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A guided introduction to this site and two ways to read it: work through chance and psychology systematically, or start from a specific case and follow the sources.

In a hurry? The quick guide compresses this whole site into five ideas and ten minutes.

A reasonable order to read in:

1. What is a coincidence? — separates the event from the surprise, the improbability, the meaning, and the causal claim people often bundle together.
2. A taxonomy of coincidences — eleven descriptive lenses for sorting a story, each with its own analytical question.
3. Probability is a model, not a verdict — why a probability only means something once you say which model produced it.
4. Multiple opportunities and selection effects — why having many chances at a pattern makes finding one almost guaranteed.
5. Why coincidences feel profound — surprise, causal narrative, and memory combine to make a chance event feel significant.
6. How to evaluate a coincidence claim — the full method, as a checklist you can apply to a real case.

Prefer to start from a specific term? The glossary has short, plain-language definitions linked back to the fuller explainers above.