Lots of people
struggle to understand the way probability works, and the fact that some ‘coincidences’
are relatively easy to predict. The classic example is the birthday problem
which shows that in any group of 23 people, there is a 50% probability that 2
of them will share a birthday, and as the number in the group increases, so the
probability also increases, until it becomes close to a certainty in a group of
around 50. With there being 365 days in a year, it’s a result which just ‘feels’
wrong to most of us.
Other ‘coincidences’
are rather harder to predict. Millions of people update or replace their smart
phones every week, and most of the time, it’s a process which is smooth and painless;
but for a tiny minority something goes wrong and data is lost. That can also happen even if the phone isn't being replaced, although finger problems rather than technological ones are a likelier cause. I don’t know
what the probability of that happening to any one individual is, but it’s going
to be a very small number. It would be an amazing coincidence if three
people
who
worked closely together all managed to lose all the data from precisely the
same time period, and it's not an outcome which many people well-versed in
probability theory would predict. It would be even more astounding if those
same messages were then found to have mysteriously disappeared from the phones
of those
who had received them as well.
Still, being
vanishingly unlikely isn’t the same as having a probability of zero, and sometimes
highly unlikely events can happen. One doesn’t need to be a conspiracy theorist
to wonder, though, whether there might not be a simpler and more probable
explanation, perhaps relating to questions such as honesty and truthfulness.
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