People are saying the moral of this story is "don't share click bait," but this isn't the takeaway at all. The lesson here is when confronted with a coincidence, one must immediately demystify it by looking for hidden variables. That is, look for nonobvious factors that increase the likelihood of such an occurrence. You will become a more clever person in doing so.
doodelay well, I would say that you can still definitely hold things in mystery if you like. I like to do that with a lot of things. But at the end of the day knowing that everything is quantifiable is also assuring 😊
yeah but sometimes a bit of mystery and wonder is also good. like a good act or scifi movie wouldn't be as entertaining everytime if you knew exactly how everything came together in it's making. also i have experienced this with singers, when you hear one of your favourite singers perform live and you realise the horrible difference between that and the recorded version...or maybe while reading a good suspense novel and you let the writer take you through the various events rather than pausing just before the last chapter and using math and psych (instead of your imagination) to find out who the killer would most likely be. just my opinion that wonder and the magic of not knowing is sometimes necessary especially appealing to your creative/artistic side. And thats coming from someone who has least knowledge about art.
Hey- agreed with the most part. Math is great for Science. But not so much for original Art (e.g., "Paint-by-Number") And by all means, no matter how great the math, "Luck" plays a great deal in it too.
Coincidences happen all the time. For every coincidence that happens and we notice, there is an endless number of coincidences that don't happen and we don't even realize possible... until they happen. You could be hit by thunder Win the lottery See a meteor burn up in the sky. Find a $200 bank note just lying on the street. All of these are just a few of an infinite amount of unlikely scenarios that just never happen to you... until one does, and people call it fate...
It all depends on when you begin the calculation. If you factor in the odds of Anne Parish becoming a children's author, the odds of her marrying that particular man, the odds of that book being given away, the odds of the estate being liquidated, the odds of it surviving the entire process, and other variables we have no clue about, then they get very interesting very quickly.
Well, deep down everything we do is very improbable. What are the odds for me having the exact breakfast I had this morning, at the exact time I did? Not very good, even though I eat similar breakfast at more or less same time every weekday morning. Our lives are a sum of amazing coincidences, and the odds of your life turning out the way it did, are minuscule. Had you slept 15 minutes longer one morning 10 years ago, your life might be totally different from what it is.
I have 19,454 unread emails on my phone. My coworker saw it today and told me I should read them. Yeah, that's how I ended up with 19,454 unread emails.
Okay but how long does it actually take to make a video like this? And who the hell makes those seriously amazing animations I wanna thank them personally.
+Hugh Mungus Have you tried getting a job at Google, working up the ranks until you become the manager over Username Changes and changed the settings to where you can change your username? That's usually the most efficient way to do it.
Just the fact that she is not the only person to who such a story could have happened and that countless other incredible sounding stories could have happened to her in her life makes that event really mundane. What if she discovered the book had been carved and had tons of money or secret documents in it? what if somebody else bought the book and he happened to know her? You see, there are so many events that one would call incredible, that the odds of one of them happening are quite high. It's like if you were surprised to draw all the aces in a card game one after another: you would be surprised, but so would you have if you had drawn 4 kings for exemple, while drawing 4 other cards at random would have seemed mundane when the odds were actually the same for those 4 cards to be drawn as for drawing 4 of the specified value. Our brain is made to recognize patterns: that's how we addapt to new situations, learn how to speek and even get curious enough to scientifically test things we could asume to be true.
The probabilities around the trip to Paris and her book being there I mostly buy, but finding the book still feels like a million to one shot. Those book stalls are endless and cluttered and disorganized. Even if you knew your book was in there somewhere, finding it would be incredibly lucky. .
I think Jumbo has a really interesting story, and it sort of fits the stories I like to do. This is my favorite book about Jumbo (it includes a great anecdote about Jumbo drinking beer from peoples' glasses): www.amazon.com/Jumbo-Being-Story-Greatest-Elephant/dp/1586421417 -Phil
As a russian speaker, I command all of you - PLEASE! It's NOT "Russian troika dolls" or "Babushka dolls", they are called "Matryoshka dolls"..... UGHHHHH!
