How a mathematician dissects a coincidence
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- Опубликовано: 30 окт 2016
- Can you unknot a twist of fate with logic? Vox's Phil Edwards asked mathematician Joseph Mazur about his book, Fluke, and one of its most incredible stories. Follow Phil Edwards and Vox Almanac on Facebook for more: / philedwardsinc1
Find a link to the book and more information here: www.vox.com/2016/10/31/1345723...
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People are saying the moral of this story is "don't share click bait," but this isn't the takeaway at all. The lesson here is when confronted with a coincidence, one must immediately demystify it by looking for hidden variables. That is, look for nonobvious factors that increase the likelihood of such an occurrence. You will become a more clever person in doing so.
doodelay well, I would say that you can still definitely hold things in mystery if you like. I like to do that with a lot of things. But at the end of the day knowing that everything is quantifiable is also assuring 😊
Bon Bon yeah so?
***** Neutron Star lol ikr? Like that's a bad thing 😂
yeah but sometimes a bit of mystery and wonder is also good. like a good act or scifi movie wouldn't be as entertaining everytime if you knew exactly how everything came together in it's making. also i have experienced this with singers, when you hear one of your favourite singers perform live and you realise the horrible difference between that and the recorded version...or maybe while reading a good suspense novel and you let the writer take you through the various events rather than pausing just before the last chapter and using math and psych (instead of your imagination) to find out who the killer would most likely be. just my opinion that wonder and the magic of not knowing is sometimes necessary especially appealing to your creative/artistic side. And thats coming from someone who has least knowledge about art.
Hey- agreed with the most part. Math is great for Science. But not so much for original Art (e.g., "Paint-by-Number") And by all means, no matter how great the math, "Luck" plays a great deal in it too.
If you are the type of person who forwards emails containing clickbaity news stories about "coincidences", you are the problem with this world.
Yep, thats the problem with the world, not world hunger, not mass poverty, not capitalism.
Its annoying emails
Clickbait emails are the heart of the world's problems
+Bobo Jojo Well, forwarding those emails is a symptom of the problem which causes all these things you listed to still exist.
+ yes yes yes!
But did you know Abraham Lincoln had a son named "John F Kennedy" who assassinated his twin brother on the same day as him?
Math: ruining fun for everyone but in a fun way.
I don't think clickbaits were ever fun to begin with
Video Graham 😂
Some people appreciate it
Coincidences happen all the time. For every coincidence that happens and we notice, there is an endless number of coincidences that don't happen and we don't even realize possible... until they happen.
You could be hit by thunder
Win the lottery
See a meteor burn up in the sky.
Find a $200 bank note just lying on the street.
All of these are just a few of an infinite amount of unlikely scenarios that just never happen to you... until one does, and people call it fate...
Leon Campa finding a $200 bill might be a bit hard, seeing as they don't exist (unless they do in a currency I'm not aware of)
Omar Sayyed he said bank note, it's a little different I believe
Isn't bill = bank note?
Ramadhiansyah R....tbh, you could be completely right.
Ramadhiansyah R I do believe they are the same
moral of the story.....stop forwarding stupid clickbaity spam
how is the title clickbait??
Munchausenification not the title but the fictional e-mail in the video
man, it's not 2004 anymore...
Samatar Ahmed DO NOT do it for the lulz
gtabro1337 *stop tweeting and sharing clickbaity spam on fb
It all depends on when you begin the calculation. If you factor in the odds of Anne Parish becoming a children's author, the odds of her marrying that particular man, the odds of that book being given away, the odds of the estate being liquidated, the odds of it surviving the entire process, and other variables we have no clue about, then they get very interesting very quickly.
Well, technically he's calculating P(she buys the book | it's in that store).
This reminds me of chaos theory. Way too many variables.
transformersloverjon Yeah, and the odds that Mary Cassatt would somehow end up with Anne Parish's childhood book AND bother to take it back to Paris.
But then you multiply that by around 1 billion women at the time.
