Coincidences by James Plaskett: The obvious
criticism to make of this book is ironically
the uneven handling of the nature of coincidences
themselves.
People vastly over-perceive the unlikelihood
of coincidences, that is how the brain works
after all. However Plaskett's book is
so
overflowing with coincidences that it is certainly
impressive. The impression I got was that Plaskett's
colourful lifestyle, which involves much travelling
to Chess tournaments and meeting interesting
people, is the catalyst behind his catalogue
of chance correlations.
Here is my explanation behind the wealth of
coincidences that happened and apparently still
happen to Plaskett.
The more events that happen to one, the more
potential connections are possible between them.
In fact, the number of connections that are
possible grows MUCH faster than the number of
events themselves. This is a mathematical phenomenon
well known to people trying to solve the "Travelling
Salesman problem", where the shortest path between
cities needs to be found. This problem is easy
to solve for a small number of cities, but as
the number of cities is increased, the number
of possible roads between the cities rises not
linearly, but exponentially. This explosion
of the number of roads rapidly makes the "Travelling
Salesman" problem literally intractable.
Another way of looking at this problem is to
consider the Small Worlds hypothesis that say
that paths between members of s set involving
a repeated commonality are surprisingly short.
The famous example is the Kevin Bacon game,
where one has to link any Hollywood actor to
Kevin Bacon in as few movies as possible. For
example Actor A stared in movie X also staring
Actor B. Actor B starred in movie Y with...
Kevin Bacon. Hence the Bacon Number of Actor
A is two. It turns out that if you take all
the Hollywood movie actors who have ever lived,
their average "Bacon Number" is about three.
Most actors are only three films or less away
from Kevin Bacon. The tinyness of this number
is largely due to a small number of actors who
have starred in a lot of films crossing genres.
I suspect that analogues of these phenomena
are at play in Plaskett's life. Each event that
occurs in his life has a chance of linking with
every other of the many events that have already
happened to him. The result is that coincidences
occur with burgeoning rapidly as every day passes.
Given that Plaskett is about forty and that
his life so far is colourful to the point of
making this reviewer rather jealous, it is not
surprising that coincidences have rained down
upon him. There is no need for an explanation
above the subtle and poorly understood and even
counterintuitive (by most humans) nature of
statistics and probability.
Of course one cannot rule out a spiritual explanation,
but if a natural explanation exists... why resort
to the supernatural?
Plaskett does not explore the mathematics of
probability in his book, an omission that disappointed
me. It makes it appear that Plaskett does not
wish to consider alternative, more prosaic explanations
for his core hypothesis, i.e. that coincidences
are caused by an as-yet-not-understood-force.
The other downside of the book is that the science
is similarly impoverished. Objections are raised
against Darwinism that are unconvincing to say
the least. No convincing alternative theory
to Darwinian evolution is put forward. The impression
I formed is that Plaskett thinks that Darwinian
is just wrong, using his intuition, rather than
credible and informed scientific objections.
It has to be said in Plaskett's favour that
he does not support the Creation myth either.
I am glad I read Plaskett's Coincidences however.
There are several reasons for this. One is that
Plaskett's prose style is excellent, sweeping
one along quite pleasantly. Another is that
Plaskett is thought-provoking. He makes one
reconsider one's assumptions and question one's
conclusions, no bad thing.
Often, for example when he described the computer
algorithms that calculated the world record
for longest chess ending, his writing was so
succinct and addictive that I regretted that
his whole book were not on such intriguing subjects.
Plaskett manages to describe his own life in
terms of Coincidences. This is a very novel
form of autobiography, and in many ways we get
a sense of the author as seen though chance
happenings rather than facts. Nice twist.
Finally it is deliciously ironic that Plaskett
failed the ultimate coincidence test: winning
a million pounds in a quiz show!!! He failed
not once, but
Twice!!!!! What's the chance
of
that happening eh?
Jim Eadon
30 March 2001
Jim's note: I wrote this review at Plaskett's
request, but was not pressured to make it a
good one!
Please
send
me (Jim) a your review or a coincidence
that happened to you.
Next:
Catdoc's
review
What do you think?
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| From: |
Marcus | Subject: | 2002-04-21 16:21:44 |
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| From: |
Lilian | Subject: | 2011-10-12 05:49:38 |
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| From: |
Lilian | Subject: | 2011-10-12 05:49:41 |
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