I’m a bit unsure of which forum to post this. It has statistical implications so could go in GQ, but I’m not well enough versed in those details; it certainly could go in GD, but I’m not up for much of a debate; it involves a TV show (CS?) but only as an exemplar of my point; and MPSIMS is always a good catch-all. But I have an opinion on this and would like to hear anyone else’s opinion.
I was watching Jeopardy with my Aunt this Monday. They’re having the Battle of the Decades last week and this week for a prize of one million dollars so there haven’t been any easy Final Jeopardy clues. I’m fairly decent with science and technology questions, but not so much with arts and literature.
In case you haven’t watched it yet, the Final Jeopardy category was 19th CENTURY POEMS and the clue of the day was
WRITTEN ABOUT THE U.S. OCCUPATION OF THE PHILIPPINES, A KIPLING POEM SAID, “TAKE UP” THIS NOW-CONTROVERSIAL PHRASE
After thinking about it for a second, I told my Aunt that I thought that I knew the correct response. The correct response was
WHAT IS “THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN”?
As I expected I got it right. Ordinarily, that question would have probably stumped me. But as I explained to my Aunt, I was pretty sure my entire adult life what the phrase “The White Man’s Burden” meant but I had never actually checked my assumption. As it turned out I had googled / wiki’d the history of that phrase earlier that very day so I looked like a genius.
So… IMHO this unlikely circumstance was exactly as miraculous as any “real life” miracles I’ve heard. My aunt is elderly and was paralyzed by polio at eleven so I just told her about the coincidence and kept quiet and didn’t editorialize about my take on miracles.
Even if it were the purest coincidence – a million to one shot – how is it miraculous? Out of all the millions of people watching the show, even if you were the only one who got it right, it could still have been ordinary random chance.
“Miracles” generally require a violation of the laws of nature. Someone walking on water is miraculous. Someone walking a mile on two broken legs is amazing, but not impossible. Someone winning the lottery is just lucky.
What it really sounds like, to me, is that you knew the answer, but didn’t know that you knew! The fact that you knew the phrase “White Man’s Burden” implies a passing familiarity with the concept.
Fortune favors the prepared mind.
But, hey, I’m just one of those lesser breeds without the law…
Well, I totally screwed up the OP. My point, obviously horribly garbled, is that I believe that it was pure coincidence, i.e., luck, that I happened to look up “white man’s burden” that day. My point was not that it was a miracle that I looked it up. Just the opposite in fact. IOW, people claim miracles based on what I believe are expected statistical occurrences given a very large number of people experiencing a very large number of events over a long period of time.
I haven’t read this book but it’s title summarizes what I was trying to get across.
I was on Jeopardy (and found the test easy) because I just suck up and remember information.
Now here is a story similar to yours which is luck, not a miracle. When I was on I got the first Daily Double in the category Famous Freds. They played a snippet from the “I’m too sexy for my hat” song. You could see me grinning, because not long before my daughter and I looked for and found the CD single for that song because the dance track was used for a play she was in. So I knew the answer
Right Said Fred.
I could sense the audience thinking how could that old guy know that answer? An awesome moment.
But just luck.
Would have been a lot more miraculous, y’know, if you had actually been the contestant that day and you got that answer and you got your million dollars.
My cousin, the first Jeopardy Tournament Champion when the show came back on the air in 1985, won because a critical question (I can’t recall if it was the final question or not) was about the geographical location of a town our Aunt lived in and we visited all the time. He said that otherwise he wouldn’t have had a clue.
The final matchup, airing tonight and tomorrow night, looks interesting. It’s going to be Ken Jennings (winner of 74 consecutive regular season games) against Brad Rutter (who won the 2001 Tournament of Champions, the Million Dollar Masters Tournament and the Ultimate Tournament of Champions) against Roger Craig (who has the single-game record). And Jennings and Rutter competed against the IBM Watson computer is a special tournament a few years ago.
I routinely smugly answer most of the normal Jeopardy questions, from the safety of my couch of course. This tournament has me feeling like a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, however.
I thought your point was pretty clear, and I agree with you. I have had many things happen to me that I am sure most believers would attribute to the hand of God, if they had happened to them. The most dramatic was when my car skidded on a snowy mountain pass and I fetched up against a concrete barrier at the edge of the road, resulting in no more than a nasty dent in the side of my car. As I looked out of my car window and waited for my heart to stop racing, the first thing I noticed was the very tippy tops of 100-foot pine trees at eye level, which meant that I was next to a very steep cliff. The second thing I noticed was that I had hit the concrete barrier about ten feet before it ended, and there was nothing but a flimsy metal guard rail after that. Ten more feet and I would have been a goner for sure.
Some call it serendipity, or synchronicity, or miracles. It’s all the same, really. If you’re paying attention to what’s happening in the world around you, you will see these things happen a lot more than you would think is possible without supernatural intervention. In my opinion, it’s because there are just so many damn things that happen in the course of a day that some of them just have to be connected at some level, even superficially.
I remember one time when knowledge of Klingon enabled me to get a Jeopardy question. The question was what country some particular sort of wine was from. I don’t know wine, but the name sounded Klingon to me. Well, I knew that Klingon was loosely based on Hungarian, and that Hungarian is (on Earth, at least) a language isolate, so therefore any word that sounds Klingon must presumably be Hungarian. It was.
Not to rain on anybody’s parade, but I found that question incredibly easy; my knowledge of poetry is not that great, but I arrived at the correct answer after about two seconds’ thought (Hmmmmm … Kipling … Philippines … controversial … “Take up” … Aha!).
Unfortunately, I probably wouldn’t have bet a whole lot once I knew the topic.
A lot of questions on Jeopardy! require lateral thinking like this; it’s more important than just memorizing facts, IMHO, though I agree that serendipity can also play an awfully big role as well.
I used to work on the radio, and we would sometimes play something called “The Name Game,” where listeners had to tell us the stage name of a celebrity after we gave them his or her real name. The DJ chose the names at random, not me (I was the news anchor and co-host); I was lucky in already knowing who Joey Levitch and Dino Crocetti were (I had just finished reading a book about them), but it took me a few seconds to figure out who John Joseph Patrick Ryan was. Again, it required lateral thinking.
See if you can identify the man without either knowing his stage name or looking him up, and I’ll tell you later how I did it!
