Anyway, since we've gone off on a tangent on statistics, I was recently treated to some dubious ones that tried to convince me that dreams that, seemingly, predict the future are to be expected considering the size of the population. The reasoning was that since there's hundreds of millions of people sleeping in America every night it's statistically guaranteed that someof those people are going to have dreams that come true. What do you think of that? Do you think that's good reasoning? I don't. How do you statistically determine how many dreams will come true? The ironic thing is that this was in a book on critical thinking. Sheesh.

Funny you should mention this as I was reading about this very issue just yesterday.  I'm reading Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale and was in the part where he's talking about the apparently widely-held belief in science that African animals, monkeys and rats in particular in this case, must have floated on ersatz rafts (i.e. fallen trees, roots, etc.) to South America.  Dawkins makes the point that we're naturally inclined to not appreciate the likelihood of that occuring as the sample size of opportunities stretching over millions of years is just too much for our imaginations.  In that case, all it took was one instance for a pregnant monkey or a male and female pair to make its/their way over.  That's it, just one instance.  Still, it's hard for us to appreciate.

We all know that so many strange and sometimes coincidentally strange things can happen, given enough throws of the dice.  What were the chances of the expected new IMF head being named Wolf-something-or-other just like the last one?