6 ms·

Should we be thinking about luck differently?

98 points by daverol 2y ago

aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
roenxi 2y ago
> We can go even further in considering our existential luck. We can, but it quickly becomes nonsense. The problem with existential luck is that we don' know the odds. Obviously, based on our current understanding of physics, we can come up with an estimate. But that understanding has to be wrong, because we can't explain why the universe exists at all. Forget the cosmological constant having lucky values, what are the odds that physical constants exist as opposed to there being a matterless void? I could make an unfalsifiable prediction that there is some sort of N-dimensional super-soup where all 3 dimensions of space, time and physical constants and maybe some huge number of others to determine starting conditions are an axis on a hypercube of unimaginable proportions. Then, everything is a certainty. The amount of luck involved in any particular space-time-other point existing is 1 and there is no luck anywhere. In some sense reality has to be of that nature, because the odds of us existing by chance is so small it suggests that our model is wrong and our existence was in fact guaranteed.
- ena0autos 2y ago
  Yes If this and If that, and of course "luck" express by passiveness this happen to me and that. I could not read the whole thing.
- User23 2y ago
  > Forget the cosmological constant having lucky values, what are the odds that physical constants exist as opposed to there being a matterless void? The odds of there being something rather than nothing are absolutely zero. This is easily seen because for the odds to be anything more than that would require some reason, and that reason, whatever it might be, would be something. This is why a matterless void isn’t actually nothing.
  - persnickety 2y ago
    And yet, there is something, therefore the odds cannot be zero, revealing a flaw in this line of reasoning.
  - travisjungroth 2y ago
    > for the odds to be anything more than that [zero] would require some reason, and that reason, whatever it might be, would be something p=0 and p=1 both satisfy this. Given the probability exists (and, you know, we’re talking about it) only p=1 satisfies.
    - User23 2y ago
      Right, so there is some reason and there always must have been. If you think there is a symmetry, there isn’t, because no reason would be required if nothing existed.
  - hshshshshsh 2y ago
    > The odds of there being something rather than nothing are absolutely zero And how did you came up with that? Evidence suggests the contrary.
    - bsbsjsusj 2y ago
      You are both right. Dealing with infinities!
- astrobe_ 2y ago
  Their "existential luck looks no different from the "circumstantial luck" to me - an asteroid hitting the earth is indeed in the matter of being "at the wrong place at the wrong time". But as someone said here, it's all about probability distributions and trying to minimize/maximize your chances. I like to believe that there is not such a thing as "chance", that it is all about hidden variables, but I've been told right here before that the quantum theory says otherwise.
- pistoleer 2y ago
  > In some sense reality has to be of that nature, because the odds of us existing by chance is so small it suggests that our model is wrong and our existence was in fact guaranteed. Sampling bias: we only exist to perceive the reality in which we exist. the countless realities in which we don't exist, we don't experience.
  - vharuck 2y ago
    This is called the Anthropic Principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
_y5hn 2y ago
You're one out of 8 billion people, the only known humans inhabiting an incredible vast cosmos with billions of galaxies and billions of years of timespan. That you are sitting here reading these typed words is nothing short of incredible, in a world that many want to model as a Newtonian marble-universe devoid of life and consciousness. People denounce past lives and future lives, but have no qualms about hanging on to their current life, as if that is worth anything more in the grander scheme of things. That's not to say it's a solution to end it all, but just pointing out the lack of logical thinking and grander perspective, that leads many thinking minds astray. Or think of it like a hacker: You're cast out as the solitary sentient entity within a huge cosmos with many possibilities and experiences. What do you want to do today? In many spiritual circles, luck has nothing to do with it, but inevitability does. Mathematics, if advanced enough, could maybe come to the same conclusion. But it's a matter of perspective. What perspective do we inhabit today? One where everything can be explained (away)? Or one where we cannot even explain what existence and sentience is, or why everything seems to become empty but still infinitely complex, when we zoom into them?
- persnickety 2y ago
  > You're one out of 8 billion people, the only known humans inhabiting an incredible vast cosmos with billions of galaxies and billions of years of timespan. That you are sitting here reading these typed words is nothing short of incredible, There's nothing incredible about being the only kind of human known to humans. Classic anthropic principle, making every kind of human special as long as they haven't met any other kind.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  > You're one out of 8 billion people, the only known humans inhabiting an incredible vast cosmos with billions of galaxies and billions of years of timespan Sure, but there are also 10^18 insects, and untold other critters too. Given the size of the universe there are likely also billions of other planets with life out there. It doesn't make sense to call existing and being alive lucky, since that's not a statistical outcome - 100% of humans/etc are alive. I suppose you could call temporarily being part of a living organism a "lucky" outcome for a carbon molecule, since for "them" it's not a guaranteed thing. As a human, things to consider yourself lucky for, rather than existing at all, as we all do, are things like where you were born, and who your parents are. Were you born into poverty, or some weird religious cult, or lucky to be born into some more fortunate circumstance?
