Over at National Review, Jim Geraghty has a series of articles suggesting that the Covid virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.  Today, he has a story with the following headline:

Guess Where the Possibly Nuclear-Fuel-Leaking Sunken Chinese Submarine Is?

I didn’t have much trouble guessing—it was Wuhan.  What did surprise me is the way he spun the story:

You probably remember that one, on account of the fact that it completely disrupted your life for a year or two and caused 27 million or so “excess deaths” around the world. But I’ll bet you don’t remember the Wuhan University researchers who allowed artificial intelligence to control an Earth-observation satellite, which led the satellite to start looking at Indian military bases and a Japanese port used by the U.S. Navy. Lead researcher Wang Mi boasted, “This approach breaks the existing rules in mission planning.” Yes, and we all know all the great things that happen when scientific researchers in Wuhan break the existing rules. First the Andromeda Strain, then SkyNet.

What other kinds of experiments are they doing over there in Wuhan these days? Summoning demons? Reaching out to say “hi” to some hostile alien empire in outer space? Are they just flipping through old Marvel comics, reading about the villains’ plots, and thinking, “Hey, that would make a cool experiment”? All the troubles in the world apparently lead back to Wuhan.

That final paragraph—especially the final sentence—is the sort of thing I’d expect from a conspiracy theory skeptic, someone who wished to make fun of the idea that certain coincidences are suspicious.  I could imagine someone mocking the claim that, “Wuhan has only about 1% of China’s population, so how likely is it that the submarine would happen to sink in the same city where Covid started?”  In other words, making fun of someone for not understanding Bayesian reasoning.

To see the problem consider how the final sentence of the first quoted paragraph could be re-written:

Yes, and we all know all the great things that happen when wild animal wholesalers in Wuhan break the existing rules. First a repeat of what happened with SARS-1, then SkyNet.

Yes, I understand that Geraghty is mostly just being humorous here.  But if you treat the column as humor, then he’s poking fun at his own views on Covid.  Thus I wonder if he’s being at least slightly serious.  At some level he seems to be assuming that digging up more dirt about Wuhan makes it somehow more likely that readers will believe (if only subconsciously) that something bad happened there back in late 2019.  But we already know that something bad happened in Wuhan—a man was selling raccoon dogs in the food market.  

What this example actually shows is that weird coincidences happen all the time, and it would be foolish to make any causal claims based on their existence.

Here’s another coincidence.  For the first time in 36 meetings, the Fed cut its fed funds rate target.  What are the chances that politics had nothing to do with a rate cut occurring at the final meeting before the November election?

I’d say the chances are pretty good.  (BTW, the previous rate cuts were also in an election year.)

Here’s another interesting pattern:  There has never been a time when the 3-month average of the unemployment rate rose by more than 0.5% without a recession.  What are the chances that the recent increase in the unemployment rate over that threshold will not lead to a recession?

I’d say the chances are pretty good.

If you seek out patterns, you will find them.  Lots of them.  But the world is full of unusual events.