the odds of getting the hand you’re dealt is extremely low – but it happens all the time. Every hand you’re dealt has a very low probability – in fact, any hand dealt in blackjack has an extremely low probability. So weird things just happen now and then.
In my college days I had one lecturer who was extremely strict about when his lectures start and when they end; he could not bear any lecturers who drone on when their time is up and cause students to be late for their next lecture. On one day he ran late – it’s the only time it happened in my class and the lecturer was very embarrassed and swore he had a good reason that time. If the lecturer weren’t late that day I probably would have been killed an a terrible vehicular accident – smashed by a truck with defective brakes. The truck had swatted a number of people on the sidewalk, demolished two large concrete power poles, and compacted a parked car (and its passengers) into a block the size of a domestic washing machine. Did I think that was a sign of some supernatural being looking after me? Not for a moment – I only thought how lucky I was that the lecturer happened to break his habit that day and hold me back for 5 minutes.
Hmmm… I always think of coincidences as “remembering the hits and forgetting the missed.” After all, how many “coincidental things” aren’t happening? Doesn’t make them feel any less weird when they do happen to you!
MadScientist has it exactly right. Another example is the supposed “hot streak” in sports, which has been shown to be utterly non-existent.
When a player goes on an apparent hot streak, like, say, Michael Jordan famously did against the Portland Trailblazers in the 1992 NBA Finals, they’re actually only performing exactly as a statistical model, given their career shooting percentage, suggests they would.
A simple way to see this is to look at any of a number of “fantasy” games, that recreate historical players through statistics and then “play” games featuring those players. If a computer-based Michael Jordan makes six three pointers in one quarter in a simulated game, no one would suggest the simulated Jordan had somehow gotten “hot.” But people are quick to ascribe terms like “hot” and “cold” to flesh and blood players as if the terms mean anything. Which they don’t. Every shot a player takes has roughly the same chance of going in as every other shot they take (that chance being, essentially, their career shooting percentage), regardless of how many the player has made or missed in a row before.
As for the nine-of-spades surprise, the fact is that, statistically, the more often you perform, the more likely it becomes that, at some point, you will have a run of the same card six times in a row. You don’t know what that card will be – the chances of any specific card appearing six times in a row is orders of magnitude more unlikely than that SOME card will appear six times in a row.
I don’t know how many shows you’ve done in the course of your career, but my guess is that its probably at least in the hundreds. When all those performances begin to add up, it becomes more and more likely that you’ll see a run like the one you describe.
One final example, the birthday paradox: In a group of at least 23 randomly chosen people, there is more than 50% probability that some pair of them will both have been born on the same day. For 57 or more people, the probability is more than 99%.
Only 57 people, and it’s a near-certainty that two of them share the same birthday, despite the fact that there are 366 possible birthdays in total. Numbers are amazing.
I suggest that something within club was prompting this. Although you looked around it still may be that a business across the street might have had a nine of spades in its advertising. I also suggest that Jay may have been putting you on as he conveniently showed up when you were at the height of bewilderment, only to handle the cards and have you believe he had done something. Its a good gag and I have seen it before.
But as for coincidence being anything other than random chance, there is not enough information.
I will mention that I have been astonished at some of the coincidences that have happened to me and gone so far as to keep a log, but interestingly, when I read about the coincidences I have written later, they don’t seem like such a coincidences after all.
“Coincidence is a word scientists use to explain what they can’t explain.”
Not really, coincidence is a word scientists use to explain things that don’t need explaining.
To calculate the probability of a spooky outcome, we just need to compile all the outcomes you’d consider spooky.
For simplicity, let’s say the participants are flipping coins instead of picking cards.
Would 10 or more heads in a row be spooky? How about 5 heads followed by 5 tails? Alternating heads and tails? Any long sequence that can be described in a few words (low entropy)? When you consider all possible low-entropy sequences and all the opportunities you’ve had to observe one, it won’t seem so improbable.
Or Jay was pulling your leg.