PaulRobinson 2y ago
A mathematical model for luck is variance. We understand variance, we understand distributions - normal, binomial, poisson, t-distribution, chi-squared, and so on - and we can model with some confidence how to take action to select where we sit in some distributions. For example, not smoking and having an active and healthy lifestyle moves you in the distribution of people likely to get lung cancer by a certain age. You are "choosing your own luck" to some degree. It's probabilistic, not certain, but it fits a known model. And then there are those situations where the distributions - and therefore the variance, i.e. the luck - is less knowable. The best tool we have for this right now is Bayesian statistics: here's what I know right now, and I will update my understanding of the probabilities as new information becomes available to me. So, yes, we should think about luck a little differently. It's not fate, it is expression of variance within a known or unknown distribution, and we can do more to understand it. This is more than most people do, and it feels more actionable and of higher utility than the examples given in the article.
- borroka 2y ago
  "It's not fate, it is expression of variance within a known or unknown distribution, and we can do more to understand it" -- In the end, you have fate within a certain variance. Generally speaking, it is better to know that you have 1 chance in 10 than 1 in I don't know how many chances, but still getting one outcome or the other is what we call “fate” or unexplainable/unpredictable/unforeseeable circumstances. A probabilistic/statistical view of life that goes beyond the simpler but tremendously wrong dichotomous view is one of the best tools one can use to make life better for oneself and more readable in general.
- tpmoney 2y ago
  > For example, not smoking and having an active and healthy lifestyle moves you in the distribution of people likely to get lung cancer by a certain age. You are "choosing your own luck" to some degree. It's probabilistic, not certain, but it fits a known model. I forget where I read it but some time back I came across this idea of measuring “luck” as something akin to radiation doses. I think the author used the term “mililucks”. Their argument was that if it takes X amount of luck to get married/get a promotion/have a healthy life/etc, then one should examine which of those things they want, and then examine how many “mililucks” any given choice you have will give you towards that goal. There’s still no guarantee, just like a given dose of radiation isn’t a guarantee of getting sick, but a house party might contribute 200 mililucks towards your goal of finding a romantic partner, but since the party also has lots of alcohol and greasy food, maybe only 1-2 mililucks towards your healthy life. You don’t get to decide the ultimate outcome and you don’t get to even know for sure whether you’re really doing to right thing, but you can reasonably see how going to a lot of house parties increases the chances of you lucking into a romantic partnership, while doing little to increase your chances of a healthy life style. In this way you “make your own luck”, simply by increasing the number of chances you have to “get lucky” in any given direction. The caveat of course is that not everyone is starting from the same baseline of luck. If you grow up in a safe area you are much more likely to not get mugged than in you grow up in a crime ridden area. But in both areas “nothing good happens after midnight” is probably a worthwhile approach to increasing your “luck” with regards to being mugged, and probably has the same number of “mililucks” regardless
abhaynayar 2y ago
> He told me that his father’s experiences in the RAF led him to insist that the family sat at the back of the plane – and the only survivors were seated at the back. He had the right parents. Interesting... will be getting seats at the back from now on!
- heresie-dabord 2y ago
  It's hard to say how serious you are, but this is a good example of casual notions of "luck". Aircraft are often struck by lightning. US airlines (for example) are very safe statistically. Looking at the probabilities, I would suggest that you can optimise your actuarial projection by insisting on sitting in centre-rear position in all passenger vehicles. From the fine article: > Of course, we wouldn’t be here to muse on our good fortune if this chain of events had not occurred [...] But perhaps the fragility of this chain should induce some humility about our self-importance. If we hope for humility, maybe we also need to hope for the right kind of humility. We need to understand that the metaphor of a "chain of events" implies some purposeful causation. However we came to be was an accident; where we are going depends on our ingenuity and ability to reason ourselves out of the mud and pathology.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    > optimise your actuarial projection by insisting on sitting in centre-rear position in all passenger vehicles As long as your seatbelt's on. Takes quite a low-speed collision to be extremely bad for a seatbeltless middle-seat passenger, whereas those either side might have a nasty bang against the seat in front but be basically fine.
- hackernewds 2y ago
  Classic survivorship bias /s
Mistletoe 2y ago
I was just thinking yesterday how me and my three brothers wouldn’t exist if my Mom’s father hadn’t had a box fall on him in the back of a delivery truck, crushing his hip and making him have to move his family several states away to convalesce. Later my Mom would grow up there and meet my Dad. Nevermind the astronomical chances that the single sperm that made you achieved success and you aren’t some other version of your siblings. Life is weird and the chances any of us exist is so remote. Enjoy your beyond lotto win and that you were able to pop into existence in the universe at all! What a gift.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Kind of puts a brake on the whole notion of time travel. I know "just world" is a fallacy, but thinking about ethics of such hypothetical temporal interventions, I have this strong sense that time travel is not possible in our universe because otherwise it would be too abhorrent a place.
