The Improbability Principle (Or things that have a one in 64 million chance happen... ALL the TIME!)

[whatthehey]

2. Oh yeah I keep running into this

I was once, decades ago but likely to reoccur now, talking to a RWNJ in a busy sports bar about how unlikely it was for the Clintons to make a bunch of money on the futures market by chance and so it had to be evidence of fraud.

I invited him to consider the 200 or so people in the joint, consider how many other options they had for passing the time, how many other people could possibly have chosen to visit that bar at that time but had not, and estimate the a priori probability of those people, and only those people, being in that suburban bar at that particular time. Because this anecdote is not a bouncy ball story, I'm not going to pretend he saw the light (he pretended the difference was human will or something, as if it's not human will making futures trades) but we sure did run out of zeros awfully quickly.

Same deal with the mouthreathers who still think Hoyle's jumbo jet junkyard is a telling rebuttal of abiogenesis. Few really "get" probability.