Assuming that thinking of a card has the same probability as drawing a card, I would calculate the probability of drawing the same card from a deck of 52 cards six times in a row as (1/52)^5. This works out to 1 in 380,204,032. Conclusion: Someone was screwing with you.
I had a weird coincidence happen to me recently at my blog. I posted my selection of songs for the Darwin mix tape challenge, and among them was a song by a Kentucky band (one of the members happened to be my x-girlfriend’s brother). It turned out that he had been reading my anonymous blog all along without having any idea that it was me, and I posted about his band without having any idea that he was reading.
I suppose that out of all my acquaintances from high school, it would be conceivable that at least one would be reading my blog. But, the freaky part is that I would be randomly including his band (of which I’m only tangentially familiar) in my post. Still, It’s nothing like six nine of spades in a row… just freaky.
Now and then someone will say a word out load at the exact time as I am reading the very same word on my computer screen.
For instance, I was watching a youtube video of past fights for a MMA fighter when suddenly my wife sang the line “I feel good”. She sang it because it was in a commercial on TV. At the exact same time the fighter yelled out “I feel good” in the youtube video and it was even in a caption in the video.
Not much of a coincidence maybe, but since then I’ve logging every time it happens, and so far there’s been 5 similar cases this year.
Then again, I read thousands of words on my computer every day and there are thousands of cases where the word is NOT said out load as I read it.
A more freaky coincidence was the night before my mother passed away. She was on death bed and I said I would be back the next morning at 9 AM. She said “No, make it 6:30.” I responded, “That early?”, because she was not a typical morning person. I said I would try. When I arrived at 6:45 I was greeted by a nurse who told me my mother had passed away 15 minutes earlier, at 6:30.
For the past month straight,I will say a word/phrase,type it,or do actions I here in a song/tv. 3 to 5 times a day. anyone else? This is soooo strange and frustrating yet so mysteriously intresting!
Suppose the chance of something extraordinary occurring at an opportunity for something extraordinary occurring is about 1 – 10^-10. Most people would consider things extraordinary long before we get in that region, but I want to be on the safe side. According to my calculator that means you’d need about 7.000.000.000 opportunities to reach the fifty-fifty mark. What would constitute an opportunity? Well, from the examples above, I’d guess pretty much anything you do or experience could count. There must be hundreds each day, thousands in a lifetime. I don’t know what the population of the US is, but suppose a hypothetical country would have a population of 14.000.000 people, the chance of nothing extraordinary occurring would be less than 1 in 4. And I feel I have been using rather conservative estimates all along the way.
My first thought is to question the story (I do not doubt the author’s well-meaning intention). As Cory pointed out, someone else might have manipulated the outcome. We have no way of knowing. Also, human perception and memory are highly fallible, as real as they may seem.
Let’s assume for a moment that this story happened just as described and without trickery. As for the long odds, remember that this sequence was not predicted in advance – it just happened. If you had predicted the outcome immediately before the sequence appeared, now THAT would be impressive! Finding patterns in random data after the fact is the source of much folly.
Absolutely any sequence of cards (different numbers and different suits) has the same incredibly long odds. View a poker hand and chances are that you never have, and never will see that exact combination of cards again. The reason this story sounds compelling is that our pattern-seeking brains recognize a pattern in the cards, which makes the outcome seem impossible. The next six random card sequence you draw is equally “impossible.”
It’s like a mega lottery winner saying that this couldn’t have happened by chance. Yet it would be truly amazing if coincidences like this never happened. Probability theory demonstrates that “coincidence happens” (Google – “Law of Large Numbers”). Just because we find a particular outcome to be compelling, does not justify assuming a supernatural cause.
Tip: Before running to the mystics, check with the statisticians first. :)
Why “spooky”, “weird”, “freaky”, etc.??? Why not ‘surprising’, ‘intriguing’, even ‘exciting’, which, I would suggest, is what coincidental events can be and usually are, and are sometimes even delightful.
Or has been a magician magicked? Whether or not someone was playing a prank on you, this occurence is not impossible, it seems to me. Just think about all the reasons/ways that it COULD happen.