  - bena 2y ago
    It’s one of those weird paradoxical things. Yes, the chances of all that happening is astronomically small, but the chances that something happens is nearly 1. So, while that specific person may not have existed, it’s likely his mother would have had children, etc, etc. And it kind of ties into the general idea. Luck is favorable variance. So put yourself in situations where you can experience variance. Eventually, you will have something favorable happen to you. There’s a post on this site that gets linked about how success is like a carnival game. And it’s about how many chances you can afford. It’s also the mentality behind “fail fast and fail often”. Increase your exposure to variance and you increase your chances of success.
sigzero 2y ago
You mean that there is no such thing as "luck"?
xyst 2y ago
what if luck is just proof of the infinite parallel universe theory? Each event, action, or outcome with even a slight variance is in each its own reality. Buy a powerball lotto? Lose in 292,201,337 realities, but win grand prize in 1 reality.
- bugbuddy 2y ago
  Infinite parallel universe is nonsensical to me. It is an unprovable metaphysical contraption that offers nothing of value besides copium for the less fortunate and the gullible among us. Also, it has nothing to do with luck as being discussed here.
  - jeremyjh 2y ago
    I think you can prove Many Worlds Interpretation correct for yourself. You do the Schrödinger's cat thing on yourself. If MWI is correct, you'll observe yourself surviving indefinitely even if every second there is a 50% chance determined by a quantum event that the trap triggers and kills you. I'm not sure this would convince anyone else even if you open the door after 6 hours and come out alive, and regardless the vast, vast majority of total observers would conclude the experiment failed since in most universes you'd be dead. But you'd either know the theory is true or just be dead. Not really worth the risk but I think it is testable.
    - fwip 2y ago
      Jesus Christ. No, this is not supported by the MWI. There's no clause in there about your consciousness getting magically teleported to worlds in which you survive. There's science-fiction with that as the premise, but it's fiction.
      - jeremyjh 2y ago
        A lot of people smarter than me think it is supported by MWI. Max Tegmark, for example wrote about this in Our Mathematical Universe[1]. No "teleportation" is required, you simply aren't observing the universes in which you die. So there is a selection bias. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality#Thought_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit... edit: Note that I do not agree - as some do - that you can extrapolate from this that MWI means we are all immortal. The "continuous fade" argument made by Tegmark is quite convincing, as are other objections to this idea.
Mordisquitos 2y ago
This comparison of different understandings of "luck" really resonates with me. I have a personal experience that, when I talk about it, I often mention the paradoxical levels of "luck" involved. Given this is a lazy Sunday, I am taking the luxury of typing it all out. Content warning: badly written self-centred personal anecdote involving serious injury and death. TL;DR: I was almost killed in an accident due to terrible circumstantial luck (wrong place, wrong time), I survived with no medical sequelae thanks to incredible outcome luck (great doctors), and with no psychological trauma thanks to partially-learned partially-intrinsic ability to accept circumstances out of my control. Part 1: TERRIBLE CIRCUMSTANTIAL LUCK In late 2019 I was on a long-weekend trip to another city in my country, in which me and some old friends who were living elsewhere were meeting up. While I was there, I was walking on the pavement at around four in the afternoon and I was hit from behind by a car at a speed of ~40–50 km/h (the driver had briefly lost consciousness, there were no drugs or alcohol involved). Last thing I remember was being in the area walking normally before the accident; I do not remember anything about the accident itself nor the car bursting onto the pavement. The impact left me with a broken hand and a fractured skull, and I was fully unconscious (GCS of 3) when the ambulance that rushed me to hospital. According to eyewitnesses I believe I was unconscious from impact. A CT scan in hospital showed I had an epidural haematoma of 19mm (bleeding inside the skull, pressing against the brain) which was pushing my brain midline by 3.7mm to the other side. I was taken to the operating theatre and was undergoing emergency neurosurgery ~2 hours after the accident. This bad luck was even worse than that of a plane crash. With a plane crash, you were unlucky to fly on that aircraft, but in my case literally anything I had done differently that day, to the very last minute, could have led me to being at that same spot 1 minute later or 1 minute sooner and thus could have saved me from the accident. Part 2: INCREDIBLE OUTCOME LUCK If you know anything about TBIs, after reading my description above you may already know I'm lucky to be able to type this. And if you don't, let's put it this way: after surgery, my parents and my partner at the time (who flew in as soon as they heard) were warned by the doctors that though surgery had gone well they had to be ready that I may be left with severe long-term sequelae. The doctors warned them that I may need training to be able to walk and talk again, and it was impossible to tell to what extent my personality and mental capacities may have been damaged. There was a chance I may need some level of special support for the rest of my life. And yet, as soon as I came back from anaesthesia, it seems that I was able to recognise everyone and I was trying to escape from my hospital bed—needing to be physically restrained by hospital