• Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Even events that happen with perfectly uniform randomness will cause situations were the event happens multiple times in close proximity.

    It’s just that we humans just love to see patterns were there are none (and suck at spotting true randomness) and will focus on the purelly coincidental “many of the same within a short time frame” whilst for example ignoring longer than “normal” periods when the event did not happen.

    Not saying “doom and gloom posts” have purelly uniform randomness (frankly, I doubt it, as most human stuff tends to have Normal or similar probability distributions), just pointing out that without actually having measured both the events and the non-events, your (and everybody else’s) natural perception will be heavilly skewed by the tendency to notice seemingly unusual patterns of events and assigning them meaning when they might have no meaning at all because pure randomness will on occasion by pure complete chance produce such patterns.

    In summary: there might be an explanation, but it can also just be pure chance, so beware of expecting such things to have a reason.