Ascribing some sort of supernatural intervention or effect to events that are deemed to be peculiar for whatever reason by the person affected, seems to affect even those who espouse critical thinking, it apears…
It sounds to me like you want there to be something more than coincidence, Mark, and I can’t blame you. It’s obvious to anyone who looks closely at coincidences that they’re actually caused by the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Here is my coincidence: After my brother got out of the service in the 70’s, we had a coming home party at my apartment that I shared with my roommate.Much alcohol was consumed, and before he left the next day, I gave him my new phone number. That day (my day off), my roommate had to go to work with a terrible hangover.We both worked for the phone company in a Central office. While my roommate was at work (sleeping off the night before on the floor),he was rudely awakened by one of our test phones ringing (this was one that was rarely used).When he answered, it was my brother asking if I was there.My roomie says “well,no he’s at home”. There was a pause, and my brother says “okay” and hangs up.About a month later we were all together when the subject of the party came up, and wasn’t everyone smashed ,and how bad our hangovers had been, and how my brother woke my roommate up at work while he was sleeping it off, and “how did he get that number anyway…..?” but “no” says my brother, “I called him at the apartment”. Huh? Well it turns out that the phone number on the test phone , and my home number differed by 1 digit, and my brother had simply misdialed and coincidentally reached my hungover roomie at work. I don’t know what the odds are of that happening, but it still was freaky coincidence to me, and fun to relate,but as far as it being in the realm of the supernatural… I think not.
I see there are a few posts running along the lines of “someone must be having you on because this is so improbable”. That is a common which I could never understand. The odds of being dealt a Royal Flush are incredibly small, but when I was dealt one many years ago I didn’t deny that it was a fair deal. People who think “this is improbable and therefore either impossible or someone must have cooked things up” need to learn to think a little more.
An example of supreme stupidity for me is the notion of “balance of probability” in civil lawsuits. Even if outcomes can be enumerated and probabilities assigned, it’s just so incredibly stupid to claim that a specific event must have happened or must not have happened based on random likelihood. Of course the intent in civil lawsuits could simply be to punish a lot of innocent people but punish some not-so-innocent people as well, in which case that goal can be achieved but it can hardly be called justice. Aside from all that, the phrase “balance of probability” is misleading – it is essentially “what do the jurors feel” rather than “what do you know based on the evidence”; I doubt that there are many cases where valid probabilities can actually be assigned.
Quick lesson in hypothesis testing.
To calculate whether foul play is more probable than mere chance, given the outcome, you first solve the reverse problem: How probable is the outcome given foul play versus mere chance?
For example, the probability that a coin toss comes up heads ten times in a row is 100% if the coin is double sided, but only 0.1% if the coin is fair. But that’s not sufficient to conclude foul play.
You also need the prior probability that the coin is foul or fair, given everything else you know. That’s where things like intuition, statistics, Occam’s razor, and Hanlon’s razor come in. If the coin tosser is known to trick people, it increases the certainty that the coin is rigged.
MadScientist, if you go too far to avoid Type I errors (false positives), you end up in Type II territory.
http://blog.cutter.com/2007/06/12/the-trouble-with-nerds
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines a nerd as] “someone who, when told that a fair coin has come up heads 99 times in a row, believes that the chances of it coming up heads on the 100th toss is exactly 50%. A non-nerd (the kind of person who tends to succeed in life), on the other hand, immediately assumes the coin is loaded – despite having been told IN THE RUBRIC that it is fair.”
I cannot help thinking there may be something in the way you shuffle the cards. Perhaps after all your years of doing card tricks you have fallen in to a pattern. The 9 of spades, after being picked the first time was replaced and shuffled in, perhaps to an area more amenable to being picked from the deck. Picked again, it is reshuffled bach to the same area. This might reduce the chances from one in 52 to one in a dozen or so. The “pattern” was broken by Jay.
So in reality, discounting the guesses for a moment, your subjects picked out the same card only three times maybe from a dozen or so cards. Doesn’t seem quite so fantastic now.