Well, deep down everything we do is very improbable. What are the odds for me having the exact breakfast I had this morning, at the exact time I did? Not very good, even though I eat similar breakfast at more or less same time every weekday morning. Our lives are a sum of amazing coincidences, and the odds of your life turning out the way it did, are minuscule. Had you slept 15 minutes longer one morning 10 years ago, your life might be totally different from what it is.
It really bothers me how many unread emails there are on that phone
I have 19,454 unread emails on my phone. My coworker saw it today and told me I should read them. Yeah, that's how I ended up with 19,454 unread emails.
aluisious
Alistair Drennan
Alistair Drennan
Alistair Drennan sounds like a job for Hillary
Okay but how long does it actually take to make a video like this? And who the hell makes those seriously amazing animations I wanna thank them personally.
Am I the only one who wants this job? Investigative Mathematician.
Youssef Khaled yea
yea
Yea you're the only one in history
do it! only people who don't are too dumb too understand math don't think math is cool
Go for it man. As a STEM Major we need for STEM field jobs!
this didn't feel like a vox video for some reason.
You have simon says, and then you have sami said
samy said That's just a coincidence
The easiest way to say it is: The world has infinite opportunities for coincidences.
Correct
I love how good you guys are getting at these video essays.
thank you
Hugh Mungus Is that sexual harassment?
The World Is Logic Google won't let me change my username anymore.
Hugh Mungus :0
That could be unfortunate (depending on your view of dying memes).
:)
+Hugh Mungus Have you tried getting a job at Google, working up the ranks until you become the manager over Username Changes and changed the settings to where you can change your username? That's usually the most efficient way to do it.
Really who still shares stuff via email?
vox does apparently
sergio7D older relatives
I do and im 24.
+Munchausenification lol
sergio7D my grandad.
No I'm being serious he actually does.
This editing is dank as fuck.
The probabilities around the trip to Paris and her book being there I mostly buy, but finding the book still feels like a million to one shot. Those book stalls are endless and cluttered and disorganized. Even if you knew your book was in there somewhere, finding it would be incredibly lucky. .
whats the odds of me watching this video after I failed my math exam? I dont know because I failed my math exam
Kept getting distracted looking for my phone when the vibrate sounded in the video.
Just the fact that she is not the only person to who such a story could have happened and that countless other incredible sounding stories could have happened to her in her life makes that event really mundane. What if she discovered the book had been carved and had tons of money or secret documents in it? what if somebody else bought the book and he happened to know her?
You see, there are so many events that one would call incredible, that the odds of one of them happening are quite high.
It's like if you were surprised to draw all the aces in a card game one after another: you would be surprised, but so would you have if you had drawn 4 kings for exemple, while drawing 4 other cards at random would have seemed mundane when the odds were actually the same for those 4 cards to be drawn as for drawing 4 of the specified value.
Our brain is made to recognize patterns: that's how we addapt to new situations, learn how to speek and even get curious enough to scientifically test things we could asume to be true.
Thank you VOX.
For all the love and for all the effort you put in all these videos!!
Vox, your editing is so awesome
Hey Vox, why do you actually have a picture of Jumbo the elephant in your intro?
I think Jumbo has a really interesting story, and it sort of fits the stories I like to do. This is my favorite book about Jumbo (it includes a great anecdote about Jumbo drinking beer from peoples' glasses): www.amazon.com/Jumbo-Being-Story-Greatest-Elephant/dp/1586421417
-Phil
this is actually called 'Synchronicity'; when a symbolic event implies causation without actually having anything to do with causation.
I love it when Vox makes little insightful and well edited videos like these.
So this is crazy, but yesterday I had a feeling that there will be a death involving someone I know in the next few days. Today, I found out that the mother of someone I knew distantly had passed away, I thought this was a weird coincidence, but then I open my RUclips page and find out that Vox uploaded a video related to coincidences? Dafuq?
Sherif Carlin A coincidence?
