On July 11, I applied for the Ink Bus Preferred, mistakenly thinking I was under 5/24. I wasn't (and wouldn't be until October, i.e. now). My application was rejected. Bummer.
Today, I logged onto my chase account and got a "YOUR OFFER" for a credit card. Lo and behold it was for the Ink Bus Preferred card. Anyway, I applied for that card... but got a message that they need to consider my application. That's not the point of this post, however.
This is the point: It can't be coincidental (can it?) that Chase would happen to have a "your offer" for me for the very card I was rejected for before -- nor could it be coincidental that it happened the very month I fell below 5/24? Right? (Keep in mind, I have never had a business card with Chase or any other bank. So, it's not like offering me a business card would be routine.) Is Chase "targeting" former "5/24-rejectees"?
We are swimming in an ocean of coincidences. Our explanation is that nature and we ourselves are creating these, sometimes causally, and also partly through perception and partly through objective accidental relationships. Often, of course, we cannot compute the probabilities, but when we can, such computations are informative. Where we have solid control and knowledge, the rates of occurrences seem about as expected, as Fisher said, but our inexperience with and lack of empirical information about the kinds of problems coincidences present do make for many surprises.
https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldou..._mosteller.pdf