staff—and loudly demanding my release. Apparently these are common reactions after waking up from a concussion. Post-op I was in ICU for 1 week and in normal hospital wing for another week. I have no memory of the first half, but it appears that all tests of cognitive ability were coming back extremely promising and signalling a shockingly good recovery. Don't get me wrong, I was in a terrible state, with a massively swollen skull, clumsy, no sense of smell (before it was cool) due to damaged olfactory nerves, and my full recovery would take many months of rehab. But the fact remains that, probably in a large part to the amazing skill of the neurosurgeons and their team who did an emergency craniotomy on me, I had no perceptible brain damage. Every doctor who saw me in the followups would say how surprised they were after reading my clinical history of the event. Part 3: GREAT CONSTITUTIVE LUCK Some of my first memories of when I was in hospital (at first I had no idea why I was there, it felt like a no-context dream state) was that, when asked what I wanted for my meals, I would intentionally ask for fish because I was aware that omega-3 fatty acids are good "brain food"—and apparently I was brain injured? In other words, even not knowing why I was there, my mind was already focusing on improving my chances. More important than this was my long-term well-being in the days, weeks, and months after the event. I have left out an important detail so that it didn't distract from the point I was making, but it was not only me who was hit by the car: it was me and one of my friends whom I had not seen in years, and she died on the spot. My partner intentionally didn't tell me this detail until after I was released from hospital and we were spending a night at a hotel. She wanted to tell me only when she was sure I could fully understand what had happened (for which I am grateful), and it made me terribly sad to head about it. Now, what made the initial circumstantial luck even worse, was this: it was I who suggested travelling to that specific city to meet up. And guess why me and my friend were on that pavement at that specific moment? We were walking to pick up the rental car in the rental place at which I had chosen to make the reservation. As you can imagine, all these things are a recipe for disaster regarding traumatic memories and needing years of therapy. I had suffered an unexplainable severe accident which left me unable to work and doing rehab for months ("so unfair! Why did this happen to me?"), my friend whom I had not seen in years —and mother of two young sons— had died in the same event ("why did I survive and not her?"), and I had made two of the arbitrary choices that led us both to be in the wrong place at the wrong time ("I am ultimately responsible for what happened!"). And yet, thanks to having internalised ideas of stoic philosophy —and to some extent, thanks to my personality— I never believed any of the italicised thoughts in parentheses above. My partner and her mother, as well as a friend of ours, all initially insisted that I should look for psychotherapy to deal with the situation —not in response to any observation of my behaviour or feelings, mind you, but just because it is "normal" to need therapy after going through a traumatic event. But I didn't need therapy, I was fine. I was able to completely accept my radically new circumstances that I had to deal with, as well as having no feelings of guilt over what was simply a series of fucked up coincidences. In the words of Epictetus, "some things are in our control and others not". How I ended up in that situation was not in my control.
mrangle 2y ago
Be careful Spiegelhalter, lest you flirt with religion.
MailleQuiMaille 2y ago
Fate, Destiny, Logos, God(s), and so on... It seems that for most of History, we personified luck and lived along that knowledge that something someone wanted some things out of that collective human experience, and thus was guiding events and people to a goal. I'm wondering what we lost by trying to explain that. For sure, religions and mythologies are still here and kicking, but I'm curious if "Science" will ever get to a point where stuff like this becomes as trivial as "Well, it's God's Plan, I'm just the character in their cosmic drama". WHat happens when the character want to change the story themselves ?
- zdragnar 2y ago
  It isn't so much religion specifically as philosophy, or a mindset. Looking at the stoics, for example, the message is to not despair or be angry at misfortune. Such emotions are a result of the world not meeting your expectations, and are a lesson to adjust your expectations. Rather than focusing on what you cannot change, the focus is moved to what you can. The trendy term for this is "resiliency", the emotional quality of capability to endure hardship. That it the very first step to "changing the story", as you say. There's no use crying over split milk, but now you can take steps to avoid spilling it in the future.
- bsbsjsusj 2y ago
  Religion and science in general are not incompatiable. Immutible religions and mutable scienece are incompatible though. God didn't create the world in 7 days. As a theory this is disprovable. So the bible needs to be edited! But that is not allowed but we have an out! We can imterpret it as metaphor.
m3kw9 2y ago
People hate it when most of their success is actually based on luck. Sequence of events that allows them to do what they do. This isn’t dumb luck but luck that enables. (The downvotes or lack of there of will prove it).
gmuslera 2y ago
Like with the Murphy’s Law, you are looking at the wrong side of the stick. It’s like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, you paint the target after the shots has been made. I remember some critics on Ringworld’s Teela Brown superpower, that was basically the author taking care that everything go well for her. Because that is what really implies being having luck as implicit attribute, that the universe conspires to make everything go well for you. Situational awareness to avoid or get involved in bad or good events is not luck, truly random events won’t be biased towards you.