Sherif Carlin illuminati confirmed
Coincidence? I THINK NOT
Intuition >> Coincidences
A lot of people die and people often think of death. You only remember the times the two collide.
Pretty sure this coincidence has way more variables than getting a three of a kind in poker. You can't just pick and choose variables, like you did in this video when there are a thousand other variables that could effect either where she was or where he was.
" three of a kind in poker"
*Four* of a kind. Not three. The odds are pretty different.
"You can't just pick and choose variables like you did in this video when there are a thousand other variables that could effect either where she was or where he was."
Wait what? What do you think of 'picking and choosing' variables as? The point of this video is to demonstrate how a mathematician thinks. They think by trying to break problems down into constituent parts, and assigning values to those parts. This is explicitly the process of a Fermi Approximation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
You can either say "it's too hard, impossible", or you can think of ways to deconstruct it. Mathematicians thrive at breaking down problems.
Hey guys... you know both of you are right, right? There are more variables, tons more, but we likely cannot know them. But that doesn't make them irrelevant. So they are there, but only as important as you feel they are. For a mathematician who simply wants to get an answer of some sort, he'll account for the variables he already knows of and accepts that his answer is an approximation, and perhaps not a very accurate one. Just the closest he can get.
For another mathematician, one who has some vested interest in a greater degree of accuracy, he might go digging for more. For weather patterns, traffic patterns, personal accounts of the lives of the woman and the man who owned the stall- all to get a better picture of the real odds. But, seeing as life is more complicated than poker, even those odds would be imperfect- which the man in the video warns us about in the beginning, using the nesting dolls. Good metaphor, by the way. And an interesting video.
By the way, Killer, ty for the link to the fermi's paradox page. I haven't heard that term since high school. Good refresher
Killua2001 My point is why try to break something down in a half-baked way? Then, make observations, adding a completely subjective probability, then getting a result in which is completely inaccurate. Sure finding variables in something, researching their significance thoroughly I understand, but calculating numbers based off of BS alone at the end seems to promote ignorance instead of understanding.
SH4D0WXR33CONt1
I think you're misunderstanding. To get any kind of real probability, you need a starting place. That's what a Fermi Approximation does. It's not expected to be precise or accurate, it's expected to give you a ballpark somewhere within one or two orders of magnitude.
This is central to Perturbation Theory.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perturbation_theory
It's not "BS". Factors like "who was most likely to inherit her childhood books", or "when did that person die" are pretty significant variables. You can *refine* these probabilities, but it's hard to pretend that they aren't relevant to calculating the probability of that coincidence.
That's not to say that the answer is correct, but that this is the process of how mathematicians think. (And since I'm a physics graduate, it also closely resembles how I was taught to think. I think in orders of magnitude.)
There's a reason for the Spherical Cow joke. The approximations may not be realistic in the end, but it's hard for someone like a mathematician to not at least *think* in terms of breaking a problem down into constituent parts.
You may find that "BS", but so far as I can tell, it's just the basic first natural response to someone curious about numbers and probabilities. Thoughts. More accurate specific answers can come later.
+SH4D0WXR33CONt1 I highly doubt the mathematician's calculation was as simple as they described it in this 6 minute video. He said at the end that he wrote a whole book on this subject. The actual research would go way above most viewers heads, so they probably didn't even bother.
honestly, Vox is an awesome channel and it deserves more subscribers.
As a russian speaker, I command all of you - PLEASE! It's NOT "Russian troika dolls" or "Babushka dolls", they are called "Matryoshka dolls".....
UGHHHHH!
The most interesting thing is that this typically-Russian artifact takes its origins from Japan. Who knew...
Matryoshka!! Or "mother" makes sense. Only reason I know what that means is from Maria GentleWhispering
They're dolls guys
The animation in these videos is always spectacular.
Good things happen to me a lot and my husband calls me the luckiest girl in the world. My sister thinks I'm psychic.
But I just think the probability bell curve would predict that there will be some people at the far corner, those for whom things just align much more often than is usual for most. That's where I sit.
