Opinion | What Makes a Coincidence Meaningful?

“Conspiracy theory believers are not simply naïve or mistaken; they chose to endorse some alternative explanations of events and then find the ways to rationalize them,” Dieguez wrote me in an email. He said his latest research indicates that people who see lots of coincidences have a “deep-seated bias to look for an ultimate cause, function or purpose for things, nature, people, events and the world in general.” That ultimate cause can be God, but it can also be “a preordained plan designed by a powerful and malevolent agency,” he wrote.

Hallucinations by large language models in artificial intelligence are, I think, weirdly related to the coincidence problem. Large language models are essentially autocomplete machines that fill in the words that seem most likely, given the words that came before. So they’re very good at creating sentences that seem plausible, even though they may be detached from reality, just as “what a coincidence” pattern spotters unintentionally do.

I also spoke with someone who has much warmer feelings toward “what a coincidence” people, Bernard Beitman, a retired professor of psychiatry who calls himself a recovering academic. He founded the Coincidence Project in Charlottesville, Va., and wrote a book, published in 2022, titled, “Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen.”

As a young man, Beitman writes in the book, “I was a part-time psychiatric resident and part-time hippie, spending half the week at Stanford and half the week on the streets of the city. During those days, coincidences flew rapidly into my consciousness.” The book contains a quiz to determine how open you are to seeing coincidences as meaningful. (I confessed when I interviewed him that I scored as “ultra closed.”)

He shared with me two meaningful coincidences from his life. When he was 9, he was searching for his lost puppy, got lost and, in getting lost, found his puppy. As an adult, he had a sudden choking fit, only to find out later that at the same time 3,000 miles away, his father was choking on his own blood and dying.