It’s A Conspiracy I Tell You!

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories but — whenever you hear the “but” you know exactly what is coming! — there is one story that is rather worrisome, and also something to which one can trivially add a bit of mathematics as a convincer.

Did you know that the actors in The Magnificent Seven died in real life in the order in which they died in the movie?

To remind you the seven were, as copied from Wikipedia,

• Yul Brynner as Chris Adams, a Cajun gunslinger, leader of the seven
• Steve McQueen as Vin Tanner, the drifter
• Charles Bronson as Bernardo O’Reilly, the professional in need of money
• Robert Vaughn as Lee, the traumatized veteran
• Brad Dexter as Harry Luck, the fortune seeker
• James Coburn as Britt, the knife expert
• Horst Buchholz as Chico, the young, hot-blooded shootist

You don’t have to take my word for it, it’s easy to google.

I remember discussing this over dinner at a training course in Mexico City. We even got as far as looking at the probability of this happening. How can you order seven people? For the first one there are seven to choose from. For the second there are six remaining. Then five, and so on. This means that the probability of this being a coincidence is one in 7! (that’s seven factorial), i.e. about 0.02%.

Can you explain this any better than chance?

Maybe they died in the movie according to their ages. You could check that out. That would make some sense, the older gunfighters die sooner in the film, and the older actors die earlier in real life.

We could probably quite easily quantify this effect, to increase that 0.02%. But it’s hard to get the probability up to anything remotely probable.

This is the way the dinner conversation went.

One matter that was not discussed, perhaps out of politeness since I was the teacher and they were the students, was that maybe I WAS MAKING IT UP ON THE SPOT, YOU MUPPETS!

My apologies. This conspiracy theory, like all of them, has no basis in fact. But it was fun while it lasted. My mathemagical distractions, the statistical analyses, trying to find rational explanations, all served to convince my audience that there must have been a plot! I should have got an Oscar for my performance!!