I flew from Finland to Thailand to spend my holiday there. Went to a particular open air bar for the first time and after 5 minutes i heard my name being called out, just to see a guy who had been my neighbour in Finland 3 years ago. We hadn't talked in years and had no idea of each others travel-plans. So, whats the explanation?
Thailand is one of the most popular tourist-destinations for us Finns, we had both used the most popular travel-agency and had been put into the largest hotel that they co-oprated with in Thailand. Also the Bar was the closest one to this hotel and many of the people that said in the hotel visited it at least once during their trip... So, if i were to see somebody i know outside of Finland, it would most likely be in place like that. Nothing magical about it...
"You're not allowed to believe in coincidences anymore"
fantastic video. thanks for uploading
I had a similar experience to Anne Parish. When i was around 7 years old, me and my brother would play this Xbox game called "Spy vs. Spy". Great game. But anyway, for a reason i can't remember, we sold it back to a game stop for probably dirt cheap. A few years later, my nostalgia had kicked in, and i had asked my parents to buy the game again. And yes, you guessed it, it was the same disc. We knew this because the file names were the ones we had put in.
This is no where near as crazy of a story compared to Anne, but still it was kinda dope.
I love videos like these, well done Vox!
Wtf is that crackling sound?
TheRealTeal it's the sound when they tap the phone screen, but yes, it sounds annoying
i think it's a projector changing slides
I know right! Had to lower the volume
You mean...the buttons on the calculator?
There's also the fact that we don't mention things that aren't coincidences. There are a lot of possible coincidences, by a lot of people, and when one of them happens the stories tend to spread. The birthday paradox is a good example. In a room with only 23 people, there's a 50% chance that two share the same birthday. And it's very likely then that everyone in that room will hear about it, even though the coincidence only happened for two people.
There's another variable that he doesn't mention that explains the fundamental difference between what happened to Anne and getting dealt a certain hand in poker; with the latter, you are constantly renewing your odds. People typically don't play one game of poker and be done. There's more to it than just Anne showing up in Paris and having a reason for the book to end there; the whole "coincidence" depended on no one else having been brought already, nothing coming up, the book ending up there at the same time as her, her coming across that one book amongst the thousands in the market...
Very cool video vox, I enjoyed it a lot. Should you have the chance interview this guy again. Cheers!
Happy Halloween!!! 🎃🍬👻
Reuben Taylor ☺
happy hallowweeeeeeennn!!!
Great videos as always 👍
the thing is, there are so many variables included that are not aforementioned, but she still managed to slip through and get lucky. its what makes it seemingly like a miracle.
love the guest! what a fascinating man
That is one passionated mathematician.
This reminds me of the film 'Magnolia'. That film is all about how people's lives can intertwine in multiple ways (and a bunch of other themes, but mainly that intertwining one).
He must be fun at parties
I just listened to Phil read that last quote about 14 times.
I don't think I could ever tire of hearing it.
NoFace
No one wants to talk to you...
NoFace
I'm sorry. That was rude of me... 😕
THANKS FOR ADDING IN THE VIBRATION SFX, I REALLY LIKED IT. HAHA
i saw 7 comments claiming to be number 1
Sikander Sajid no you didn't.
whitepiano23
Are you a politician? Because you are on the right road.
Well, he said he saw 7 comments claiming to be number 1, it doesn't mean he saw those comments in this video, he even may have seen those 7 comments in separate videos
they my have been from one ( or just less than seven ) person with multiple accounts
Or... whatever hell else possible scenarios
The odds are 1/1 because it actually happened. Events in the past will only play out one way.
Great topic Vox. Given enough iterations of a particular process some rare event or coincidence is bound to happen. In sports there is always something that pops up every year that is rare like this year with a Cubs/Cleveland World Series. It would be interesting also to see the exact odds of the common coincidences like having the exact same name, car, or liking the same movie.
editing is really good this video
Very interesting, great video :D
those phone buzz sounds terrified me
I know right!!! Me too.
still seems pretty amazing to me
Tati D I'm pretty sure it's not the point of this video to make it less amazing.