98 points by daverol 2y ago

[dead]

> We can go even further in considering our existential luck. We can, but it quickly becomes nonsense. The problem with existential luck is that we don' know the odds. Obviously, based on our current understanding of physics, we can come up with an estimate. But that understanding has to be wrong, because we can't explain why the universe exists at all. Forget the cosmological constant having lucky values, what are the odds that physical constants exist as opposed to there being a matterless void? I could make an unfalsifiable prediction that there is some sort of N-dimensional super-soup where all 3 dimensions of space, time and physical constants and maybe some huge number of others to determine starting conditions are an axis on a hypercube of unimaginable proportions. Then, everything is a certainty. The amount of luck involved in any particular space-time-other point existing is 1 and there is no luck anywhere. In some sense reality has to be of that nature, because the odds of us existing by chance is so small it suggests that our model is wrong and our existence was in fact guaranteed.

ena0autos 2y ago
Yes If this and If that, and of course "luck" express by passiveness this happen to me and that. I could not read the whole thing.
User23 2y ago
> Forget the cosmological constant having lucky values, what are the odds that physical constants exist as opposed to there being a matterless void? The odds of there being something rather than nothing are absolutely zero. This is easily seen because for the odds to be anything more than that would require some reason, and that reason, whatever it might be, would be something. This is why a matterless void isn’t actually nothing.
- persnickety 2y ago
  And yet, there is something, therefore the odds cannot be zero, revealing a flaw in this line of reasoning.
- travisjungroth 2y ago
  > for the odds to be anything more than that [zero] would require some reason, and that reason, whatever it might be, would be something p=0 and p=1 both satisfy this. Given the probability exists (and, you know, we’re talking about it) only p=1 satisfies.
  - User23 2y ago
    Right, so there is some reason and there always must have been. If you think there is a symmetry, there isn’t, because no reason would be required if nothing existed.
- hshshshshsh 2y ago
  > The odds of there being something rather than nothing are absolutely zero And how did you came up with that? Evidence suggests the contrary.
  - bsbsjsusj 2y ago
    You are both right. Dealing with infinities!
astrobe_ 2y ago
Their "existential luck looks no different from the "circumstantial luck" to me - an asteroid hitting the earth is indeed in the matter of being "at the wrong place at the wrong time". But as someone said here, it's all about probability distributions and trying to minimize/maximize your chances. I like to believe that there is not such a thing as "chance", that it is all about hidden variables, but I've been told right here before that the quantum theory says otherwise.
pistoleer 2y ago
> In some sense reality has to be of that nature, because the odds of us existing by chance is so small it suggests that our model is wrong and our existence was in fact guaranteed. Sampling bias: we only exist to perceive the reality in which we exist. the countless realities in which we don't exist, we don't experience.
- vharuck 2y ago
  This is called the Anthropic Principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

