The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions

See also House-Money Effect (ch. 84); Sunk Costs Fallacy (ch. 5); Winner’s Curse (ch.
35); Contrast Effect (ch. 10); Loss Aversion (ch. 32); Cognitive Dissonance (ch. 50); Not-
Invented-Here Syndrome (ch. 74); Fear of Regret (ch. 82)

---

24
THE INEVITABILITY OF UNLIKELY EVENTS
Coincidence
At 7.15p.m. on 1 March 1950, the fifteen members of the church choir in Beatrice,
Nebraska were scheduled to meet for rehearsal. For various reasons, they were
all running behind. The minister’s family was delayed because his wife still had to
iron their daughter’s dress. One couple was held back when their car wouldn’t
start. The pianist wanted to be there 30 minutes early, but he fell into a deep
sleep after dinner. And so on. At 7.25p.m., the church exploded. The blast was
heard all around the village. It blew out the walls and sent the roof crashing to the
ground. Miraculously, nobody was killed. The fire chief traced the explosion back
to a gas leak, even though members of the choir were convinced they had
received a sign from God. Hand of God or 
coincidence
?
Something last week made me think of my old school friend, Andy, whom I
hadn’t spoken to in a long time. Suddenly the phone rang. I picked it up and, lo
and behold, it was Andy. ‘I must be telepathic!’ I exclaimed excitedly. But,
telepathy or 
coincidence
?
On 5 October 1990, the 
San Francisco Examiner
reported that Intel would take
its rival, AMD, to court. Intel found out that the company was planning to launch a
computer chip named AM386, a term which clearly referred to Intel’s 386 chip.
How Intel came upon the information is remarkable: by pure coincidence, both
companies had hired someone named Mike Webb. Both men were staying in the
same hotel in California, and checked out on the same day. After they had left, the
hotel accepted a package for Mike Webb at reception. It contained confidential
documents about the AM386 chip, and the hotel mistakenly sent it to Mike Webb
of Intel, who promptly forwarded the contents to the legal department.
How likely are stories like that? The Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung saw in them
the work of an unknown force, which he called synchronicity. But how should a
rationally minded thinker approach these accounts? Preferably with a piece of
paper and a pencil. Consider the first case, the explosion of the church. Draw four
boxes to represent each of the potential events. The first possibility is what
actually took place: ‘choir delayed and church exploded.’ But there are three

---

other options: ‘choir delayed and church did not explode,’ ‘choir on time and
church exploded’ and ‘choir on time and church did not explode.’ Estimate the
frequencies of these events and write them in the corresponding box. Pay special
attention to how often the last case has happened: every day, millions of choirs
gather for scheduled rehearsals and their churches don’t blow up. Suddenly, the
story has lost its unimaginable quality. For all these millions of churches, it would
be improbable if something like what happened in Beatrice, Nebraska didn’t take
place at least once a century. So, no: no hand of God. (And anyway, why would
God want to blow a church to smithereens? What a ridiculous way to
communicate with your worshippers!)
Let’s apply the same thinking to the phone call. Keep in mind the many
occasions when ‘Andy’ thinks of you but doesn’t call; when you think of him and
he doesn’t call; when you don’t think of him and he calls; when he doesn’t think of
you and you call?. . .?There is an almost infinite number of occasions when you
don’t think of him and he doesn’t call. But, since people spend about 90% of their
time thinking about others, it is not unlikely that, eventually, two people will think
of each other and one of them will pick up the phone. And it must not be just
Andy: if you have 100 other friends, the probability of this happening increases
greatly.
We tend to stumble when estimating probabilities. If someone says ‘never’, I
usually register this as a minuscule probability greater than zero, since ‘never’
cannot be compensated by a negative probability.
In sum: let’s not get too excited. Improbable coincidences are precisely that:
rare but very possible events. It’s not surprising when they finally happen. What
would be more surprising would be if they never came to be.