On the contrary, in fact
Still don't you dare share those stories
This has given me a strange insight. Great video!
Love this. I'm going to buy Joseph Mazur's book! :-)
Great video!
Trust mathematicians to try and suck the fun and 'mysticism' out of amazing things....
Matthew Sukhram (subjectively speaking of course).
Ohhh... that's a slap in the face. In the face of all humans that can be rational. You are basically saying that it's "boring" to use your mind, to think about a situation, to act with consideration, to question things. That's quite a problem, dude.
RimaNari Nope! I just don't like being told to not have an imagination!
Blballerboy Are you saying that the man who proved fermats last theorem disciplined himself to have a lack of imagination?
Blballerboy There is a distinction between some healthy imagination and imagination that borders on superstition. The latter can cause wars.
Who still forwards emails?
This is perhaps the most interesting video on RUclips I have ever watched so far. Maybe because it's relevant to what I study.
I love how you put slack on the phone!
Wow good job Vox on going beyond the popular anne parrish story. love the art style as well.
Well at the end of the day pealing away the events that lead to this woman reuniting with something she cared about doesn't make it any less beautiful. Its sweet to think that lovely things like this are less rare than we might otherwise have been led to believe.
great video Vox
great vid!!
Shakespeare and company is still open! It's still a lovely book store
Idk. Even though it was all lined up to happen, it still feels amazing that it did.
0:35 Love the phone's google search history "Carrot Top Tattoos" "how to befriend carrot top" "carrot top is my friend?"
Your analysis is akin to what I've known about plane crashes during my time working for "a large aerospace manufacturer". That is the actual crash is the 7th item in the chain of events. In other words not random.
I loved this piece.
Oh God my ears!! The popping with that "typing" sfx in the beginning........
Stop ruining the perfection that is Mathematics Vox. You don't deserve the right to talk about Mathematics.
omegahakim123 We'll they're certainly irrational.
Ba dum tish.
EchoL0C0 ?
Jaddua Jones there's always more variables than these main factors. So I think it's good to stick with the perfection
LinusMLGTips Irrational numbers are a big concept in mathematics.
I always felt insane because my brain always wanted to find the true odds behind a ‘coincidence’.
The phone vibration sound is making me look at my phone all the time. And the "typing" or "tapping" sounds are making me think my speakers are broken.
LOL, this videos vibrations from the iPhone scene made me think that i was getting a phone call notification.
... me waiting for him to prove that her experience was anything shy of phenomenal
As always, phenomenal video design Vox!
I stopped to retie my shoe one morning. 20 minutes later I was 3 seconds late for a car coming through a red light that would have t-boned me dead. What are the odds of that?
I have a story. It's long, and you might find it uninteresting, but I'll tell it anyway.
When I was in 5th grade, I became best friends with the kid that lived behind me because I started to take the bus, which was what he had done for years prior. Every morning we waited together, talked, had fun, and got incredibly close, along with a few other kids at school. This friendship lasted until the winter of 7th grade, when his family had to move to North Carolina because of his parent's job. I considered him to be my rock in early middle school; we had classes together, we talked in the hallways-- we grew apart in friend groups but we stayed friends. He always encouraged me to keep on drawing, that I would succeed as an artist, and that supported me throughout the time we were friends. So this guy moves away, I have no contact information of him and this continues until the summer before my senior year in high school, 5 years later. I signed up for a precollege experience at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh for art, and I'm there for three weeks. For the first week and a half, I made friends, we had fun, yada yada. One night, when my friends and I were cooking late at night in the dorms, our stove triggered a gas leak, so we pulled the fire alarm and we had to evacuate. That night I had made new friends, and a series of events led to another and we're having fun but what else do I see but this one guy who looked exactly like my childhood friend. I started freaking out-- before that night, I showed my other friend a photo of us when we were in 5th grade bc it was one of my only pics from childhood I had in my phone. I worked up the nerve to talk to him, and it turns out he was the same guy I had known way back when, and he even lived in the same dorm as me and i didn't know. We didn't really catch up after that night; 5 years apart led us our own separate ways, but it was still amazing that this even happened at all, almost 900 miles away from where we lived.
