(Archive This!): Why Do We Believe That Catastrophes Come In Threes?
Taylor
Celebrity Deaths, Triaphilia and the Iranian Election
COMMENTARY
By JOHN ALLEN PAULOS
July 5, 2009
ABC News, KJIH-TV Media
Michael Jackson's untimely death coupled with the deaths of Ed McMahon
and Farrah Fawcett in the same week revived the belief of many that
celebrity deaths, plane crashes and all manner of catastrophes come in
threes. The persistence of this belief is difficult to explain since
the case for it is so easily demolished.
After all, every recurrent phenomenon must come in threes. All we need
to do is wait for the third one to occur. If Michael Jackson hadn't
died, we would simply wait for another celebrity to die.
Given how many people we tend to elevate to this status, this
shouldn't take long. Billy Mays and Gayle Storm, for example, died as
I wrote this.
Or we could go back in time.
If Jackson hadn't died, then believers could point to the deaths of
David Carradine, Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett as illustrating their
claim. The death-in-threes claim is empty and uselessly flexible in at
least two senses. Not only is the time frame unspecified, but so is
the definition of celebrity.
The game is meaningless but sometimes addictive. What about U.S.
senators and sexual peccadillos? We have Craig, Vitter and Ensign. Or
we can play it with governors. Here we have Spitzer, McGreevey, and
Sanford.
If there aren't yet three, we can loosen the job constraints or
lengthen the time spans; if there are more than three, then we can
tighten the job constraints or shorten the time spans.
Triaphilia, Why the Persistence?
The tendency to want to hold on to the three connection is strong in
many areas of life.
Why? One reason might be a sort of number mysticism. Three is the
first odd prime number, the triangle is a stable shape, in our base 10
system, the fraction 1/3 is .3333333…, et cetera.
A second more compelling reason might be psychological, perhaps
deriving from the structure and limited complexity of our brains.
The appeal of the trinity in Christianity and other religions, the
philosophical triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, and even the
setup of many jokes seem to stem in part from a natural resonance with
the number three. (A priest, a minister and a rabbi go into a bar
and ..., or a physicist, an engineer and a mathematician are asked how
to … .)
People Naturally Seek Patterns
A related third reason might be the fact that people are naturally
pattern-seeking, and searching for and labeling triads, even if
pointless, can give people a sense of control as only mumbo-jumbo,
hocus-pocus, and flapdoodle can.
Michael Eck's Web page, The Book of Threes, is replete with countless
examples of the ubiquity of threeness.
To get back to Michael Jackson (with due acknowledgement that Buddy
Holly, Ritchie Valens and the "Big Bopper" all died together in a
plane crash in 1959, and that Jimmy Hendrix, Janice Joplin and Jim
Morrison all died with weeks of each other in 1970, et cetera), the
fact is that deaths (celebrity or otherwise) are like births, a random
Poisson process that regularly gives rise to clumps of people being
born together or dying together. It's well-known that in a group of
only 23 people, there is a 50 percent probability that two of them
will share a birthday (or a deathday), not necessarily in the same
year.
If we stipulate the same year, then the probability falls, of course,
but if we allow for birthdays in the same week of the year, the
probability rises, and if we consider not 23 but thousands of
celebrities of one sort or another, it rises much more. The bottom
line is that these celebrity deaths in a relatively short time span
are not unusual.
Three Puzzles Involving Number Three
Building on this triplebolic mood, I'll end this section by mentioning
three puzzles involving the number three. They are among the oddly
many such three-puzzles.
One is the Monty Hall 3 door problem, which I discussed in an earlier
Who's Counting column.
The second is the 3 hat problem, which I also described in another
earlier column.
And the third is the following: Approximately what percent of positive
whole numbers contain the digit 3. Some numbers, like 24, 91 and 475,
do not contain a 3, but many of them, like 13 and 783, do contain one.
The answer is below.
Numbers and the Iranian Election
A postscript on the Iranian election: In addition to the resonance
many people have for the digit 3, there are affinities and aversions
to other digits as well.
In fact, when asked to pick digits randomly, people tend to choose 3
and 7 more often than would occur if the digits were randomly
generated.
Moreover, when asked to pick a string of random digits, people tend to
choose adjacent digits such as 45 or 89 more often than would occur
randomly.
Examining the last digits and the last pairs of digits of the vote
totals from various electoral districts in Iran, Bernd Beber and
Alexandra Scacco of Columbia University recently concluded that both
these tendencies were manifest in the official results.
Since the last digits of the various districts' vote totals would be
randomly distributed in a fair election, they inferred that these
totals were fabricated by the authorities.
There is some question, however, whether these deviations from
randomness are quite as statistically compelling as the authors argue.
This, of course, does not mean that the election was not stolen as
most threedom-loving people believe.
John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, is
the author of the best-sellers "Innumeracy" and "A Mathematician Reads
the Newspaper," as well as (just out in paperback) "Irreligion: A
Mathematician Explains Why The Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up."
His "Who's Counting?" column on ABCNews.com appears the first weekend
of every month.
http://a.abcnews.com/images/Health/FawcettMcMahonJackson_090626_mn.jpg
Some have pointed to the recent deaths of Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett
and Michael Jackson as evidence that events occur in groups of threes,
but John Paulos says this notion is without scientific basis.
(picture source: ABC News, KJIH-TV Media)