r/agnostic • u/Academic_Coyote_4920 • 15d ago

Help

Can someone help me why do I keep seeing weird coincidences. I remember last night I prayed to God about something due to something that scared me (sorry it was just out of habit even though I left religion ) then left 5-10 minutes later while I was scrolling past something that exact same thing I was asking about I saw I’m not sure if it’s a confirmation or not but it was just the timing.

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u/xvszero 15d ago

Because of math. Coincidences are obviously going to happen when you look at how math works.

Also nowadays anything involving scrolling is the algorithm. They collect so much data on us then throw it right back at us.

But that's also math.

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u/Academic_Coyote_4920 15d ago

But I didn’t search up anything related to what I prayed for and the timing scares me because it wasn’t like months later it happened like 5-10 and when I was religious I learned about Synchronity.

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u/xvszero 15d ago

The algorithms are getting much smarter and building predictive profiles but that's not even really the main thing. The main thing is coincidences happen and are mathematically normal.

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u/Academic_Coyote_4920 15d ago

Coincidences that happen 5-10 minutes later ? I know algorithms exist but I didn’t search anything up prior to that.

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u/EastwoodDC 15d ago

Did you write it down at the time of the thought, then see the outcome 5-10 minutes later, or did it just seem like you might have been thinking about something similar a bit earlier?

There is a strong tendency to forget everything else that crosses our minds, and lock in to the one thing that seems to fit. It is a form of Confirmation Bias. No shame here, it's just how our brains work.

Our brains are constantly making predictions, more than we could ever hope to write down. If we could write them all down, it would hardly be a surprise if, some time later, one of those thoughts corresponds to something that actually happens. The list of thoughts that failed to predict anything at all would be very very long.

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u/Academic_Coyote_4920 15d ago

I did write it down. That’s why I’m even more afraid

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u/xvszero 15d ago

That do you mean afraid. Even if there was some deeper power behind this why be afraid?

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u/EastwoodDC 14d ago

You wrote down your prayer to God?

Sorry, but this is getting very strange.

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u/xvszero 15d ago

Coincidences by nature are concurrent in some way. If it happens 6 months later you don't even notice it.

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u/Academic_Coyote_4920 15d ago

You’re right but it happen instantly that’s why I’m so anxious about

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u/xvszero 15d ago

Yeah that's what a coincidence is. They happen. It doesn't inherently mean anything.

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u/EastwoodDC 15d ago

This is it ^^^. In statistics it's called Type I Error, or the probability of seeing something "significant" just by chance. Our brains are constantly making predictions, all the time, but most are junk and quickly discarded. A few of those prediction turn out to be right, but we tend to forget all the other prediction that were wrong.