The physicist Richard Feynman used to make a joke about a posteriori conclusions—reasoning from known facts back to possible causes. “You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight,” he would say. “I saw a car with the licence plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of licence plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!” His point, of course, is that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful.