Also the nine of spades is innocuous. People might go for an innocuous card rather than a high profile card such as Ace or royalty. Further increases the chances of being “guessed” by audience members three times in a row. Again, not such a fantastic coincidence.
So, what are the chances of two not-so-fantastic coincidences happening together to someone who regularly repeats the two card tricks? Fairly high I’d imagine.
What exactly is the point of this article? It seems to hint there is “something” happening that should be investigated. It does not define what, it does not define how, it offers no proof other than personal account, and it is likely not repeatable. It just hints at “something” beyond the reasonable as having occurred.
I’m left to wonder what this is doing here? Is the author not capable of arriving at a reasoned explanation? Is he trying to put forth an hypothesis of some kind? Is he starting to believe his own act?
I guess I am one of those fortunate people who cannot point to an instance in his life where, coincidence or not, something inexplicable happened. Perhaps that in itself should be investigated as an oddity, countering natural laws of nature. Is there anyone else out there who can point to no extraordinary event in their lives? Or am I alone in this, and should therefore feel special?
I’m with Stu, but I’ll take it a step further. I assume that since this is the internet and you claim to be a “mentalist” the entire 9 of spades story is a fabrication.
If the story is true, it’s a startling coincidence. But as others have pointed out, startling coincidences are bound to happen somewhere, sometime. Why now there and then?
It’s a boring answer, but it’s probably the correct one. Probability is a fascinating topic though, there’s something about it that messes deeply with our intuitions (like the birthday paradox above). It’s certainly got much to do with our pattern seeking brains.
now = not
Part of Freakishness is the narration we impose upon it. 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 looks like a freaky coincident on the lottery but 37/11/26/15/24/13/7 doesn’t. They’re both just as likely and just as unique string of numbers.
My experience of a coincidence was this:
When in high school I was involved with the yearly high school play. In a scene a guy would break some sunglasses. Since my mother worked at a large chain of opticians, she got me a handful of Wayfarer ripoffs to be smashed.
We smashed the first pair on the last rehearsal before the premiere, After the act was finished, I picked up the shattered frames, and put the lenses in my pocket.
Afterwards we had an impromptu party, and I wound up quite drunk. So I decided to sleep over with my girlfriend who lived close to the school. This meant that the next day I came to school in the same clothes.
The first two lessons were elective, so my class was spread ut through the school, and not together as in most lessons.
After thes I was walking down the corridor, and a guy, Michael, from my class came out of one of the science rooms. They had just finished their two hours of chemistry, where they had been speaking about, amongst other things, polarized light. Now this guy was a comedian (really, he’s a pro now, has been for 15 years), so the first thing he says to me is “Hi Soren, you wouldn’t have to have two pieces of polarized glass on you?”
Now I would like to say that I just nonchalantly took out the lenses and gave them to him, but I started out a little confused, and we went down the hall together. After 30 seconds, I remembered and had him ask the question again, when he did, I pulled out the lenses and gave them to him.
To my luck they were polarized.
This is the biggest coincidence I remember having experienced. Each step in this chain is not in itself improbable, Michael was prone to making nonsensical statements, I would occasionally stay at my girlfriend on a school night, etc but the experience when I remembered the lenses in my pocket was so surreal.
Mentally picking out a card is not the same as physically picking out a card from a randomly shuffled deck. As part of culture certain cards have a place in our memories – the Jack of Hearts as a symbol of an anti-hero (Bob Dylan song and a movie), Eights & Aces is a ‘dead man’s hand’. The Ace of spades is seen in graphic art far more often than say, the ten of clubs, and so on. When picking out cards mentally there will be some push towards those cards which are more ‘known’ culturally. Also, it is a basic part of the mentalist’s act to know that people follow predictable trends when asked to pick a number, date, day of the week, etc. It is basic magic to force marks towards the pick you want them to make.
I was considering when I was younger and playing war with a deck of cards with my friends. It was amazing to us then that there would be so many commonalities with the way the cards would deal out. If four of us were playing sometimes we would all throw out the same number card, or with two of us playing we would throw the same card many times in a row. There were many common combinations but after awhile we realized that it was just the nature of the cards to be random and not so random.
