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The law of credulity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2016
Extract
Coincidences are a source of amusement and occasional unease in our lives. They often appear to defy the laws of probability – even to demand a supernatural “explanation”. Probability theory reveals the root cause of this disparity between expectation and reality. As I shall show, it stems from the fact that our intuitive estimate of the probability of a coincidence occuring becomes increasingly inaccurate the more “outlandish” the coincidence seems to be.
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- Copyright © The Mathematical Association 1993
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