Why do things happen in waves?

For, some people it goes beyond chance. Although I have to think that, aside from death in the family, there is perhaps a lesson that is not being learned. There is often a subtle pattern to bad choices.

We had 4 people in our family die within four months. On the other hand, we went from 1968 to 1992 without any deaths at all.

Its an illusion. Things happen randomly all the time, and so are of little note. But, every once in a while, there is a hot streak and it seems to validate the notion that things come in waves more often than they actually do. If you were to take notes and faithfully plot certain types of events, you would find that the clusters are artifacts of chance.

Sometimes, once you have you attention brought to something, you tend to notice it happening from that point on.

Unfortunately, this is not as true as some would like you to think. Humans are hard-wired to seek patterns where no patterns exist, and therefore, we see patterns in everything, including random actions. An easy way to prove this is to look at white fluffy clouds on a sunny day. You will find images of various things, i.e. dragons, castles, faces, etc. These things do not exist as anything more than the play of light and shadow on water vapor. It is our brains that produce the patterns where none exist. But people will believe that such things are messages from the great beyond, or from those deities that are looking out for us. Once you know the scientific and biological reasons behind such things, it makes it difficult to resort back to the superstitious beliefs of these things being warnings at all. It is just randomness in an indifferent universe.

I do think people make the same choices based on a certain premize over and over again. Example teenagers who believe the people they go to school with are their friends, and then are disappointed when no one comes to visit them at college, even though they are less than an hour away. The reality is, high school “friends” are more often than not, “classmates” and not really “friends”. Or people who choose risky behavior on the assumption that nothing will happen to them because they consciously don’t want it to; they feel entitled to beat the odds.

It’s human nature to seek patterns in things.

Edit: Oh. I should have looked at the other answers before writing my own. Hah! Time to hand out GAs!

Way to go, MacBean.

I think it’s a combination of that pattern-seeking behavior and the fact that sometimes one event really does lead to a related event. There are infinite ways this can happen and it depends on the circumstance, and sometimes the connection is more apparent than others.

So for instance, if my best friend buys a red convertible, and I absolutely love her car, I may be more inclined to buy a red car—and that might be a conscious decision (“I love her red car! I am also getting a red car!”) or I might love other features about the car (maybe the fact that it is a convertible) yet still be subconsciously drawn to red cars because of her car. So we could end up with a whole bunch of red cars in my friend group.

Check out Malcolm Gladwell—Blink and The Tipping Point. He addresses this kind of phenomenon really nicely.

I was just reading Hamlet, and came across this line in Act IV:

“One woe doth tread upon another’s heel”

I was just looking at this question, so I thought of it. This contributes in no way to the discussion.

I enjoyed it, Pete.

<3 classics.

Martin Gardner has a great essay on coincidence, where he argues that given how many chances there are for strange occurrences to happen simultaneously, that there should actually be more of them. Randomness often doesn’t seem random to us.

Some examples:

1. the ipod people found that a truly random shuffle felt nonrandom to people, because songs would repeat too closely, or you might get two songs from the same artist in a row, and other seemingly nonrandom events. They actually had to design a nonrandom shuffle that would feel more random to people.

2. it’s much more likely to get some numbers matching on a lottery ticket than none matching at all.

3. How many people have to be in a group before you’re likely to have two with the same birthday? Answer: 23. Once you get towards thirty, it’s practically assured.

So, yes, we are pattern seeking animals. But also, probability is a little counterintuitive sometimes.

Type in “Elliot Wave Theory” into Google.