What are the chances of particular coincidences happening?

[Art Man]

I don't know much about the mathematics of chance but hear this out.

What is the chance of this...

You are using a message board with say, 20 other active users and 100 inactive anonymous users.

All of the users are located within free countries... U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, etc

Nobody uses their photo. Nobody has identified themselves openly on the message board.

And then one user posts a topic with a real photo of himself as his avatar.

Another user sees that photo and thirty minutes later, at his place of work, somebody walks in who looks exactly and precisely like the person in that photo.

 

Would you say this was a coincidence or intentional? Is it a lookalike or the same person?  If coincidence, using the math of statistical chance to find your answer, what are the chances?

 

 

Remember, how much space is covered in the locations and the timing of thirty minutes between photo seen and coincidence of sighting. 

Edited September 5, 2019 by Art Man

[Strange]

7 minutes ago, Art Man said:

Would you say this was a coincidence or intentional? If coincidence, using the math of statistical chance to find your answer, what are the chances?

I don't see how it could be intentional.

So a coincidence. How likely is it? Hard to say, but often these things are not as unlikely as you might think. For example, the message board probably attracts people with similar interests. And people with similar interests often work in the same company. (Every company I have worked in has been full of engineers. That is probably not purely by chance.) And then you need to take into account that it may not be the same person, but just someone who looks similar. If you have just seen a new photo, you may be "primed" to spot someone who looks similar. In the same way that when you buy a new car, you suddenly see far more of them on the road than you did before.

Then you need to remember that even if the chance is a million to one it is still quite likely to happen. There may be more than a billion people who use message boards and forums on a regular basis. It would be expected that several of those would experience million-to-one events.

[swansont]

How can you be sure that the avatar is of the user? Mine isn’t, and others have done similar things.

[MigL]

Is it just a coincidence if Clint Eastwood walks into your place of work and says
"Go ahead, make my day"

[Art Man]

Perhaps the person wasnt the same person in the picture but was someone who looked like him, 99% identicle.

The chances are still phenomenal as pure coincidence. Then you must wonder what caused this coincidence? Did the person plan to go there and somehow manifested the picture in advamce like some sort of spooky telepathy/telephony thing, or did the picture manifest the person, or was there no connection at all and somehow and someway both things appeared to the same person completely out of random chance, like hitting 7 7 7 on a slot machine?

To reduce the chances to something believable and likely, both the picture and the person would need to be connected to the same source.

Edited September 6, 2019 by Art Man

[iNow]

Nobody cares

[Strange]

8 hours ago, Art Man said:

Then you must wonder what caused this coincidence?

If there was a cause, then it wasn't a coincidence.

I have bumped into people I know on the street in a city on the other side of the world, by pure chance.

That may seem incredibly unlikely, but think of all the billions of people who haven't bumped into someone they know like that.

[hypervalent_iodine]

!

Moderator Note

In the spirit of the other thread of yours on stalking, this too is closed.