Can probability explain uncanny coincidences?

Billions of people make some coincidences inevitable. That doesn't explain why one keeps happening to you, at the worst possible moment.

Skeptics have a trump card: with billions of people and endless chances, something astonishing is bound to happen somewhere. True, but it answers a different question. The puzzle is the pattern that repeats in one life, with timing and detail that feel aimed. A coincidence can still be evidence that your explanation is missing something. Chance explains that it happens, not what it means.

• What it could changeJudging each coincidence on its own details, not the law of large numbers, would reopen cases skeptics closed in bulk.
• How it touches todayPeople already treat repeat coincidences as signals, and some research says that can be rational.
• Our futureWe may find that meaning is a kind of data we never learned to measure.

• The existence of billions of people and many opportunities makes some extraordinary coincidences likely, but does not by itself show that chance is the best explanation for every coincidence.sharonrawlette
• Some advocates of synchronicity argue that recurring or highly structured personal coincidences may contain significance not captured by general appeals to large numbers.sharonrawlette +1
• A coincidence can be evidence for revising a favored causal theory, even when it does not establish the alternative; its evidential force depends on the competing explanations and their prior plausibility.cocosci