I had a similar experience to Anne Parish. When i was around 7 years old, me and my brother would play this Xbox game called "Spy vs. Spy". Great game. But anyway, for a reason i can't remember, we sold it back to a game stop for probably dirt cheap. A few years later, my nostalgia had kicked in, and i had asked my parents to buy the game again. And yes, you guessed it, it was the same disc. We knew this because the file names were the ones we had put in. This is no where near as crazy of a story compared to Anne, but still it was kinda dope.
I flew from Finland to Thailand to spend my holiday there. Went to a particular open air bar for the first time and after 5 minutes i heard my name being called out, just to see a guy who had been my neighbour in Finland 3 years ago. We hadn't talked in years and had no idea of each others travel-plans. So, whats the explanation? Thailand is one of the most popular tourist-destinations for us Finns, we had both used the most popular travel-agency and had been put into the largest hotel that they co-oprated with in Thailand. Also the Bar was the closest one to this hotel and many of the people that said in the hotel visited it at least once during their trip... So, if i were to see somebody i know outside of Finland, it would most likely be in place like that. Nothing magical about it...
Pretty sure this coincidence has way more variables than getting a three of a kind in poker. You can't just pick and choose variables, like you did in this video when there are a thousand other variables that could effect either where she was or where he was.
" three of a kind in poker" *Four* of a kind. Not three. The odds are pretty different. "You can't just pick and choose variables like you did in this video when there are a thousand other variables that could effect either where she was or where he was." Wait what? What do you think of 'picking and choosing' variables as? The point of this video is to demonstrate how a mathematician thinks. They think by trying to break problems down into constituent parts, and assigning values to those parts. This is explicitly the process of a Fermi Approximation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem You can either say "it's too hard, impossible", or you can think of ways to deconstruct it. Mathematicians thrive at breaking down problems.
Hey guys... you know both of you are right, right? There are more variables, tons more, but we likely cannot know them. But that doesn't make them irrelevant. So they are there, but only as important as you feel they are. For a mathematician who simply wants to get an answer of some sort, he'll account for the variables he already knows of and accepts that his answer is an approximation, and perhaps not a very accurate one. Just the closest he can get. For another mathematician, one who has some vested interest in a greater degree of accuracy, he might go digging for more. For weather patterns, traffic patterns, personal accounts of the lives of the woman and the man who owned the stall- all to get a better picture of the real odds. But, seeing as life is more complicated than poker, even those odds would be imperfect- which the man in the video warns us about in the beginning, using the nesting dolls. Good metaphor, by the way. And an interesting video. By the way, Killer, ty for the link to the fermi's paradox page. I haven't heard that term since high school. Good refresher
Killua2001 My point is why try to break something down in a half-baked way? Then, make observations, adding a completely subjective probability, then getting a result in which is completely inaccurate. Sure finding variables in something, researching their significance thoroughly I understand, but calculating numbers based off of BS alone at the end seems to promote ignorance instead of understanding.
SH4D0WXR33CONt1 I think you're misunderstanding. To get any kind of real probability, you need a starting place. That's what a Fermi Approximation does. It's not expected to be precise or accurate, it's expected to give you a ballpark somewhere within one or two orders of magnitude. This is central to Perturbation Theory. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perturbation_theory It's not "BS". Factors like "who was most likely to inherit her childhood books", or "when did that person die" are pretty significant variables. You can *refine* these probabilities, but it's hard to pretend that they aren't relevant to calculating the probability of that coincidence. That's not to say that the answer is correct, but that this is the process of how mathematicians think. (And since I'm a physics graduate, it also closely resembles how I was taught to think. I think in orders of magnitude.) There's a reason for the Spherical Cow joke. The approximations may not be realistic in the end, but it's hard for someone like a mathematician to not at least *think* in terms of breaking a problem down into constituent parts. You may find that "BS", but so far as I can tell, it's just the basic first natural response to someone curious about numbers and probabilities. Thoughts. More accurate specific answers can come later.
