Largely agreed.
Establishing proof-positive that you're seeing something statistically abnormal requires you to understand as completely as possible the actual likelihood of the event occurring.
If I flip a coin 50 times and it's tails 48 times, I can accurately say that is not likely a coincidence. It could be, but we understand that there is an equal chance of either heads or tails, and there can be no other outcomes. It's important that we understand the most likely outcome (25 heads, 25 tails) and extrapolate from that whether or not we're looking at an unnatural pattern.
I don't feel like that is possible for a lot of the potential "coincidences" that are suggested here.
For instance, is it an impossible array of coincidences that the number 17 is mentioned as many times as it is?
The number 17 a small number within the useful and common numbers humans use every day. It would be weird to see the number 1,427,389 everywhere, because it's not a small, common number. But there are plenty of times when the number 17 can occur within our lives and have absolutely no meaning whatsoever.
I see it at the gas pump. I count 17 people in a random work group. My phone showed 17 minutes elapsed before I was taken off hold. And sometimes, 17 senators do something or 17 soldiers die overseas. I see it everywhere because I hang out with you guys, and 17 is important to you, so I see it, even though it's not remotely important to me. Because my brain is looking for it without me knowing.
Within a small range of low, common numbers (say, 1-50), how many times do you see any of those numbers at all? To know if 17 is showing up too many times, we'd need to know whether it's showing up far more often than 16 or 18. Anyone posting headlines with those numbers around here, just to make sure? That'd be useful research.
I know that not everyone is on the "17 is significant" bandwagon, but that's just demonstrating the problem with trying to analyze apparent coincidences that happen in real life.
It's very difficult to know what the "fail" conditions are for events that happen in real life, and chaos theory plus the sheer number of things that happen every single day make it very possible to trick yourself into thinking that something being more common than you thought (like the number 17 or the fact that people in power die and resign all the time) actually means that something is more common than it statistically should be.
Largely agreed.
Establishing proof-positive that you're seeing something statistically abnormal requires you to understand as completely as possible the actual likelihood of the event occurring.
If I flip a coin 50 times and it's tails 48 times, I can accurately say that is not likely a coincidence. It could be, but we understand that there is an equal chance of either heads or tails, and there can be no other outcomes. It's important that we understand the most likely outcome (25 heads, 25 tails) and extrapolate from that whether or not we're looking at an unnatural pattern.
I don't feel like that is possible for a lot of the potential "coincidences" that are suggested here.
For instance, is it an impossible array of coincidences that the number 17 is mentioned as many times as it is?
The number 17 a small number within the useful and common numbers humans use every day. It would be weird to see the number 1,427,389 everywhere, because it's not a small, common number. But there are plenty of times when the number 17 can occur within our lives and have absolutely no meaning whatsoever.
I see it at the gas pump. I count 17 people in a random work group. My phone showed 17 minutes elapsed before I was taken off hold. And sometimes, 17 senators do something or 17 soldiers die overseas.
Within a small range of low, common numbers (say, 1-50), how many times do you see any of those numbers at all? To know if 17 is showing up too many times, we'd need to know whether it's showing up far more often than 16 or 18. Anyone posting headlines with those numbers around here, just to make sure? That'd be useful research.
I know that not everyone is on the "17 is significant" bandwagon, but that's just demonstrating the problem with trying to analyze apparent coincidences that happen in real life.
It's very difficult to know what the "fail" conditions are for events that happen in real life, and chaos theory plus the sheer number of things that happen every single day make it very possible to trick yourself into thinking that something being more common than you thought (like the number 17 or the fact that people in power die and resign all the time) actually means that something is more common than it statistically should be.