> highly unlikely events occur all the time
They do?
They do?
Let's say some day you find an acquaintance on the street. Not extraordinary. But that specific acquaintance that you hadn't seen in 10 years. On that specific day, on that specific street, at that specific time. If you had wondered the day before how likely it would be that that specific set of circumstances would come togethet, you would have rightly concluded it was exceedingly unlikely.
This is another way of looking at the first example in the article. The question was not how likely it was that that specific woman had their two children die of natural causes, but how likely it was that someone in the country or the world would have such a thing happen in a large interval of time.
And imagine how often you almost run into acquaintances on the street, and don't notice. It must happen more often than when you do notice. If you made a concerted effort to look for near-coincidences, you would suddenly find yourself noticing lots more unlikely things that were happening all along.
Once you start digging into someone's life you'll learn all sorts of things that might seem really unlikely... but you'd find unlikely things in someone's life picked at random, you just never dug into them, because they're not accused of murder.
So a specific person being killed by lightning within a given year is pretty unlikely (less than one in 10 million chance), and on average it happens once every two weeks in the US. Lots of people, see.
Same thing with other situations where there are lots of observations...
The chance of someone being hit by lightning is not very low. Therefore, it is not a highly unlikely event. And it does happen relatively frequently.
Unlikely events don't happen very often. That's just a definition. If event X happens frequently, then it isn't an unlikely event.
But if you have a whole bunch of possible unlikely events, then one of them (a different one each time, usually) can happen fairly often.
Back to the lightning example, any given person being hit by lightning is an unlikely event. But as you not "someone being hit by lightning" is not, because we are now observing these unlikely events across so many people.
All of which is to say, observing that an unlikely event happened doesn't provide much information on its own, if you have observed a lot of things happening in general...
So it's quite correct to say "unlikely events happen all the time".
Individual coincidences are rare. But if you start really looking for them, you will absolutely find some coincidence. The one that happens will have been unlikely and impossible to predict ahead of time, and yet you were more or less absolutely certain some coincidence would occur, because there are so many possible configurations of coincidence that one is bound to happen.
Any given reader's brain existing to comprehend this comment is highly unlikely, yet it occurs and continues within layers of chaotic systems, that exist turbulently, in perceived reality.