Coincidental Probability

It's too windy to go to the airport this morning so I thought I would spend a minute here and tell you a story.

I have a new favorite word. It's "Coincidental Probability". I discovered it while watching an episode of NCIS. If you are familiar with it, Tim McGee and one of the newer female agents, were having a conversation about a "Coin Toss". It seems to be one of their favorite methods to settle bets or make predictions.

It seems that every time the coin was tossed, whether it was heads or tails, McGee would always win.

After some degree of frustration on the part of the loser, she finally asked the question: "Why is it, that every time we toss the coin, you always win"? McGee said that she should chalk it up to "Coincidental Probability" but she rejected the answer and asked if it was a trick coin or some kind of magic. McGee suggested that she might not understand the concept but when he did, she claimed to have written her senior thesis on Coincidental Probability and knew all about it.

I decided to Google it and see what they had to say about it. When I did that I found a ton of information under Coincidence Probability and with that, I became pretty interested in the different degrees of the concept and how I had inadvertently been using it all my life.

They used the probability of birthdays. They gave an example of the probability of someone in a room full of people, having the same birthday as you. I decided to use something else.

When you are invading a foreign country by air, especially in a helicopter, and you know where the anti aircraft positions are, you probably better not fly over them or you could get your ass shot off or shot down. That thought process went back 44 years.

Thanks to coincidental probability and some seriously bad times for Captain Campbell, Warrant Officers Morvant, Robb, Lambert, Rhorer,  Olinger and Lts. Coombs, Long and Forscythe , I learned quickly, where not to go.

It might seem elementary to make a decision to change course because people were getting shot down over a specific area but when you have orders to fly a specific route to "ingress" a target area, that's the way you go.

In the latter part of my combat tour, especially when I became one of the senior pilots, I pretty much decided that I would make up my own rules of ingress and egress after I crossed the border into Cambodia.

For those of you who have seen Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise in "A Few Good Men", you might ask, "Can you ignore an order". My answer is this: "When you have a new guy in charge, a guy that has no combat experience invading another country, a guy who is an idiot, HELL YEAH.

I considered my decisions in combat as decisions that saved American lives more than focusing on decisions that took enemy lives. I liked George Scott's explanation of that when he played the role of Patton. "Make the other damn bastard die for his country".

Whether the captain in charge of me liked it wasn't really that much of a concern to me. I had already made the decision to leave the Army because of him and my career didn't mean shit to me. When he threatened to ruin my career I responded with : "There must be a misunderstanding sir, I'm leaving the Army when my tour is over and my new career is ruining yours". 

That was a good decision and in my recollection of experiences that could be classified as "Coincidental Probability" , I concluded that if I had not taken that path, I would have ended up like the group of brave men listed in the above paragraph of men who had been shot down.

Now, before I sign off, I want you to think about the signs you've seen in human behavior that cause you to think a particular way. Whether it's a co worker who is "cooking the books" and stealing commissions from you or a competitor that's paying kickbacks to customers, there is a great degree of probability that their repeated theft or lies isn't just a coincidence. Some people are just assholes and all you have to do is watch and learn. After that, you should know which way to go and what to do.

Y'all have a nice day and hello to Dr. Mike O, Dr. Manny T, and a couple of other guys who have found lots of bullet holes in their helicopter.