“If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re going to get it wrong.”

— Joseph R. Biden, vice president of the United States, during a 2009 political talk in Williamsburg, Virginia, that showed a shaky understanding of probability is no roadblock to higher elective office in America

What has hit Los Angeles is a force of nature that is exactly the same as a flood or a fire or an earthquake. It’s the natural law of probability. Given four to five million vehicles traveling on those freeways each day, a certain number of accidents will happen. It was mathematically unlikely that one would happen at each of seventeen major interchanges simultaneously on any given day, but the odds caught up with us. Mathematics is a force of nature, too.

From Thomas Perry’s very funny 1983 novel Metzger’s Dog, in which LA thieves show that the CIA’s middle initial might be claiming just a bit too much

There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvelous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them. … Such sentiments are seldom thoroughly stifled unless by reference to the doctrine of chance, or as it is technically termed, the Calculus of Probabilities. Now this Calculus is, in its essence, purely mathematical; and thus we have the anomaly of the most rigidly exact in science applied to the shadow and spirituality of the most intangible in speculation.

The opening words of Edgar Allen Poe’s
“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842/3)