A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidences is a prime characteristic of… — John Allen Paulos
A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidences is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence.
p. 35Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
There’s always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe.
p. 44
The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will...The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place.
p. 37
Correlation and causation are two quite different words, and the innumerate are more prone to mistake them than most.
p. 159