+SH4D0WXR33CONt1 I highly doubt the mathematician's calculation was as simple as they described it in this 6 minute video. He said at the end that he wrote a whole book on this subject. The actual research would go way above most viewers heads, so they probably didn't even bother.
So this is crazy, but yesterday I had a feeling that there will be a death involving someone I know in the next few days. Today, I found out that the mother of someone I knew distantly had passed away, I thought this was a weird coincidence, but then I open my RU-vid page and find out that Vox uploaded a video related to coincidences? Dafuq?
There's also the fact that we don't mention things that aren't coincidences. There are a lot of possible coincidences, by a lot of people, and when one of them happens the stories tend to spread. The birthday paradox is a good example. In a room with only 23 people, there's a 50% chance that two share the same birthday. And it's very likely then that everyone in that room will hear about it, even though the coincidence only happened for two people.
This reminds me of the film 'Magnolia'. That film is all about how people's lives can intertwine in multiple ways (and a bunch of other themes, but mainly that intertwining one).
Good things happen to me a lot and my husband calls me the luckiest girl in the world. My sister thinks I'm psychic. But I just think the probability bell curve would predict that there will be some people at the far corner, those for whom things just align much more often than is usual for most. That's where I sit.
Well, he said he saw 7 comments claiming to be number 1, it doesn't mean he saw those comments in this video, he even may have seen those 7 comments in separate videos
the thing is, there are so many variables included that are not aforementioned, but she still managed to slip through and get lucky. its what makes it seemingly like a miracle.
There's another variable that he doesn't mention that explains the fundamental difference between what happened to Anne and getting dealt a certain hand in poker; with the latter, you are constantly renewing your odds. People typically don't play one game of poker and be done. There's more to it than just Anne showing up in Paris and having a reason for the book to end there; the whole "coincidence" depended on no one else having been brought already, nothing coming up, the book ending up there at the same time as her, her coming across that one book amongst the thousands in the market...
Well at the end of the day pealing away the events that lead to this woman reuniting with something she cared about doesn't make it any less beautiful. Its sweet to think that lovely things like this are less rare than we might otherwise have been led to believe.
This calculation also takes in the chance of her that year there needs to be the specification of that day, that stall, that book out of the rest. This calculation would be much rarer I would assume by at least a multiple of 500 it is significantly much rarer than a four of kind. But obviously there is no way to quantify why she decided to walk so technically we can specify an exact probability but I believe it is significantly more rare than suggested. Just the opinion of a senior actuarial science student at Purdue tho so what do I know. Lol
Ohhh... that's a slap in the face. In the face of all humans that can be rational. You are basically saying that it's "boring" to use your mind, to think about a situation, to act with consideration, to question things. That's quite a problem, dude.
Your analysis is akin to what I've known about plane crashes during my time working for "a large aerospace manufacturer". That is the actual crash is the 7th item in the chain of events. In other words not random.
The odds still had to line up. The thing is these stories are fascinating because of their emotional surprise factor. And even after these mathematical analyses, the psychological perception is still the same. The narrative way of perception works on the basis of engagement and how interesting an odd is. The probabilistic explanation doesnt puncture its enigma.
but did i miss the part where he calculated the probability that her own childhood book was in the book stall? cuz that's the most "amazing" part of the story and the reason why it is seen as this huge impossible coincidence. the rest of his calculations and thought process were logical but if you can't calculate the odds of her own personal childhood book ending up where she was on that day, then you haven't truly demystified this story imo
I would also say there's another mathematic/statistical way to debunk coincidences. One could also estimate how often non-coincedences happen. If every child on the planet would have one book he/she would have written something in and would put that book on a foreign market. It would be quite likely that at least one of them would rediscover that book and have this coincidental experience. So from the standpoint of the person who rediscover's his/her book from childhood it feels like a magical event, but discounting that against all the people who didn't rediscover their book it makes it more into an event that could have actually happened by chance.
