A person can expect a one-in-a-million event about once a month, given the rate at which events occur.
Littlewood's arithmetic: at roughly one event per second during eight hours of alertness, a million events pass in about 35 days. Miracles are what a large denominator looks like.
In practice
- A person who thinks of a friend just before the friend calls has had roughly a million thoughts that month.
- An organisation that experiences one truly improbable coincidence a year is behaving exactly as a large denominator predicts.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- The ways evidence misleads