Two Girls, a Golden Balloon, and Fate | Hacker News Reader

Two Girls, a Golden Balloon, and Fate

priceonomics.com

55 pointslalwanivikas16 comments

This reminds me of a story I heard as a kid while listening to a baseball game on the radio.

During a game one night, one of the non-starting pitchers was bored in the dugout and started doodling on the baseballs that would be periodically brought out to the umpire (to replace balls that are hit out of play or that are scuffed on the dirt). He happened to know that it was the home plate umpire's birthday that day and so on one ball he wrote "Happy Birthday Dave" (or whatever the umpire's name was). At one point, that ball was brought out to the umpire by the bat boy along with a few other balls and was put into play by the umpire who didn't notice the inscription.

The batter happened to hit that ball foul into the stands where it was caught by a guy named Dave who was also celebrating his birthday that day.

I love hearing stories like this because it's amazing how many coincidences can occur (especially when we look for them). As the article almost points out (in reference to human nature), we're totally in the dark about all the things that make the girls different.

I also think commonalities can be asymmetric ... they both hate pork rinds and love candy is markedly more likely than they both hate candy and love pork rinds.

This was a story on radiolab titled stochasticity: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91684-stochasticity/

What a fun story. I can see what the mathematician is saying, that with billions of "events" happening all the time, supremely improbable events like this are bound to happen periodically. And we only notice the ones that strike our fancy.

But it still makes for a fun read, and in the end it brought together two families and forged new friendships.

Yeah... It reminds me of a Feynman quote:

"You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"

Just confirmation bias at work. I am sure there are many things they did not have in common that they choose to ignore. Humans are pattern recognition machines which in truth is a lot of fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

A little bit more likely than it first would seem. The balloon didn't land on Laura Buxton, but on a farmer who knew someone named Laura Buxton, which depending on how common that name is and how many people the farmer knew is not extremely unlikely. After the girls met they were already primed for looking for resemblances because of the identical name. All in all, it's a very unlikely event but not as unlikely as you might think.

Plus, many similar meetups have occurred between people who didn't share similarities, but we don't hear about those because they're unremarkable. There are many motivations for believing events such as this are more than just a coincidence. It's also very difficult to comprehend the sheer number of human beings living on this planet when each of us has relationships with such a minuscule percentage of them.

I wonder if you could calculate just how unlikely this event is. Then multiply by the world's population and a few decades, and count how many similarly unlikely events happened. Do you get a big mismatch or not?

Clearly there's a glitch in the matrix.

Oh sure, the mathematicians might be able to hand wave away this one with their "trillions of events".

But what about that time where thousands of men were all named Spartacus?

Yeah, ponder that one over a really hot cup of tea.

Douglas Adams already covered this:

One in a Million chances happen 9 times out of 10.

No, no, these things tend to happen when your planet is located in a Plural sector (In our case, plural Z). Possibly one of the girls was pulled in from a different timeline when the earth reasserted itself after the vogon demolition. Or, quite possibly, the golden balloon was a remanifestation of the golden bucket, also known as the heart of gold, which is the center of the infinite improbability drive, and everyone knows that the field it generates has far reaching but relatively minor consequences on the lives it touches.

The quote is actually Terry Pratchet, not Douglas Adams.

“Million-to-one chances,” she said, “crop up nine times out of ten.”

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Discworld

Huh, I've misattributed that quote in my head for quite a while then. Thanks for straightening me out.

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