I have a story. It's long, and you might find it uninteresting, but I'll tell it anyway. When I was in 5th grade, I became best friends with the kid that lived behind me because I started to take the bus, which was what he had done for years prior. Every morning we waited together, talked, had fun, and got incredibly close, along with a few other kids at school. This friendship lasted until the winter of 7th grade, when his family had to move to North Carolina because of his parent's job. I considered him to be my rock in early middle school; we had classes together, we talked in the hallways-- we grew apart in friend groups but we stayed friends. He always encouraged me to keep on drawing, that I would succeed as an artist, and that supported me throughout the time we were friends. So this guy moves away, I have no contact information of him and this continues until the summer before my senior year in high school, 5 years later. I signed up for a precollege experience at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh for art, and I'm there for three weeks. For the first week and a half, I made friends, we had fun, yada yada. One night, when my friends and I were cooking late at night in the dorms, our stove triggered a gas leak, so we pulled the fire alarm and we had to evacuate. That night I had made new friends, and a series of events led to another and we're having fun but what else do I see but this one guy who looked exactly like my childhood friend. I started freaking out-- before that night, I showed my other friend a photo of us when we were in 5th grade bc it was one of my only pics from childhood I had in my phone. I worked up the nerve to talk to him, and it turns out he was the same guy I had known way back when, and he even lived in the same dorm as me and i didn't know. We didn't really catch up after that night; 5 years apart led us our own separate ways, but it was still amazing that this even happened at all, almost 900 miles away from where we lived. Coincidence may be math but it's still a strange thing.
about 2 months ago there was a news story of a rear-end collision in Germany (nobody got hurt). The remarkable thing was that both drivers as well as the police officer documenting the case had the same birthday. If I didn't make any mistakes when calculating, this is expected to happen in one out of 133,225 accidents/occasions where 3 people are involved. If you consider how many accidents happen all the time the newsarticle (in german): diepresse.com/home/panorama/welt/5081591/Zufall_Drei-Geburtstage-bei-einem-Verkehrsunfall
This reminds me of a segment shown on "That's Incredible!", an American reality TV show in the early 80's. A girl wrote a note on a $5 bill and spent it. Twelve years later she came across that bill. Cathy Lee Crosby, one of the show's hosts, said the odds of that occurring was something like 6 billion to 1. Not impossible, but pretty close to it!
There are 7 billion people on Earth, so that happening to a random person would be about 1.17 to 1. Factoring in the number of people that would write a note on money minus the variable amount of people the bill would reach, that would be about 1000 to 1 (estimate). So multiplying the numbers together, the chance of this happening to one random person on Earth would be about 1.17×10⁻⁴ to 1.
anyway, why matreshka dolls are called "troika", I wonder) "troika" just means "three", "a group of three", and obviously there were more than three dolls here
Great topic Vox. Given enough iterations of a particular process some rare event or coincidence is bound to happen. In sports there is always something that pops up every year that is rare like this year with a Cubs/Cleveland World Series. It would be interesting also to see the exact odds of the common coincidences like having the exact same name, car, or liking the same movie.
i have an interesting story to share.. in my hindi literature text book back in standard 9th or 10th CBSE, we had a a chapter on sir C.V. Raman . i was surprised when i realized we had started the lesson on his birth day. And even more surprised and creeped out when the lesson ended on his death anniversary. C. V. Raman Indian physicist Born: 7 November 1888, Thiruvanaikoil, Tiruchirappalli Died: 21 November 1970, Bengaluru
"Ian" Parish made me chuckle throughout the video. That aside, this video is so important and so relevant in so many ways for all the pseudoscientific claims floating around.
