I realised after posting it that my diagram of the Trapezoid of Professionalism might have baffled a few people, and honestly I fear the explanation may baffle some of those people even more but I think it’s important to explain none the less.
The Connection between Paul Allen and Jon Allen is pretty obvious, they share a last name and a predilection for perfection, but other than the fact that Jonny Paul has both of their names in his name, there’s no other connection to either of them, nor is he really a counterpoint to any of their common aspects.
In fact, before seeing him by chance on a random episode of The Paul Daniels Magic Show, I had never even heard of Jonny Paul, so the fact that he entered my consciousness on the same night as the Jon Allen lecture is apparently pure coincidence.
But there is something bigger going on that I didn’t really want to get into in that post, and that bigger thing is this:
Coincidences are actual magic.
I can tell I’m going to have to win you over on this one, so lets start with baby steps.
Reverse Echos
I know you might not believe this but every so often I make a mistake. It’s true, my life is not a perfect unbroken sequence of achieved goals. Even on a finer level though, sometimes stuff goes wrong. One time I did a magic trick with an audience volunteer who had limited movement in one arm, which I only discovered when I asked him to place his left hand on top of a knot I had tied around his right hand index finger.
I also see other people make mistakes, like a mentalist who got an audience volunteer to pick any long word starting with the letter ‘O’ from a randomly selected page of a book test, only to discover that she had chosen “Of” instead of the predicted “Oceanview” because English wasn’t her first language.
Mistakes like these can happen to everyone because while we claim to have magical powers, we don’t actually know everything. We don’t know if a member of the audience has a loose grasp of the language which might mess up subtle linguistic queues invovled in forces or a physical disability that can prevent them from doing the things we need in the process of a trick. By thinking ahead we can catch some of these early for example I often start balloon based routines by asking for a volunteer without a latex allergy¹. We can’t always predict what might cause a problem in the future though, we can only prepare for the future by learning from mistakes we made. You can’t learn from a mistake you haven’t made yet.
Or can you?²
In the case of the mentalist with the book test, the catastrophic incident occurred with his second volunteer. With his first volunteer however, in asking him to select a book the immediate response was, “Oh, they are all in English.” That’s weird isn’t it? A sort of mini hiccup on the same axis as the big fuck-up but preceding it.
When I asked the guy with the paralysed arm to hold out his hand he was holding a glass of wine at that time and he turned around to find a table to put it down on before continuing… Which is odd because most people would just put the glass in their other hand. That moment of awkwardness was my little reverse echo, not quite an event preceding the cause but a coincidental precurrence of it, created by a larger underlying cause which had been present all evening.
Seeking Connections
When you start to think this way the natural predilection is to begin predicting things, looking for signs of tiny issues which could lead into larger problems. Seeing someone struggle to take off a ring for an effect might clue you in to the possibility of a ring not coming off at all, leaving you in the awkward position of having a spectator on stage who can’t actually help you at all³.
But this heightened sense of pattern matching throws up a lot of false positives. Spotting odd coincidences can sometimes feel magical and sometimes feel terrifying. Sometimes it’s Dirk Gently, sometimes it’s Final Destination.
More often than not however, if you’re looking for filmic analogies, the closest might be The Silver Linings Playbook, where a strange coincidence might inspire you to take notice of something you would otherwise ignore. To take a chance on something purely because the name or the packaging features something prominent which has an odd serendipitous connection to you and you alone⁴.
Of course, we don’t actually live in a universe where some kind of omnipotent presence is seeding the world with secret messages just for you to interpret, so living by this kind of random happenstance is utterly unhelpful.
Or is it?⁵
Any sensible person will tell you that looking around for coincidences won’t give you any deep insight into the universe or secret messages from cosmos, because the place these correlations come from is actually inside your own head. They only seem important in the moment because of your own internal subconcious biases, and as such when you follow up on such things, the only thing you gain insight on is yourself.
But why wouldn’t you want insight into yourself?
Harvesting Entropy
Allow me to get a little bit technical for a moment. If you have ever played around with scripting on Linux computers you may have tapped into a file called:
/dev/random
Which while it has a file handle is actually an the system’s way of providing random numbers. Part of the spec is that these numbers have to be cryptographically secure, meaning they are unpredictable.
Think about that for a moment. A computer, which only ever does what you tell it to in deterministic repeatable fashion on a massive scale, is expected to do something unpredictable. How would you go about accomplishing that?
