Mark Gagnon

Right.

Like think about you riding your bike and all of a sudden you stop to pick up a penny on the ground.

And right when you stop, a truck flies in front of you and almost hits you.

And you're like, wow, what a miracle.

And it's like, yeah, it is.

But also you get one of those a month.

Now, the law of truly large numbers extends this principle to populations as well.

With 8 billion people on Earth, a one in a billion event should happen about eight times.

A one in a million event should happen 8,000 times.

Every day, someone somewhere is experiencing something that feels cosmically impossible, but actually it should happen.

It's just math.

But of course, these laws that aren't actually laws, they require you to agree with Littlewood's definition of a miracle with the proposition of the average person experiencing just one event per second.

It's an interesting idea, a cool framework to try to understand what's going on.

It just requires you to get on board with his presuppositions.

But then, another thing to consider when you're looking at these patterns, we have to think about the phenomenon of apophenia.

You may have heard this word before.

Apophenia is the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in completely random data.

And this isn't a bug in...

what makes us human.

It's actually a helpful feature.