Coincidence, Fate, and Large Numbers
I recently got a letter from the DMV that said “…you may believe that you’re a good driver, but your record shows that you are not a safe as you might think.” Below their friendly “warning” was a summary of the two speeding infractions that had recently been added to my record a month apart. My first thought: “Ha! Little do they know that I had a third ticket erased by driving school.” My second: “Wait a second…how does two tickets in two months equate to being a bad driver? There must be thousands of people getting a letter like this!” A quick calculation shows that a driver who gets a ticket once every 10 years on average - by no means a surefire bad driver - has a 1 in 7200 chance of getting tickets in back-to-back months. Long odds, to be sure, not that rare when you consider that there are roughy 200 million licensed drivers in the US.
Put yourself in my shoes? Would you curse your shitty luck? Blame a bored police force? Accept it and find a nearby bar with cheap - no, really-cheap-natty light-because-you-can’t-afford-craft beer? All of the above? First, let’s change the situation: imagine that instead of getting back to back tickets, you found an incredible job and future husband/wife in back-to-back months. What would you think? Would you think of it as “things happening for a reason”, divine intervention, fate, or the ultimate realization of your amazing professional and socio-sexual talents?
Before you answer that, let’s look at this from a different perspective. In between the ages of 22 (approximate college graduation age) and 32, a span of 10 years (same as the speeding example), on average people will find both a) a job they’re at least a bit excited about, and b) a potential spouse (Clarification: I’m using rough estimates from Baby Boomers/Gen X data, and the probability is admittedly much lower with the Millennial generation, but bear with me here, this is only meant to be an approximation). While not precise, the odds of such an event (exciting job + potential spouse in back-to-back months) happening does not significantly differ from the speeding ticket example. And given that there are roughly 50 million people in the 22-32 age range in the US, that means that roughly 7000 people in that span should be expected to experience such fortune purely by chance.
What does this mean? Simply put, human beings did not evolve to understand how large numbers and probabilities affect our lives, a limitation closely tied to our intuitive notion of cause and effect. We’re hardwired to believe that events that occur close together are related and often causal, something that probably helped us survive before we developed tools, fire, electricity, and modern technology. This phenomenon is what drives people to believe that dancing creates rain (ex: Tom was dancing and it rained, therefore dancing creates rain), that walking under a ladder is bad luck (ex: look at Bob - he did that and he got hit by a car afterwards), and that knocking on wood does, well, anything (knock on wood). There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year, seconds in which thoughts and actions are occurring almost constantly, and almost 7 billion people on the planet - coincidences (good and bad) are going to happen, and they’re going to happen A LOT.
When I used to play poker full-time, I was always amused by conversations with people who believed that things like phase of the moon or weather affected their luck - not surprisingly, those people were always losing their money. The reality is much simpler: poker is a game of skill and a game of chance. The best hand may not hold up often in a single session or even over due to bad luck (the equivalent of getting those back-to-back speeding tickets) but in the long run you’re going to win money when you’re consistently getting your money in with hands that are better than your opponents’.
So, what’s the point? Well, it’s pretty simple really: just like poker, life is part luck and part skill. In the short term, a series of good things or a series of bad things may very well occur together. So if you experience an unexpected bout of crappy luck in your love, professional, or social life - don’t put too much stock in it. We’re all going to experience that at some point no matter what we do, and it’s easy to draw incorrect and potentially unhealthy conclusions from it. To paraphrase, shit happens. Furthermore, you actually have a good degree of control over how often good or bad things happen in your life - the “skill” of life, if you will. By increasing the things more likely to lead to good outcomes (e.g. eating well, working hard, exercising, getting negative people out of your life) and decreasing the things that are more likely to lead to bad outcomes (e.g. spending more than 2 consecutive nights in Vegas), you’ll significantly improve the odds that you’ll experience more fortune than misfortune in your life. That’s what I’d call karma an amazing consequence of mathematics.