WeAreTheKey

Being a bit of a skeptic myself when it comes to many "uncanny" things, I found this article interesting.

Law of truly large numbers:

http://skepdic.com/lawofnumbers.html

Huh, that was kinda interesting. Though they seem to be stretching reason a little by saying things like "With 6 billion people having an average of 250 dream themes each per night..."

Really? 250 "dream themes" each night? Most people can't remember anything from any particular night, let alone 250. Plus, dreaming of seeing a cat, then seeing a cat the next day would be far from a coincidence. But having an entire dream about ONE specific, peculiar and random thing, which you can recall vividly, then having that one specific thing happen directly afterwards is far less likely.
Plus, they point out that strange coincidences are likely to happen to someone with 6 billion people on the planet, but fail to separate that from the odds of them happening to you, which is much less likely.
I'm not saying it's not still just a coincidence, but the article seems bent on proving it's point in kind of a silly way, like poking holes in Uri Geller, who everyone knows has been discredited about a million different times. And by claiming that the odds of winning the lottery twice AREN'T "1 in 17 trillion" but apparently a simple "1 in 30 for a four month period" which is clearly a load of crap. Are they talking about winning anything like when you get 3 or 4 of the numbers right and win $50? They must be, which is totally misleading since the "1 in 17 trillion" odds are obviously referring to winning The Jackpot twice.

What's up with that?
I'm often equally annoyed by people who believe and cling to flimsy "theories" (like Geller's '11' theory), AND by the skeptics who often snootily look down their noses at any theory and clearly take giddy delight in their 'debunking'.
I wish they could all just meet in the middle and get real about the facts, leaving the wackiness and the condescension aside.
I'm not really referring to just this article, but to many things I've read, so I just thought I'd go off on that a bit.

Yeah, that "250 dreams per night" number didn't seem right to me, either. According to dreamresearch.net: "dreams happen very regularly at least five or six times per night in an active stage of sleep called REM sleep". That's a big difference.

My understanding of the 1:30 lottery odds was that is the actual odds of someone winning the lottery for a second time. The point was that when someone did that on the east coast, it was actually mathematically likely for that to finally happen.

I also think that this guy starts with a good point and pushes it past it's limits. I agree that many, even most, events that people describe as uncanny, karma, divine intervention, fate, etc, etc, are simply coincidences. However, trying to explain ALL strange happenings in such a way is going overboard. Someone seeing the exact sequence of a dream unfold in front of them in real life is not a coincidence.

Well I'm still a bit confused about the lottery thing, but perhaps they have a point that I haven't understood yet. Kinda like that "3-door problem" that had me baffled for a while.
Perhaps they mean that winning twice is bound to happen to someone at some point, and those odds are 1:30 for any four-month period... which means it "ought" to happen about every ten years, statistically.
But it still would be the average person's odds of winning the jackpot SQUARED, since you'd multiply the odds by themselves.
So if your odds of winning the jackpot were 1 in 31,622 - which is very good odds for a lottery - then your odds of winning it twice are ALREADY 1 in a Billion!
For your odds of winning twice to be "1 in 17 Trillion", you'd have to be playing a lottery with Jackpot chances of 1 in 4,123,105, or roughly one in four million. However according to
savingadvice.com, "single state lotteries usually have odds of about 18 million to 1".
Which means with those odds, winning twice is more like..... 1 in 324,000,000,000,000! That's 324 TRILLION! WTF?
Here in Oregon, our odds of jackpotting (?) are 1 in 6,135,756. Hey, not bad! Too bad winning it twice would take overcoming odds of 37,647,501,691,536 to 1...

My brain just exploded.

Yes, any single individual's odds of winning the lottery twice are astronomical, but the odds of somebody doing it are not so high.

It's like a Royal Flush in poker is a very rare hand for an individual to get in poker. But if you take all the poker games all over the U.S. then the odds are not only that you'd come across one, but many, many Royal Flush's.

