I mean this scenario: you stumble upon a certain fact, person, data point, concept, whatever, you have never heard of before. You store this fact to your personal knowledge and carry on. A short time later, in a totally different context, you encounter this concept a second time! It’s a bit baffling, but probably not very surprising in a statistical way.
I’m sure that there is a word for this phenomenon and that I once read the Wiki page for it, but I can’t remember the name. It’s hard to google for, so I’m counting on the Dope.
P.S.: I’m totally expecting to get the answer soon and to read about it twenty minutes later in the still unread magazine on my table. That would be meta.
Ah, that was quick. And “Baader-Meinhof” phenomenon rings a bell. Given that I’m German, there’s a good chance that I’ll stumble upon the RAF some time this evening.
Given the fact that another thread about this very topic was started recently, one could say that the OP is itself an example of the phenomenon it’s asking about. How meta is that?
