Today, in a moment of idleness and nostalgia, I tried Googling an old girlfriend I haven’t seen or heard from in decades. She has a very common name, so she’s hard to Google. I’ve tried a few times in the past, and have always failed.
Today, though, I found her. A few minor clues helped me pick her out from the dozens of others with the same name. There wasn’t much. I still don’t know where she lives, and I still don’t know if she has a family. The one and only thing I’ve learned is that she was the screenwriter for two short films, both by the same director.
So of course I Googled that director. The first hit was a list of all his movies, in order of their rankings on IMDB, with cast listings for each movie. The top-billed cast member on the top-rated movie was — (drumroll!) — my son-in-law.
No, there is no conceivable connection between the ex-girlfriend, who I lost touch with when my son-in-law was something like an infant, and the son-in-law himself. No, the ex-girlfriend never lived in the city where I and the son-in-law live now, or in any other city he’s lived in. Yes, I was vaguely aware that my son-in-law was involved with moviemaking as a serious hobby, and somewhat more vaguely aware that he might have done some acting as part of that hobby. That’s all I’ve got.
This is not as unlikely as it seems. There are only about 5000 real people in the world. The others are holograms, ghosts, cardboard cut-outs, robots, etc. Most of them are just names on databases to give an appearance of a fully populated Earth. Most of those IMDB movies are fake. Consider yourself lucky that your daughter happened to marry a real person.
One explanation is that the butterfly effect in physics also occurs in the social world too – in that single events and actions engender causal links that spread out way beyond the immediacy of our perceptions, and probably eventually everywhere. A woman who crashes her motorbike into a car in London probably eventually has a knock on effect (pun intended) somewhere in China, where a Chinese businessman chooses restaurant A over restaurant B and probably eventually changes the nature of a board meeting in Chicago.
It’s just that the vast majority of these links on the causal chains are invisible to us. Naturally, when we do notice a connection (like yours above Steve) we focus on it and block out a lot of background noise and extraneous data not relevant to the connection.
I have a suspicion, actually, that pretty much everything anyone does in terms of event or action is part of a causal nexus linked to everyone else’s events and actions, rather like trillions of bees flying around, where all bump into some others bees (which indirectly causing further bumping) but not others. To apply that analogy to human societal interaction, we sometimes are reacquainted with past bumps via a succession of other bumps, but we notice because we never pay attention to all the other bumps that are not in our chain of connection.
And now the question is whether this blog post contains enough information for the reader to identify the ex-girlfriend. I suspect the answer is yes, but I haven’t actually tried…
Am I the only person who was absolutely sure this post was going to end with some kind of counter-intuitive theorem or example to explain it all?
My only $0.02 here is that the probabilities that person A knows person B, that person B knows person C, and that person A knows person C are rarely independent because people tend to date/become friends/work with people of similar demographics.
Not to doubt the 6 degrees of connections; but there seems to be some possibility of a mistaken identity involved that you might perhaps clarify.
You write, “A few minor clues helped me pick her out from the dozens of others with the same name.” Also some possible slippage of identity could be possible through a director’s name that could be common–which name and IMDB links connected them.
Since the woman you are seeking is probably around the same age as your son-in-law’s mother, why not just ask him if he knows her through his movie-making hobby? You could probably do that in a quite innocuous way. It’s not like you are looking for a youthful peer of your son-in-law, after all! It could be easy to casually mention that coincidentally you once knew someone by that name and were wondering if it’s the same person or perhaps a relative of the person.
It’s always so much fun to contact an old friend! I hope this works out for you.
Another possibility is that there are 1,000s of ways two people could be connected. If you see just one, it looks amazing. But it really isn’t. For example you could have also discovered she has a dog with the same name as your cousin’s dog.