تعبير
انجليزي عن coincidence
تعبير انجليزي عن coincidence
Coincidences are part of life
Coincidences are ubiquitous events in our
lives. Some seem insignificant, like distributing a poker flush, but others
really attract our attention: thinking of a friend who has not been seen for
several years and who calls you right now or shortly after. What these events
have in common is that desire to always want to explain them, as if there was a
special reason that they happened as they happened. These attempts at
explanations can range from the lucky rabbit's paw to gri-gri, to the horoscope
or to the gift of shared telepathy with a friend. But what people do not know,
or simply do not want to know (as it is true that believing in irrational or
supernatural elements reassures sometimes), is that the coincidences, as
remarkable as they sometimes seem, are in no way surprising. In fact, most are
just facts, events without any meaning.
There are many reasons why people
misinterpret coincidences. Human beings have a relatively limited understanding
and knowledge of probabilities, we believe that each effect must have an
intentional cause, we do not understand the laws relating to large numbers, and
succumb easily to selective memory and subjective validation: this tend to
remember positive correlations and forget about the greater number of cases
where nothing happens to significant.
Probabilities are not really popular when
you go to high school. This is a shame because a good mastery gives you the
means to fully appreciate and understand the meaning, or lack of meaning, of
most everyday events. A misunderstanding of probabilities and statistics,
common in our societies, makes people more easily surprised and amazed at what
they should be when faced with coincidences, hence the easy and quick jump to
the metaphysical explanation.
For example, how lucky are two people with
the same date of birth to be in a 23-person room? Most people will answer that
it must be close to 1 in 30 or even less. Surprisingly, this "chance"
is only 1 in 2 (the probability is 50%) and can be calculated very simply:
(364x363x362 ... x343) / 36522 The fact that most people are ignorant, pushes
them to quickly conclude that their experience was so unlikely that perhaps a
supernatural force or a very special bond brought them together. In a larger
group, this probability rises very quickly. It is 7/10 for a group of 40 people
and for a group of 100 people, there are 3 million chances against one that two
people have the same date of birth.
Most people, especially on a trip, are
very surprised when they discover having a mutual friend with a stranger.
Sociologists have shown that two individuals at random know (in the broadest
sense) an average of 1000 people each, which gives, for a population of 50
million inhabitants, 1 chance in 50,000 so that they know each other. The
probability that these two people have a common friend increases sharply to 1
in 50, and the probability of being connected by a chain of two is greater than
99 out of 100. In other words, if Durand and Dubois are two people chosen at
random, it is almost certain that Durand will know someone who knows someone
Dubois knows!
The real meaning of bizarre coincidences
can be understood and explained by what is called the law of very large
numbers. This statistical law establishes that with a sufficiently large
sample, even the most improbable becomes probable, and thus becomes
"supernatural". An example that the case of this woman from New
Jersey who, a few years ago, had won 2 times in the lottery in 4 months. The
newspapers reporting the case explained that there was a 1 in 1.7x1018 chance
of this happening. Technically, this is correct, but it is misleading because
it is based on a much too narrow perspective. The odds for a given person to
win 2 draws with 2 tickets purchased is actually 1 in 1018, but the odds for
someone to win among the millions of people playing is only 1 in 30. This is
the background of the law on very large numbers. Unusual events become highly
probable when enough individuals are involved. This lifts the scape of mystery
surrounding certain phenomena and leads simply to scientific reflection.