That said, I do have a friend who can sit at a black jack table and guess every card before its turned. Some of you may ask why she isnt famous or rich for this? Its because as soon as the casino sees her “counting cards” they escort her out after taking her picture. Seems to me there are a lot of people who control their own coincidences.
Okay. So to semperskeptic #19 and others who missed my point. I/we are out to examine. explain and entertain the biggest television viewing audince we can find. I’m assuming most of which have had an odd coincidental experience happen to them and I would also assume some of those coicideneces went beyond the standard one-two punch. To me, these could be very compelling dramatic segments to focus on, especially when connected to the science of probability and statistics. Blend in the power of selective memory, confirmsation bias and even delusional thinking and it’s my bet you would have a more than compelling half hour of viewing for any person looking for something to think about. That’s science. Does that make it clear?
Your “Is the author not capable of arriving at a reasonable explanation” is incredibly insulting. This is a blog, not an a scientific panel. No, at the time I was not able to arrive at a reasonable explanation… and I’m still not completely sure of what happened. Are you? Explain it to me then. I’m not a scientist and I’m not out to offer you or anybody else any “hypothosis.” I leave that up to you and the people who kindly responded the way they did. I was happy to read several possibilities that might have been happening. I never suggested any supernatural cause and found it interesting that some took that as a point I was making or thought I was “believing in my own act” or pushing some believer agenda. Nothing could be further from the truth. Putting things like this out into Skeptology are what being part of The Skeptologist team is all about. I wasn’t chosen to be a part of this program because I want to believe in magic, Elvis sightings, pink fairies or Santa Claus. While I have had to put all those things aside long ago, I still have an open mind. I’m a performer. You provide the hypothesis, I do the magic tricks okay? To others: I offered this anomaly up as #1) a true experience. It is not a fabrication. You can hardly write fiction more improbable than that, right? #2) BTW: Jay didn’t just “show up” and shuffle my cards. He had been relaxing in the Green Room all evening and was getting ready to go on. His momentary comment to me was a casual in-passing aside. I’m confident he wasn’t “pulling my leg.” How could his shuffling of the cards make any difference after I had completely shuffled the pack five or six times? He’s not at all familiar with cards and magic like Johnny Carson was. I just happened that way.
It’s apparent to me that when things like this take place, many people who are not thinking critically might jump to strange conclusions. That’s what it was all about in case you thought I was going New Age on you. Lighten up.
Shahar, in post #6 I posit that a spooky sequence is one that follows simple rules or can be described in a few words. For example: “repeating 9″ or “numbers 1 through 7″ or “my phone number”.
It’s spooky because we assume that simple rules must’ve been encoded somehow.
But defining “coincidence” is subjective, like defining “irony”. Some people have no sense of it, and others see it in everything.
There are a couple of things about Mark Edward’s story that make it more spooky. First, the fact that peope picked the nine of spades both mentally and physically, so it wasn’t all a prank on Mark or subconscious priming. Second, Mark said, “Interestingly enough, the Nine of Spades has hardly ever come up when I have been performing card routines since that night.” So there’s nothing special about the nine of spades.
There’s nothing special about the nine of spades or any other card until it comes up an improbable but far from impossible number of times – then we make it ‘special’. When dealing with a finite deck – 52 different cards – it is not only possible for the nine of spades to come the number of times it requies a given person to find it ‘anomalous’, to be too many many times, it is inevitable you’ll get a run like that. How many times in his life has Mark Edward dealt cards?
I’m thinking any lurking statisticians are laughing their asses off at this.
I’m thinking any lurking statisticians are laughing their asses off at this.
Ummmmm, so exactly what is your profession DA? :)
I think the probability that you are lurking is impossibly low, except that you have now shown up … lurking. Unless, you aren’t here. Which would, coincidentally, cancel your probability of lurking.
My apologies. I did not mean to insult, and I should have held my frustration in check. Other than a coincidence there is not much one can surmise from this. At least there was nothing else I surmised from this. As I said, there is nothing to test, it’s not repeatable, and (while I believe you) it’s hearsay. In many other forums and podcasts it has been drummed into me this sort of thing is not the realm of the skeptic.
