What Are the Chances?
Not long ago, my sister-in-law, Jane Hatzimasouras, returned from a holiday on the Greek island of Spetses with a rather remarkable true story to tell. One day she was passing the time in a café with friends. One of her party returned from a swim with a ring that he had found on the seabed near a rock about 40 yards away from the main shoreline. A name and date were engraved on the inside of the ring: Athena Karagiannis and November 17, 1979.1 It is traditional in Greece when a couple marry for the groom to have a ring engraved with his wife’s name, along with the date of their wedding, and vice versa for the bride.
As the group excitedly mused on how the ring had come to be in its watery hiding place, Jane could not help but notice a woman who was not one of her group listening in intently. Eventually, this woman approached my sister-in-law’s party and said, “I hope you don’t mind me interrupting, but I could not help but overhear you discussing the ring that you have found. You see, my surname is Karagiannis and my mother’s name is Athena—and about 40 years ago, my dad lost his ring while swimming in the sea!”
We frequently have to make decisions based on real-life probabilities; we are simply not very good at doing so.
The group then waited in anticipation as the stranger called her mother to check on the date of her mother’s wedding day, only to be disappointed to learn that it had actually been March 8, 1980. It appeared that the ring was not the one that had
