I don’t deny that you feel freaked out by this experience, but it isn’t all that surprising. When calculating the probability of an unlikely event, you must also consider all the other events that could have happened and that you would have found equally weird.
Of the trillions of other equally-unlikely coincidences that didn’t occur, here are a few examples:
You take a round-trip flight and the two flight numbers concatenated make your social security number.
As a child, you had a pet cat and dog named Milly and Rex that seemed to behave like a married couple. Later, you meet a married couple named Milly and Rex who like to cosplay as a cat and a dog.
About a hundred years ago, a polyamorous journalist with an interest in human rationality wrote a newspaper column. The name of the column was an anagram for the journalist’s name. This man was also friends with your great-great grandmother.
For more on this subject, I’d recommend Innumeracy, and especially Chapter 2: Probability and Coincidence.
I don’t deny that you feel freaked out by this experience, but it isn’t all that surprising. When calculating the probability of an unlikely event, you must also consider all the other events that could have happened and that you would have found equally weird.
Of the trillions of other equally-unlikely coincidences that didn’t occur, here are a few examples:
You take a round-trip flight and the two flight numbers concatenated make your social security number.
As a child, you had a pet cat and dog named Milly and Rex that seemed to behave like a married couple. Later, you meet a married couple named Milly and Rex who like to cosplay as a cat and a dog.
About a hundred years ago, a polyamorous journalist with an interest in human rationality wrote a newspaper column. The name of the column was an anagram for the journalist’s name. This man was also friends with your great-great grandmother.
For more on this subject, I’d recommend Innumeracy, and especially Chapter 2: Probability and Coincidence.