Mark Gagnon

You need 23 people.

Yeah.

And then in order to get a 99.9%, you're like, oh, you probably need like 360.

You actually only need 70.

Now, this feels wrong because there are 365 days in a year, but the math is actually completely correct.

People underestimate it because they think about the odds of someone sharing their specific birthday when that's not what the question's asking.

The question is asking, what are the odds that any two people

share any birthday.

Now this matters because it's a metaphor for how we think about extraordinary events, right?

We ask, what are the odds of this specific thing happening to me?

When the real question is, what are the odds of this remarkable thing happening to anyone ever?

So Littlewood's law describes this beautifully.

It was established by a Cambridge mathematician named J.E.

Littlewood, and he defined a miracle as any event with a one in a million chance.

He then estimated that every person experiences about one event per second during their waking hours, seeing things, hearing stuff, encountering people, making decisions.

And at one event per second,

eight hours a day, you're going to rack up a million events every 35 days.

That means statistically, you should expect a one in a million event roughly once a month.

So according to this law, if miracles are one in a million events, they're actually not that rare.

They're just, they're actually on schedule.