Twice now, within the month-to-date, I’ve started seriously looking into an idea and, within a week or two, a directly related post finds its way to the HackerNews front page. As far as I know, HN doesn’t have a personalization engine that could’ve tracked me across the internet to show these to me specifically.
I don’t mean to imply anything crazy is going on here—it’s entirely possible that some decent subsection of the HN cohort was primed in some way, and I’m perfectly aware of the frequency bias (and more vulnerable to it right now, for unrelated reasons). It just got me thinking; at what point is it appropriate to assume phenomena like this isn’t random? I have no idea what my prior odds for this would be, especially given the rise to front page specifically.
How much serendipity is too much?
Twice now, within the month-to-date, I’ve started seriously looking into an idea and, within a week or two, a directly related post finds its way to the HackerNews front page. As far as I know, HN doesn’t have a personalization engine that could’ve tracked me across the internet to show these to me specifically.
I don’t mean to imply anything crazy is going on here—it’s entirely possible that some decent subsection of the HN cohort was primed in some way, and I’m perfectly aware of the frequency bias (and more vulnerable to it right now, for unrelated reasons). It just got me thinking; at what point is it appropriate to assume phenomena like this isn’t random? I have no idea what my prior odds for this would be, especially given the rise to front page specifically.
This sounds like the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.