How People End Up Believing in the Irrational

I'm glad I have my head screwed reasonably well on my shoulders, because otherwise I might have become tonight one of these people who are spooked into believing the irrational.

Uncharacteristically, I had my laptop on my dining table, doing miscellaneous stuff while waiting for dinner to be ready. My friend Mark, from the northern latitudes (he doesn't really like to be identified much more precisely than this), comes in on LiveMessenger, as he does almost every night, with some variant of "sup buddy?" I told him I was ready to eat dinner, he replied that he and his partner were too, and I wrote "cool". Then he wrote this sentence, which I reproduce verbatim because it is important for the rest of our story:
ya got a nice bottle of wine

Now, there are two ways to understand this sentence: "yes, we've got a nice bottle of wine!" or "have you got a nice bottle of wine?" because, at least on such an informal medium, "ya" can pass equally, I think, for an abbreviation of "yes" or of "you," and who cares about precisely placing commas in instant messages?

I understood the sentence the second way, which didn't seem far-fetched since, after all, I did have a bottle of wine -- which a friend offered me a few days ago -- and I looked at the label and typed:
Malbec 2006 from Argentina
,,, and what came back was:
um how'd you know
I'm scared

At first, it didn't make any sense, and it took me a little while to figure out what had happened: they had the same wine in front of them, and Mark, who had not meant to ask me what I was drinking, but just to tell me that they were having some wine with their dinner, thought I had guessed what they were drinking!

I was silent for a while, first because it took me a while to figure out what the heck had just happened, and then after that because I was playing games with him, letting him spin his brain around this little mystery. He "nudged" me (in LiveMessenger, a "nudge" is a command that makes the message window shake while your computer buzzes, as if you were given a shock) because he really couldn't take it -- not knowing how I had guessed correctly. At that point, I must admit that I embellished in a somewhat underhanded way: I didn't explain that I had misunderstood his statement, instead I said that I was just using the wine I was drinking as a wild-ass guess for the one they were having -- a half-truth at best.

End of the anecdote. What does one make of it? Well first, Malbec is now very much en vogue right now, so it's not too surprising that they would also be drinking it. Perhaps no less than one chance in 10? Secondly, there are not that many vintages in active circulation in supermarkets, I would guess mostly three: 2005, 2006 and 2007. So that leaves us with one chance in 30, if I oversimplify. So it's not so far-fetched that we would accidentally be drinking the same wine from the same year (for the record, these were at least not the same vintner or brand: mine was Domaine Jean Bousquet, from Tupungato Valley, Mendoza; theirs was Trivento Amado Sur, a blend with some syrah and bonarda, a grape I had never heard about).

But my point is this: if you take the average person with no knowledge of probabilities, and somewhat influenceable into finding a supernatural explanation more convincing than a statistical one, that person could be very easily convinced at this point that I am some sort of medium with clairvoyant powers. We know that people talk about "the laws of series" when three plane crashes happen the same week in unrelated contexts; or that many amateur gamblers believe that if the roulette has come out on black four times in a row, it is more likely than the next throw will come up red; etc. So surely, my wild but successful guess would have been interpreted by many of these people as a sign that a higher power was at work. The same people, of course, do not notice when plane crashes do not occur, or are very equally spaced, which is just as improbable as three in the same week; or when the roulette goes "black, red, black, red" which has the same probability as four times black in a row.

If I wanted to take the time, and antagonize some of my friends, I could be convinced to drift into how this kind of superstition is probably the source of most religions. But it's getting late and this is the kind of theory I need to explain when I have not had a glass of... Malbec 2006 from Argentina.