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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
If a screenwriter were to come up with a storyline in which a tech tycoon drowns when his luxury yacht is hit by a freak storm just two days after his co-defendant in a multibillion dollar fraud trial — for which both men were recently acquitted — is fatally hit by a car in another set of ostensibly unsuspicious circumstances, they might very well be told this was rather too implausible for viewers to buy.
And yet this was the tragic real-life series of events over the past week or so. The body of Autonomy co-founder Mike Lynch was recovered on Thursday, along with four others who had been on board Bayesian when it sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday (the body of Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter was found later), while former colleague Stephen Chamberlain died after a car hit him during a run on Saturday.
It didn’t take long for the conspiracy theories to start. Pro-Russia personality Chay Bowes posted on X a clip of himself speaking on the Russian state-owned RT channel in which he pointed out the low probability of being acquitted in a federal criminal trial in the US — about 0.4 per cent, according to Pew. “How could two of the statistically most charmed men alive both meet tragic ends within days of each other in the most improbable ways?” asked Bowes.
The apparently random, unrelated and unlikely circumstances of Chamberlain’s and Lynch’s deaths are bizarre indeed, though the idea that some of us might be “statistically charmed” is perhaps even stranger. But what makes it so hard to get our heads around the idea that some things are really just a coincidence?
Further, what do we even mean by the term? I like the definition offered by mathematicians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller in their 1989 paper, “Methods for Studying Coincidences”, namely “a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection”.
That we should be astonished when coincidences do happen is understandable, even reasonable. After all, every coincidence that occurs is, by its very nature, highly improbable. But that some coincidences occur is not just highly likely; it is inevitable. We might like to imagine that we all have control over our lives and what goes on around us, but in reality we live in a complex, messy, often inexplicable world in which chance plays a huge role.
“Everything that happens is incredibly unlikely, and the most unlikely thing of all is to be born,” David Spiegelhalter, emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge, tells me.
“The sequence of occurrences that led to your existence is so bizarrely implausible — any little whisker of change and you wouldn’t be you,” Spiegelhalter says. “With the uncountable ways in which your parents’ chromosomes can combine, if you were conceived an hour later you could be a very different person. We are each a product of a unique sequence of unrepeatable events.”
As we know from Diaconis and Mosteller’s definition, though, what makes a coincidence is something that is “meaningfully related”. So while our very existence might be vastly more unlikely than the close-together deaths of Lynch and Chamberlain, we don’t consider ourselves to be walking coincidences.
But when we do notice a set of circumstances that seem both highly unlikely and related in some way that we consider significant, our tendency is to look for causation. When the exact same numbers were drawn two weeks in a row in Bulgaria’s national lottery back in 2009, authorities ordered an investigation, suspecting manipulation, but they came up with nothing. A mathematician put the odds of this happening at one in four million — highly improbable, but at some point, such coincidences will inevitably occur.
Indeed, the odds of any one person winning the national lottery are inconceivably low, and yet the chances that someone will win it in any given week are very high. To the winner, of course, the fact that they picked the right numbers is a huge coincidence; to everyone else, the fact that a random person won the lottery this week is utterly non-noteworthy.
Occasionally, of course, seemingly unrelated events can lead us to reconsider what we had earlier considered a “coincidence”. Was the fact that Covid-19 started in a place in which there is a lab that conducts research on coronaviruses just a coincidence, or does it suggest the virus didn’t come from a wet market as widely reported? We may never know. But coincidences do and should make us ask questions about the circumstances that produced them. Sometimes, though, all we will find is that truth can be stranger than fiction.
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