It might be true if you pissed off a bounty hunter with a penchant for numerology.
Mind you: the pilot still makes four, even if all he played was cards.
Humans have a psychological need to make mental systems out of a random seeming world, to reduce unceratinty.
“Deaths come in threes” gives you something to say and feel more conotrol about then having to accept: “death is random and can strike devastatingly at any moment, and here is some stuff about chance and probability you are not biologically equipped to understand fully”
A real world example from my life: pregnancies in my workplace come in threes. Four years running we’ve had three staff pregnant at the same time, and it’s become a “thing” with my co-workers.
Year 1, three staff fell pregnant and were due within a six week period. One miscarried.
Year 2, three staff were pregnant. So was a former staff member.
Year 3, the wives of three staff were pregnant and my co-workers eagerly seized on that as the new three even though two of the pregnancies started before they came to work for us. The babies were born over a four month period.
Year 4, a member of the contracted cleaning crew had a baby the same week a staff member announced her pregnancy, and two months later a former staff member was pregnant. Again, declared the new three even though none of them work together and two of them weren’t even concurrently pregnant. Also another former co-worker’s wife’s pregnancy was not counted.
It’s easy to find threes if you’re around enough people and you’re flexible about what counts.
Exactly. It reminds me of numerology in general. There is enough wiggle room in the rules that it is possible to prove any numerological result. The favourite popularist one being proving someone bears the number of the beast. Mess with the encoding scheme, maybe tweak the name (latinise it for instance) choose between full name, initials, fold a date or other “important” number into the encoding, and so on. Have a go.
We will know the answer when the last person dies. If the total number of people who ever lived, divided by three, is an integer, then the hypothesis will be confirmed.
The “things happening in threes” saying is about as believable as numerology, astrology, dowsing, palm reading, and phrenology. Since all of those are demonstrably bunk, I think that answers the question.
To provide some objective evidence, here’s Wikipedia’s list of recent deaths of famous people. There isn’t a single day with exactly three people dying.
Well, when the *second-to-last *person dies, I think we can be fairly certain of the final count. Then there’ll be somebody left to do the math.
Or perhaps more specifically, optional stopping and starting, since you get to pick the interval each time.
Hopefully not in short order or else we are in big trouble. Maybe hundreds of thousands.