Matt Parker

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278 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2010 last heard 8 Jul

Matt Parker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · How useful is GDP? · 22 Apr 2011 podcast

And if you choose the first name, John, it's not independent.

You choose a second name, Charles.

And on top of that, they're at a party with their friends.

And you don't choose your friends at random by rolling a dice.

Well, most people don't.

Friends are picked because they're people you know and they're people that generally have similar lifestyles.

So if we actually wanted to get the real probability of this, we'd have to look much deeper into the statistics and pretty much conduct some surveys at dinner parties.

But short of doing that, we can still assume, even though it's much more likely than we expect, it is still fairly unlikely, which is where we come across our second problem, the number of chances this has had to happen.

There may have been more people at the dinner party and just five of them happened to match.

What if their mother's names had matched?

Would that be equally amazing?

Because that doubles our chances straight away.

And the father's name could have been any name.

And we just looked at the chance that it's John Charles.

And what if they discovered this at a football game?

or any other situation.

In fact there are loads of opportunities for people to realise they all have a significant person that they all know with all the same name.

And once you start looking at that you realise even though it's still amazing it happened to them it's really not amazing that it happened in general.

So if you look across the entire population things like this are expected.

It's a bit like winning the lottery.

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