/feels/ - personal experiences

It sounds like the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. This is a cognative bias where a new piece of information seems to now be applicable with improbable frequency. A classic example is learning a new word, and then seeing that word used everywhere.

It's just updates. Don't worry about it.

>>1767
I have never been satisfied with this explanation. Always seemed something like >>1769 was more in the ballpark.

>>1770
Do you have a logical reason to believe It's not cognative bias?

>>1771
Confirmation bias is as real as the placebo effect is.

>>1766
The word you're looking for is synchronicity

>>1772
The placebo effect is very real. People are cured by placebos all the time, and the weird thing is it works even if they know it's a placebo! The human mind is tryly a strange thing. Confirmation bias is also very real, and is a serious problem especially in science because even when researchers don't mean to, they will sometimes skew the results to reflect a bias they had without even realizing. I think it's pretty interesting.

>>1766
I have. Recently I developed an interest in learning Russian, got a book on it. See that a coworker of mine that I'd never talked to has a laptop I like, ask him and he's got another one. This one's got a English/Russian keyboard though.

>>1770
It could be a neat quirk to reinforce recently learnt concepts, if you are looking for a "purpose" to it.

>>1767

What does the phenomena have to do with the Baader-Meinhof group?

>>2460
"Baader-Meinhof phenomena" is a term which is applied to people with a certain mindset. It has no more to do with Baader and Meinhof than "Stockholm Syndrome" has to do with a city in Sweden or a "catch 22 situation" has to do with a certain novel. It's just the original example the figure of speech derived its name from.

>>1771
The dismissal of meaningful coincidence as Baadar-Meinhof phenomena, frequency illusion, or cognitive bias is in itself biased, in that it is based on a world view that presupposes information must always behave in a causal manner similar to the physical world that we can access with our senses. This bias is reinforced by the fact that it is most often described in linear terms within a linear language. Why should we suppose that information always behaves in a causal manner when so many observe acausal or retro-causal phenomena? Just because synchronicity seems to be a low probability event that is not easily reproducible doesn't mean that acausal or retro-causal transmission of information is an illusion. It seems to be the case that information does not need to be bound the laws of classical mechanics, unless one subscribes to a linguistically constructed worldview that orders information as such.

>>1766
>Is their a name for it?

Many but the common one is "synchronicity". Coincidences like these happen all the time, especially when we're surrounded by media like we are now, but certain states of mind make us more keen to notice them, or having noticed them make us more keen to think there is something significant going on.

They're a fundamental part of our reality, and they reveal a big part on how reality works. I do think many people here in this thread get the wrong idea about them. "Is it placebo? Is it psychological? Is it physical?" Instead of theorizing, people should strife to understand reality be experiencing it, not to by theorizing what can be, what will be or what was, at the end these things won't move things forward. Of course, sometimes it's important to think about what one experienced, but when one theorizes too much they end up with nothing of substance. An example would be Christianity, where people are passive instead of active, which limits their understanding to a symbolic form only and makes them unable to really see what it means to be "Christian." Christianity is either something that is used to enslave or something really high-level that people who only practice it actively get to understand. Asking, why God allows bad things, asking why God doesn't make people happy, asking why there's evil and how can there be God if evil exists. These are problems of people who do try to view and mold their understanding by passively glossing over things, not by looking deeply at them by experiencing them. There's truth in Christianity, there's truth in Buddhism, there's truth in Hinduism, there's truth in any system that describes a certain set of traits, they all describe parts of the fundamental reality. People who think that Christianity is the only true religion do have a shallow understanding of Christianity, many things are also altered by the church. There's a similar issue with Buddhism, where people interpret emptiness as being nihilistic or empty, which wasn't the intention of. Emptiness can only be truly understood by experiencing what it means "to be empty." Also, emptiness is something truly universal, it exists in any possible reality just by understanding of what it means for something to be empty. Like some other person said, altered states of consciousness are a path to understanding synchronicities and the real part of our ultimate reality, though LSD and drugs, might not be the best way due to the general immaturity people do have when tripping on them, it would be like giving a child a pile of gold and then expecting that they spend it well. That's why I think things like meditation are more efficient, because people there are in a certain mindset and there's a much lower chance of them acting immature, it's like "growing up naturally."

They reveal themselves when in a certain state of mind, and some people gloss them over and think of them as this or that, but what people should do is experience and experiment with them, "Can I affect the outcome of synchronicities?" "To what degree can I affect them?" "What are they?" When a person tries to understand them by deeply by trying to experience them and "following them" they gain a deeper understanding of how they could be and what they are. Trying to experience, experiment and think, that's a good way of gaining an understanding of them. Thinking of them they're a certain way makes you unable to think in other ways, because your perception of them most likely affects how you see them and to what conclusion you come to, that's why some people think it's psychological or placebo. That's also an issue general in life with people trying to view things a certain way, affecting their worldview, like politics, religion, games, sexuality, if they lose themselves in them and think of them more as they are, clinging to them, viewing them in a delusional way, thinking they're the absolute truth, making decisions what one think is, getting affected by the group mentality, their whole perception changes into something that makes them unable to see other things. Getting to see things in a more shallow form, missing the depth of things because it goes against their their current perception or because the perception makes them blind to see things which doesn't conform to their narrative.

Causality isn't a linear chain of events, causality is more dynamic and allows for far more interesting things than deterministic chain of events that follow one another with absolute certainty. Causality isn't physical, causality isn't restricted. Causality does happen on an unifying way in reality, and events can affect far more than people think they do, events can affect things which seem to not be connected by small distance, but by relation of objects.