First, you posted twice in the half hour before this post. There’s no need to bump a thread that you are actively posting in.
Second, you’re really straining to find something that might remotely be called a coincidence in that xbox gamertag post. All that happened there is someone has a name that your imagination is trying to find an obscure and unlikely relevance. There’s nothing there at all.
Nothings weird about the date, its more weird that out of all the like 100 gamertags that I looked at, probably the scariest one is the only one that had a future date in it.
Well that wasn’t the real gamertag, but, to be trueful, the actual one didn’t really have anything spercific to me (like my initials, date of birth, etc), its just that it was a quite scary gamertag, and now i’m worried that because I spotted it, along with the date, something bad might happen on that date.
What did the therapist say to you to help you?
Also, are you saying that because I have attached the two ideas together, there is more of a chance of it happening?
So, someone happens to have the same initials as you and they put a date in their tag? Why is that weird? If they had the same initials as you and wrote in their motto, “Carpe diem,” would it be weird because the only person with your initials you’ve seen is telling you to seize the day? I’m just not seeing the coincidence part.
Because the gamertag was scary. Like I said, that wasn’t the real name of the gamertag, that was just an example because I didn’t want to put the real one.
The point is, I spotted a scary gamertag with a date in the motto, and now i’m scared that something bad might happen on that date.
Take note of “irrelevant, unrelated or innocuous”. Seeing a date and a couple of letters and leaping to the conclusion that “something bad might happen on that date” is faulty thinking and symptomatic of a mental disorder.
Everyday there are thousands of things that could happen that would be a coincidence if they happened. You could walk into a store where you’ve never been before and run into an old friend who is also only going there for the first time. You could mention your birthday to a friend and discover that they have the same birthday. You could read a story in the newspaper about a murder in some distant city and discover that it’s somebody you once knew. You could walk into work one day wearing a shirt, a pair of pants, and a pair of shoes that you just bought and discover that a coworker is wearing the same clothes that they also just bought. A friend could tell you about an obscure long out of print novel they just read and you could discover that it was by your uncle. You can come up with many more such possible coincidences if you think about it.
Over your lifetime, there will be millions of events which, if they happened, one of them will seem like an incredible coincidence. Dozens of these events will indeed happen. At random, dozens of them will have to happen over your lifetime. If none of them ever happen, that would be far less likely than a few dozen of them happening. To find out if some unusual number of coincidences has happened to you in your life, you would have to figure out the total number of possible coincidences. Then you would have to figure out the number of coincidences which actually happened. Then you would need to calculate the probability that that number of coincidences actually happened to you. Until you do that, you’ve got nothing.
You said the only thing scary about the gamertag was the initials. What made it so scary apart from them?
No I said that it was ‘death SL’. Anyway, that wasn’t the real gamertag, it was just example, as I don’t want to put the real one on, but it was something which i thought was scary.
Another coincidence happened just literally then. I was looking at something in google earlier on today, and just them, when on facebook, something about it popped up as an advertisement on the side of the page. Do you think this is again just a coincdience, or do you think that it is just because its been there loads before, but because I searched about it a few hours ago, I noticed it, when before I usually haven’t?
The easiest way to get around this is to stop believing in omens. Quit cold turkey.
There. No longer scary. It doesn’t even rise to the level of a coincidence. Do some Googling about how humans are pattern-makers and will take totally chaotic, random data and spot patterns in it. Combine that will seven billion people each doing thousands of things a day and realize that the data pool for life is so friggin’ huge that **not **being able to create patterns out of all that noise would be the truly scary thing.
Look up the meaning of the word “coincidence.”
Everything else is in your head, and you are making a mountain out of a grain of sand. Chill.
Could someone tell me what the chances of this are because, as you see, this is yet another coincidence, and it is literally just like an hour after posting this.
Moving to IMHO from GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
It happened, so the chances of it happening are 100%.
Google ads are placed based on your browsing history. This isn’t even a coincidence.
Read the wikipedia page on coincidence. People drastically underestimate the odds of events occurring, the term for that is innumerancy, you might as well look that up too.
Or you could blame some cookies.
Isn’t it an amazing coincidence that the “mom” who always discovers these neat tricks (in ads) always lives in Wichita, just where (my computer thinks) my computer is?
To answer a previous question: For instance, one thing bothering me was a song that seemed too coincidental to not have some connection to me. While not discounting the idea that it could happen (avoiding me rejecting her reasoning) she then reasoned with me until I was forced to admit that the song could apply to millions of people and there is nothing to suggest the songwriter had picked me in some psychic way.
If you’d like the thread to contain anecdotes of “just weird shit,” I do have some doozies I can’t explain for the life of me.
CoolGuy, you should reread Implicit’s post #27. The things you think are extraordinary coincidences are totally innocuous, everyday events. The fact that at the moment your perception of these events is screwed hints to a possible mental disorder. Have you been through mentally challenging and/or exhausting times lately? I’d recommend to see a doctor or a qualified therapist.
This is still confirmation bias, pure and simple. Do you remember all of the hundreds of times you have been about to call a friend you haven’t talked to in a while, and they don’t call you just before? No – you don’t remember those times. You only remember the times that seem like coincidences. This is confirmation bias. Furthermore, there were probably other times you thought of calling your friend, but never followed through with it. In each of those times your friend did not call you. It only the one time they did that it seems weird, and you take note of it and remember it. All of the other non-coincidences that happen hundreds of times a day – you don’t remember those. You only remember the coincidences that should happen, statistically, given all of the other non-coincidences that happen much more often. Furthermore, sometimes coincidences actually happen. What I mean by that is that sometimes something happens that really does seem improbable to you. For example, you may win the lottery after putting in your birth date or something like that. The probability is unbelievably low and may seem like a coincidence. But so many other people play the lottery like that every day, that the probability of it happening to somebody by pure chance is actually very high. All of the times people don’t win you forget about. But the one time someone does, confirmation bias kicks in.
CoolGuy, can you suggest any reason why this is not a prediction of death for anyone else with the initials SL?
Why does it single you out? Or, conversely, will everyone with the initials SL die on the forecast date? Just those with the initials SL on the gaming forum? Just those on the gaming forum who play that game with the initials SL? Just those who play that game on that forum with the initials SL who click on that I.D.?
What makes you think it is just you and you alone subject to death on this date?