This video is entertaining but, as several comments have pointed out, it completely misses the point of probability of unlikely events. The most important thing in these contexts is that probability is not absolute, but depends on what you already know. Hindsight completely changes the math of the problem. The original story is so amazing because the likelihood of SOMEONE finding their childhood book by chance across the ocean. However, once the event has already happened, it is of course more likely to happen to somebody who has better odds at it. So if you "start to dig" again, you first of all are dealing with a completely different math problem and, not surprisingly at all, you will find out that Ann had indeed far better odds of that particular, otherwise rare event happening to her specifically. So back to the original problem: why was it more likely that one would think after all? Because there are many unlikely events that make good stories. For us to be amazing by coincidence, it doesn't matter that Ann found her children's book or hear childhood teddy bear, or that it happened to her and not someone else in the first place. Adding the probability of all the unlikely "good story events" will actually give you the probability of something like that happening. I think this would make for an equally entertaining but accurate video, so please consider correcting this video, guys.
the thing that bothers me is that no one mentioned that of course it was a book she had interest in that she bought, and the reason she had interest in it was that she had it as a child, two events that were already linked that we never think about.
Great video but that ticking sound effects imitating “pressing the phone screen” drove me crazy in the beginning I thought my speakers had something in them.
I don't want to get into get quantum physics and whether real probability exists, but assuming fatalism you only need to know all the variables and every event has a 100% chance. Even if real probability exists you can get very close assuming you know enough variables. That's why there is the concept of chance. You always base it on what you know.
When in Holland in 1960, I ran into a woman on the street. I recognized her immediately -- and she, me -- we had been friends in the 4th grade but hadn't seen each other since. I can sure see why we'd both be in Europe that year but the question is: How did we still recognize each other? We were 18 and hadn't seen each other since we were 8 or 9yo.
poker player here... while you can be dealt a hand that makes 4 of a kind.. it wont be, on average, within an hour. more like... 125+ hours of playing.
Zefram0911 The point was that it does happen to some people in an hour of playing. There are million of people who never find their long lost childhood items, but some people will.
if you think about it, everything is based on probability (like meeting your "soulmate" its all about the things you do most or the people that you know). And the whole universe can be explained with mathematics
Two things I learned from this video: mathematics will always find a way to ruin a good story & Phil Edwards sends emails with, "You have to see this!" like a cookie-cutter spam message.
I stopped to retie my shoe one morning. 20 minutes later I was 3 seconds late for a car coming through a red light that would have t-boned me dead. What are the odds of that?
Here's another simpler way of looking at - try to imagine all the amazing coincidences that DON'T happen!! Maybe Joe Mazur can calculate how many of them there are ;-)
She went to Paris every two years... she always looked in the book stalls, she always looked at the children's section, English language books did not sell and so tended to stick around ... we seem to be nearing 100% ..
I think of it more complexically. What are the odds of the book heading to Paris? x. What are the odds of the book going to that particular bookstore? y. What are the odds of that book not being bought? n. What are the odds of that book being available, and sightable? k. What are the odds Anne went exactly to that bookstore? p. What are the odds of her deciding to go to the bookstore? z. What are the odds of them going to Paris? r. As you can see, it gets immeasurably complex.
Real life is defined within a fixed set of parameters since the world we live in is finite, especially for those who seldom leave the confines of their home/town/city/district/nation. Considering she was a novelist and reader of children's fiction, ventured to Paris every other year, and Paris had only two bookstores at the time, with limited amounts of literature in English, and her mother died and sold off her estate in Paris - the odds of Anne recovering her book are not incredibly remote.
***** And those decisions are influenced by conditioning and restricted to what's possible in this physical and finite world. Real life IS a deck of cards - it's just that the deck contains vastly more than 52 possibilities.
It's fun to dig into a particular story, but the other mathematical aspect is that rare events are highly likely in the long run. There are millions of books bought in far-flung locations - the odds that a story like this one would NOT occur in 100 years of book buying are pretty low! (A coincidence like this, not the particular book and person combo). We tend to put more importance on rare events that produce a coincidental result than on the millions of coincidences that are not noteworthy. Ever look at a digital clock and see number sequences that mean something in everyday life? 1:23, 7:47, 9:11, 4:11, 3:14 etc. These tend to be memorable because we notice the double meaning, not that they occur more frequently than any other sequence we happen to observe and immediately forget.
The moral of the story is when all rational factors are removed than its coincidence... If You believe in coincidence. Would the same factors be in place had she decided to travel to Paris, four years later or had she skipped going to any book shops or stalls and still found that book in a Parisian Cafe that had books?
