3 ms·

It is not just research: https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood

• mjburgess 5y ago
  > Littlewood's law states that a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (defined by the law as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month. - wiki > At a global scale, anything that can happen will happen a small but nonzero times: this has been epitomized as “Littlewood’s Law: in the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month.” This must now be extended to a global scale for a hyper-networked global media covering anomalies from 8 billion people—all coincidences, hoaxes, mental illnesses, psychological oddities, extremes of continuums, mistakes, misunderstandings, terrorism, unexplained phenomena etc. Hence, there will be enough ‘miracles’ that all media coverage of events can potentially be composed of nothing but extreme outliers, even though it would seem like an ‘extraordinary’ claim to say that all media-reported events may be flukes.
  • TimPC 5y ago
    For this to be true a person has to experience a large number of events. For any meaningful definition of event that's false. So clearly this law requires an event to be routine in some extreme way in order for enough of them to occur that these outliers are hit. So maybe my miracle for this month is I take a breath that is 1/1,000,000 in how unusually large it is.
    • zby 5y ago
      It is about media - the interned and other media are gathering all the outliers and reporting on them - it is not that a person experiences now more events than he used to before the internet.