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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

>We can expect “miracles” to happen regularly, because in a world with 7 billion people the odds of a one-in-a-billion event are pretty good.

In my mind a miracle is something that can't be explained by science (walking on water, resurrection, etc.). I'm wondering if they mean "coincidence" instead of miracle. Something that is extremely unlikely, but wholly explainable by science. For example, I once went on a trip with my daughter to a far away city. Everywhere we went she ran into someone she knew. We went out to eat and a friend (who was from an entirely different part of the country) was seated at a table next to ours. We went to a venue that seated 20,000 people and it turned out that the people right behind us were friends of hers that she hadn't seen in ages. I don't think any of those meetups were miracles. They were just a bunch of coincidences.

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That may be what you define as a miracle, but there are a lot of people who regard 'coincidences' as meaningful and evidence of synchronicity and the supernatural such as ESP/psi, and love to recount stories as proof thereof. (These days, the spooks now have names like 'racism', but the logic is the same.) If you trace Littlewood's law back to the Freeman Dyson essay which coined it ( https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood#origin-of-littlewoods-law-o... ), you'll find that it's a review of a book titled _Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience_. You can easily surmise why the book would go into discussions of how unlikely coincidences are actually likely, but Dyson makes it clear what is being debunked by Littlewood's law:

> The book also has a good chapter on "Amazing Coincidences." These are strange events which appear to give evidence of supernatural influences operating in everyday life. They are not the result of deliberate fraud or trickery, but only of the laws of probability. The paradoxical feature of the laws of probability is that they make unlikely events happen unexpectedly often...

So, since people do regard these coincidences as 'miracles', it is necessary to point out that they would happen frequently in a world completely devoid of any kind of 'supernatural influences', and thus are poor evidence for the supernatural.

> (These days, the spooks now have names like 'racism', but the logic is the same.)

I don't understand what you mean or are referencing here. Can you clarify? I couldn't figure it out from the context. Thanks.

An example of something offered as an explanation (of a phenomenon or an idea), looks like.

> (These days, the spooks now have names like 'racism', but the logic is the same.)

This is doubly-odd, as "spook" is a racist slur.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/spook

> When referring to a black person, the term spook dates back to the 1940s. It is used with disparaging intent and is perceived as highly insulting. Black pilots who trained at Tuskegee Institute during World War II were called the Spookwaffe.

Its highly likely that tourists would congregate around the same attractions when visiting a foreign city. A site like tripadvisor would have enough data to predict with high confidence the itinerary of 1000 random couples who visit a place. I live in a resort city and there is a clear distinction between areas that locals gather and the places tourists frequent.

That's why it's in quotes. I'm sure there are still a good chunk of people that believe in miracles by that definition, but for those that don't, they have to take it to mean "beat the nearly impossible odds", otherwise they have to get into another pointless argument about words with parents that are just glad their child beat cancer for the 8th time.

Just this week I looked at my GitHub followers and at what "place" I am in Germany.

When I scrolled through the list I found me and somehow an old friend of mine directly a place above me in that list.

96k devs on GitHub are from Germany so this felt pretty unlikely to me.

Nah, it was probably the 'meetup god' that caused it.

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