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Tangentally related, I find it interesting that we often call people lucky when something very bad happened to them, but they somehow managed to survive the sit

• niftich 10y ago
  This isn't much of a leap -- it's the difference between an independent and a dependent variable, of which in these situations, most people have a good intuitive notion of. Given a disruptive event that happened to the person and they were able to avoid a worse fate that befell others in the same event (e.g. others died in the same plane crash) is more strongly perceived by people as an instance of "overcoming the odds" than when someone did not experience that event at all. By the time the disaster is past the event horizon (e.g. the plane is, say, in an unrecoverable stall and plummeting toward the ground), the odds of avoiding lethal shock, injuries, or dismemberment seems fairly low. It's perhaps a perversely named 'survivorship bias', where all victims -- survivors or not -- got into that situation as a cumulative result of all of their (and others') choices leading up to that moment, and that altering their plans ahead of time (by deliberately changing travel plans) would have invalidated the conditions required for their participation in that particular event. Interestingly, though, merely "missing the flight" is often considered to be very lucky, despite often not guaranteeing that the outcome would've been identical.