Here’s some bad news and good news about fortune cookies. The bad news? The probably won’t predict your future. The good news? They might make you rich.
The website FiveThirtyEight analyzed 1,035 different fortune cookies to see what wisdom they were REALLY passing along.
They found the fortunes themselves were pretty bland and un-ambitious. Only 22.3% of them make a prediction about the future.
And more than half just make some statement about YOU, like “You are patient and wise” or “You make everyone around you happy.”
But, oddly enough, the “lucky numbers” on the fortunes were actually SOLID.
They ran a simulation and found that if you played random lottery numbers for 1,000 entries into every Powerball in the past 10 years, you would’ve lost $2.5 million. But if you’d played the fortune cookie numbers, you’d be up $172,000.
Is that random chance? Maybe. Or maybe the fortune cookies know something we don’t. (FiveThirtyEight)
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