The fact that it is an amazing coincidence, a one in a XXXX occurrence, does not make it any more or less explainable or amazing than a one in XX occurrence.
Obviously I failed to realize it was not meant to do anything but spark a you-tell-me-yours and I’ll-tell-you-mine flurry of posts. Again, my misunderstanding, my apologies, and my bad for letting my ignorance-borne annoyance show through.
I’m not sure you owe anyone an apology if, in fact, this thread’s topic was designed to elicit instances of personal incredulity among others.
DA = Demi-Lurker: The Shadow Prophet.
DA = Demi-Lurker: The Shadow Prophet.
That’s it, I’m off to theness.com where sanity reigns and bran goodness is appreciated.
Coincidentally, I might be offended, I’ll need to think about it first.
Here’s my big coincidence. It happened just a couple weeks ago, and it happened at Disneyland (it is the Magic Kingdom, after all…). My daughter & I rode Space Mountain, which is a roller coaster in the dark. Before the ride I hung my sunglasses on the front of my shirt. After the ride we came out of the exit tunnel, I felt for my sunglasses…and they were gone. They must have flown off during the ride. They were expensive glasses (Maui Jim, about $200), so we rushed back to the exit and told the attendant. He checked the little stand….no sunglasses. He asked what row we were in and I told him. He then checked every car for a full cycle, and still no sunglasses. He said, “You can check back here later, or at the Lost & Found tomorrow.”
We rode a couple more rides, and then it occurred to me that they take a souvenir photo on that ride. We went to the photo stand and found our photo….no sunglasses on my shirt. It had been about a half hour at that point, so we went back to the ride attendant. It was a different person this time; she went to the little stand, and there were three pairs of sunglasses there. She asked me if any of them were mine.
I looked at the first one…no. Second one…no. Third one….YES! We thanked her profusely, and left. We got back outside into the sun, and I put them on. They weren’t my glasses. The lenses were a slightly different tint. I thought, “Naah, what are the odds?” and figured it was just my brain misremembering. After all, they were the exact same glasses in every other respect.
When I got home I checked the Maui Jim website, and sure enough — there were the glasses, and they came in different lens colors. One was clearly in my possession, and another was what I clearly remember owning.
So two people went through the same ride at Disneyland within a half hour of each other, both wearing almost identical, rare (due to their price) sunglasses. Both lost them on that ride. What are the odds that I would lose those glasses on that ride, and have a nearly identical but different pair returned to me a half hour later?
I’m also assuming that whoever lost these glasses ended up with my pair. To whoever that was, I hope you’re enjoying them.
About a month ago, I had a dream about a woman who worked for me a few years back. When I awoke, I asked myself how I was going to explain the coincedence when she phoned me the next day, and when she did, I told myself it was just that, a coincidence.
There was never any pattern to her phone calls to me; they were random. whenever she felt like it. When hearing of the incident, other people say there has to be more to it; I say it would be weird if something like this didn’t happen every so often.
Larry C, I’m thinking that yours were thrown into the inner workings of the ride and ground to expensive dust.
The owner of the second pair might have been two minutes behind you at the kiosk after you claimed his.
His loss – your gain, but if so I bet he isn’t marveling at coincidences.
Cory calculated the odds of randomly selecting the same card 6 times in a row to be about one in 380 million. However, that is the probability for one trial. Every time a new card is randomly selected, a new trial begins.
So let’s take a guess at the total number of trials, confined to, say, the United States. One magician working a room and performing “pick a card” tricks may start twenty trials a night, conservatively. If we assume our average magician works five such shows per week for a year, that’s about 250 trials per year, per magician. In all the night clubs in the country, there are surely thousands of magicians working regularly. Add similar performances in other venues and by amateur magicians, and the total number of active magicians performing “pick a card” tricks could easily be half a million or more. Together, those half-million magicians will perform, conservatively, 125 million trials per year. Therefore, purely by chance, one of those magicians will hit the six-in-a-row scenario every three years, on average.