Early pseudorandom algorithms were based on a long seed determined by the system clock, which would do a sort of deterministic shuffle on the binary digits to give a result which no human would have the ability to predict. But this isn’t about what humans can predict. In cryptography, computers are often pitted against eachother, so if you got 100 random numbers from a machine at a certain time you could try to figure out what starting seed would produce those numbers in that order, resimulate the process and get ahead of the algorithm. To counter this you need a source of entropy. That is to say, some kind of unpredictable data which can be mixed in with the algorithm to ensure that without the exact same data, its sequence cannot be replicated or simulated.
One online casino famously used a webcam pointed at a wall of shelving, on which a hundred or so lava lamps slowly undulated, providing more than enough raw data to seed the algorithm.
But going back to /dev/random, you don’t have a wall of lava lamps. So what is your computer’s source of entropy?
Well isn’t it obvious?
Its you.
You move the mouse at an unpredictable speed and direction, you press keys at unknown intervals, and if you run a script at start-up which tries to generate some random numbers you may instead get an error telling you there’s not enough entropy.
People can start to glitch out with insufficient entropy too. If you lock someone in isolation with no stimulation they can start to lose their mind⁶, including their sense of time, self, and reality.
So here’s my hypothesis:
If a lack of entropy can numb the mind and dull its capabilities, then a surplus of entropy can be used to generate more thoughts, which in a creative field like magic can only be a good thing.
Or is it?⁷
…
Well of course it is!⁷
Plus, and putting this into words is why it took so long to get this out, it feels meaningful.
Have you seen The Life of Pi? The Life of Pi is a movie about a boy who survives a shipwreck, only to end up sharing a life raft with a tiger , their uneasy truce puntuated by many moments of hardship and triumph, culminating in an overnight stay on a living island that eats people before finally making it to dry land where the tiger leaves never to be seen again. This story is being recounted by the boy (now a man) years later to an insurance adjuster who is trying to ascertain the reason for the original shipwreck, of which there was only one known survivor. The insurance guy says it seems far fetched and so Pi (the survivor’s name is Pi, the movie has very little to do with mathematics) gives an alternative story without the tiger and the island and the rest of the fantastical parts.
Neither of the stories provide any insight into the shipwreck nor give any information which may lead to the location of the wreckage. Ultimately it has zero bearing on the case which version of events took place… But wouldn’t you prefer it if the one with the tiger was true?
Similarly wouldn’t you prefer to think that rather than doing something on a whim, you did it because the universe signalled to you personally that it was the right thing to do?
I learned to think this way after reading Spun Into Gold by Romany.
Everything she wanted to do, leaving her husband, stealing a trinket from a faux Egyptian temple, turning up to a conference for top magicians before knowing a thing about magic, she did it all because of the signs from the universe, and look at her now! She’s won the World Magic Awards and Magic Circle Stage Magician of the Year, toured the world and performed to royalty.
You might say she probably wanted to do all that stuff anyway if she was willing to take random coincidences as life advice, and I’d be inclined to agree, but then her book would be about a woman who sort of stumbled around doing what she wanted and along the way happened to put together an award winning magic routine.
The way it’s written though… This way its destiny! Don’t you want a bit of destiny?
Wouldn’t you prefer to feel like the choices you made, no matter how small, meant something?
¹ It’s rare but it does exist, like a lot of allergies really. There are so many things a person can be allergic to, it’s worth thinking about. I usually try to word it in such a way that it’s not immediately obvious what’s coming because I don’t want to undermind surprising moments. If a routine unexpectedly uses an egg I ask for non vegan volunteers. The most versatile phrasing I use is “I need someone who doesn’t mind getting their hand dirty” which covers so many sins it’s unreal.
² Making an assertion and then immediately questioning it is a rhetorical device I’ll be using a lot.
³ Oddly the worst such encounter I had was a woman with a ring so small and light that I could barely handle it for my ring on string routine, and that ring could barely stay on her finger. It had a piece of plastic tubing on the thinnest part to bulk it out so it wouldn’t fall off.
⁴ Many times I’ve been looking for a piece of music on Spotify and I will instead find another song with the same title or a very similar title which I actually end up liking more. This has also happened with movie titles and book covers.
⁵ See I did it again!
⁶ Michael from Vsauce did a series of videos called Mind Field, one of which saw him subject himself to white room torture.
⁷ Rule of threes baybeee!