Coincidence may be math but it's still a strange thing.
This was wonderful.
I love you vox. you're very likely the best channel on RUclips
The odds still had to line up. The thing is these stories are fascinating because of their emotional surprise factor. And even after these mathematical analyses, the psychological perception is still the same. The narrative way of perception works on the basis of engagement and how interesting an odd is. The probabilistic explanation doesnt puncture its enigma.
Is anyone else getting vox notifications even though you aren't subscribed to the channel ? I keep getting them everyday even though i unsubscribed long ago.
Or maybe the odds of her not finding that book were far far greater than the odds of her finding the book. Perhaps it was all pre destined.
Great video. My mom always annoys me with these types of stories. I always try to explain to her it's just a coincidence. I will show her this maybe she will get it now.
that was an excellent video
Great video but that ticking sound effects imitating “pressing the phone screen” drove me crazy in the beginning I thought my speakers had something in them.
After watching the coincidences Vsauce video, I now believe that everything is always able to happen.
Could you post the music credits I like a couple of the songs but can't find them with the small text at the end of the video.
I live a few blocks from Weber in Colorado Springs...talk about spooky coincidences!
Explain it with the Terryology school of maths which is developing by Terrence Howard
This reminds me of a segment shown on "That's Incredible!", an American reality TV show in the early 80's. A girl wrote a note on a $5 bill and spent it. Twelve years later she came across that bill. Cathy Lee Crosby, one of the show's hosts, said the odds of that occurring was something like 6 billion to 1. Not impossible, but pretty close to it!
There are 7 billion people on Earth, so that happening to a random person would be about 1.17 to 1. Factoring in the number of people that would write a note on money minus the variable amount of people the bill would reach, that would be about 1000 to 1 (estimate). So multiplying the numbers together, the chance of this happening to one random person on Earth would be about 1.17×10⁻⁴ to 1.
I would also say there's another mathematic/statistical way to debunk coincidences. One could also estimate how often non-coincedences happen. If every child on the planet would have one book he/she would have written something in and would put that book on a foreign market. It would be quite likely that at least one of them would rediscover that book and have this coincidental experience. So from the standpoint of the person who rediscover's his/her book from childhood it feels like a magical event, but discounting that against all the people who didn't rediscover their book it makes it more into an event that could have actually happened by chance.
about 2 months ago there was a news story of a rear-end collision in Germany (nobody got hurt). The remarkable thing was that both drivers as well as the police officer documenting the case had the same birthday.
If I didn't make any mistakes when calculating, this is expected to happen in one out of 133,225 accidents/occasions where 3 people are involved. If you consider how many accidents happen all the time
the newsarticle (in german):
diepresse.com/home/panorama/welt/5081591/Zufall_Drei-Geburtstage-bei-einem-Verkehrsunfall
i have an interesting story to share.. in my hindi literature text book back in standard 9th or 10th CBSE, we had a a chapter on sir C.V. Raman . i was surprised when i realized we had started the lesson on his birth day. And even more surprised and creeped out when the lesson ended on his death anniversary. C. V. Raman
Indian physicist
Born: 7 November 1888, Thiruvanaikoil, Tiruchirappalli
Died: 21 November 1970, Bengaluru
NCERT Book Class 9 Hindi Sparsh Chapter 4 वैज्ञानिक चेतना के वाहक चंद्रशेखर वेंकट रमन
Brilliant!!
How do you get that result?
having the power to turn possibilities into fact.. is d msg i got from this video.
I think the fact there was only 2 english book stores is the defining factor
the thing that bothers me is that no one mentioned that of course it was a book she had interest in that she bought, and the reason she had interest in it was that she had it as a child, two events that were already linked that we never think about.