The main point is that individually rare occurances are actually statistically expected occurances when taken in large numbers and therefore should not be taken as "divine intervention" just because it was unlikely to happen to you.

Also, one more note on the lottery scenario: Remember that the given lottery odds are per ticket, not per person. Many people buy multiple lottery tickets. In fact, most "regular" lottery players buy multiple tickets.

True stuff.

Which reminds me, when I was about 8 or so, I asked my stepdad what would happen if in baseball, someone hit a ball and it landed on the top of the wall somehow, so it's neither in-field nor out, would it be considered a home-run?
Instead of answering, he basically scolded me for asking such stupid questions, because such things have never happened, and the odds are that it never will happen, so don't be such an idiot, etc...


WELL WELL WELL...
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/720944/

Now THAT'S divine intervention

ps- What a fuc#ing a$$h@!#

Crazy numbers! I agree that anyone looking for something will find it. Like the movie number 23. I was creeped out at first by the movie and reading this article, but I all came together for me. Numbers are magical, just like everything else, and who ever the magician is, they can make is seem like anything can happen. But it may just be an illusion....

Cool baseball thing! Way to asked questions Transfixed. By the way has your step dad ever seen that video?

Yeah, i'm very familiar with the "23" phenomena, though not through the movie. In fact i refused to see the movie on the basis I strongly suspected they would massacre the genuine implications. In another forum I regular a phrase "what the thinker thinks, the prover proves" is often referred to, this is a concept that I continually try to remind myself of when working with exercises that may effect consciousness (the quote is from the same person who expanded on the 23 phenomena long before the movie btw)

The phrase boils down to what you've been talking about. If you suspect, or worse, believe something will occur, things are connected, or a certain pattern exists (the " thinker" part of the brain) you will seek out, completely subconsciously, evidence that supports that supposition and ignore that which does not (the "prover" part of the brain.) There's all kinds of evidence that the brain simply ignores information it takes in if it is contradictory to one's beliefs or moral stance. So I very much agree that many coincidences seem simply that, connections the individual constructs to add more significance than is probably due.

On the other hand there is also evidence that as a person develops the right hemisphere of the brain or increased neural connection over the corpus callosum that in addition to increased intuitive activity that synchronicities, those meaningful coincidences posited by Jung, also increase. I know several people who claim to have experienced this and read of many more.

So I suppose I sit somewhere in the middle on this. While for the most part I remain skeptical, I don't discredit the idea of synchronous happenings.

Wouldn't the movie still be massacred (or not) regardless of whether you saw it?!

I mean....I dunno.....I thought it was kinda cool.

of course it would or wouldn't. "refused" sounds like I was excited by it and against it though I guess... I mostly just sighed and ignored it...
I couldn't see how an ontological exercise (as I was introduced to the concept) thrown in as part of a major production Hollywood action (horror?) movie in the way it appeared would offer much more than a watered down version of the idea and aside from that the movie as simply a movie just didn't really interest me that much.

Well you missed out on the actual experience of a really good movie cause you let your knowledge of a subject matter overpower your chance to get lost in a wickedly interesting movie.

I am sad that you shafted yourself.

but to each his own I guess.

Well this has gone off topic now, but in all fairness I did ask several people their thoughts on the movie and took that into account too. I was willing to suspend the subject and just approach it as a movie if it sounded great but I rarely watch movies (rather read + work, school, baby, pick one) as it is and it didn't seem like a must as one of the 4 or 5 movies I maybe watch a year. so, yeah, my loss I guess... eh.

Well, to continue our off-topicness, I am always torn by such movies because if you do know a lot about the subject, then it can be frustrating to see it only 1/2 expressed in a movie.
But on the other hand, most people aren't aware of the idea at all, so the film is going to introduce a lot fo people to the concept, from which point they can investigate or learn on their own. So in the end, it's not really a bad thing I think. Besides, the 23 number phenomenon was just the device they used to drive the story along, it wasn't really about the number itself. The story was pretty cool too.

AHEM - now back to coincidences....boy....those sure are weird...