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

[Orrex]

4. Richard Dawkins explored this nicely in The Blind Watchmaker

He drew a clear and important distinction between something that is "unimaginable" versus something that is "incalculable." In practical terms, most mundane humans can't imagine the unlikelihood of natural quadruplets (especially not those who insist that they can!), but we can readily calculate that unlikelihood.

I was once involved in a near-miss accident on icy roads, with my car spinning about 540° through oncoming traffic. We survived unhurt and with only a tiny ding in our bumper. Friends later told us that the odds against such a thing were "astronomical." I can't crunch the math, but I'd have to guess that our odds were probably something closer to one-in-fifty, but that didn't stop armchair statisticians from citing it as "miraculous" proof of God's grace.


As a species, and absent formal study of statistics, we seem to have a pretty weak overall sense of probability.


k/r