That one guy (or girl, sure) every three years will understandably wonder why this remarkable event has occurred. But just like the lottery, it is a virtual certainty that someone will win.
Oops! (I knew that would happen.) I forgot to multiply the 250 shows per year by the 20 trials, so each magician is actually capable of performing 5000 trials per year! Therefore, keeping all other numbers the same, we get 2.5 billion total trials per year, and we can expect that some magician, somewhere, will hit the six-in-a-row scenario about once every two months.
Sorry for the initial mistake. Anyway, the point should be clear.
Max, the numbers I chose were a special series. At least to me. My point was that any event can be looked upon as a coincident, as any event is unique and unrepeatable. We are story tellers and it’s the narrative that makes the mundane spooky.
Firstly coincidence cannot be proved with anecdotal stories, that fact is always told us. There could have been any number of reasons why people were thinking of that particular card. Second if that had happened to me after the third card came up I would have asked the next person to think of a card and just told them of the answer if it worked I am the best mentalist in the world if it didn’t I would have carried on and named the card another way.Magicians are always looking for this kind of luck.
We should bear in mind that the peoople making the choices were not blinded to each other.
Devil’s Advocate: “We should bear in mind that the peoople making the choices were not blinded to each other.”
Most clubs frown on doing that to their customers.
I share Mark Edward’s fascination with coincidence since I have had several in my lifetime that I deemed worthy of awe. I think the relevance to skepticism is the fact that many people to whom these eerie incidences happen, chose to interpret them as evidence of the supernatural, whereas skeptics understand that these things are well within the realm of chance despite the interesting circumstances that make them story worthy. Is that about right Mark?
“Most clubs frown on doing that to their customers.”
In my salad days, er, make that herb days, I was rendered quite blind in many a club. Things must have changed. I know I have.
I have thought of my coincidence every day since it happened 4 yrs ago. My Dad, Jude, had been dead only a week, and my Mom was grieving severely; they had been married since ages 18 + 20, more than 53 yrs. I drove the 4 hrs. required to bring Mom to my house, but she was restless, so we drove another 1/2 hr. to visit a friend, but she was out. Instead of returning to my house, I turned the other way and drove until we were lost. To this day I don’t know why; I said something like, “Let’s have an adventure!” to my Mom. It was as if my car knew where to go and I let it. We drove this way for another 1/2 hr, but I don’t think my Mom noticed. It was getting dark and I was really lost in a fairly large city. “Hey Jude” came on the radio and she brightened. Because my Dad’s name was so unusual, our family ALWAYS noticed when it popped up. “Hey Jude” even played on the radio as we pulled up to the gravesite to bury him, which Mom took as a sign of comfort. As we drove, I noticed a sign for an old castle, called Stokesay, at the top of a mountain of winding roads. We followed signs for a few miles, up Spook Lane (no lie) to a real castle. A wedding party was pouring out. Out of all the parking lanes, I drove down the third lane, felt my car come to a stop midway, turned my head to the right, and the license plate on a car said, “Hey Jude.” My Mom, who I never remember carrying a camera in her LIFE, had a disposable camera in her purse, so we have a great shot of the plate. We sat there open-mouthed, dumbfounded, and laughing for the longest time. I asked someone where we were and we made it home. The next day we hurriedly had the picture developed and made into an 8X10; it carried her through the year; she thought my Dad was telling her he was okay. I don’t attribute anything supernatural to it but it was still a really weird experience. One yr later my Mom was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and decided to “join Jude” rather than fight.
Donna,
Your story really touched me. I can see why it stays with you after 4 years. It seems that the effect that a coincidence has on the person that it happens to is much more profound than it is to a person that it is told to. I find they usually just shrug and say something non-committal. I suspect they half way don’t really believe you. And who could blame them? People are not very good witnesses to even their own lives at times. Thanks for sharing.
A touching story, yes, but it underscores what an earlier poster said about how the narrative is what drives the ‘wow’ factor of coincidences.