_y5hn 2y ago

You're one out of 8 billion people, the only known humans inhabiting an incredible vast cosmos with billions of galaxies and billions of years of timespan. That you are sitting here reading these typed words is nothing short of incredible, in a world that many want to model as a Newtonian marble-universe devoid of life and consciousness. People denounce past lives and future lives, but have no qualms about hanging on to their current life, as if that is worth anything more in the grander scheme of things. That's not to say it's a solution to end it all, but just pointing out the lack of logical thinking and grander perspective, that leads many thinking minds astray. Or think of it like a hacker: You're cast out as the solitary sentient entity within a huge cosmos with many possibilities and experiences. What do you want to do today? In many spiritual circles, luck has nothing to do with it, but inevitability does. Mathematics, if advanced enough, could maybe come to the same conclusion. But it's a matter of perspective. What perspective do we inhabit today? One where everything can be explained (away)? Or one where we cannot even explain what existence and sentience is, or why everything seems to become empty but still infinitely complex, when we zoom into them?

persnickety 2y ago
> You're one out of 8 billion people, the only known humans inhabiting an incredible vast cosmos with billions of galaxies and billions of years of timespan. That you are sitting here reading these typed words is nothing short of incredible, There's nothing incredible about being the only kind of human known to humans. Classic anthropic principle, making every kind of human special as long as they haven't met any other kind.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
> You're one out of 8 billion people, the only known humans inhabiting an incredible vast cosmos with billions of galaxies and billions of years of timespan Sure, but there are also 10^18 insects, and untold other critters too. Given the size of the universe there are likely also billions of other planets with life out there. It doesn't make sense to call existing and being alive lucky, since that's not a statistical outcome - 100% of humans/etc are alive. I suppose you could call temporarily being part of a living organism a "lucky" outcome for a carbon molecule, since for "them" it's not a guaranteed thing. As a human, things to consider yourself lucky for, rather than existing at all, as we all do, are things like where you were born, and who your parents are. Were you born into poverty, or some weird religious cult, or lucky to be born into some more fortunate circumstance?

PaulRobinson 2y ago

A mathematical model for luck is variance. We understand variance, we understand distributions - normal, binomial, poisson, t-distribution, chi-squared, and so on - and we can model with some confidence how to take action to select where we sit in some distributions. For example, not smoking and having an active and healthy lifestyle moves you in the distribution of people likely to get lung cancer by a certain age. You are "choosing your own luck" to some degree. It's probabilistic, not certain, but it fits a known model. And then there are those situations where the distributions - and therefore the variance, i.e. the luck - is less knowable. The best tool we have for this right now is Bayesian statistics: here's what I know right now, and I will update my understanding of the probabilities as new information becomes available to me. So, yes, we should think about luck a little differently. It's not fate, it is expression of variance within a known or unknown distribution, and we can do more to understand it. This is more than most people do, and it feels more actionable and of higher utility than the examples given in the article.

borroka 2y ago
"It's not fate, it is expression of variance within a known or unknown distribution, and we can do more to understand it" -- In the end, you have fate within a certain variance. Generally speaking, it is better to know that you have 1 chance in 10 than 1 in I don't know how many chances, but still getting one outcome or the other is what we call “fate” or unexplainable/unpredictable/unforeseeable circumstances. A probabilistic/statistical view of life that goes beyond the simpler but tremendously wrong dichotomous view is one of the best tools one can use to make life better for oneself and more readable in general.
tpmoney 2y ago
> For example, not smoking and having an active and healthy lifestyle moves you in the distribution of people likely to get lung cancer by a certain age. You are "choosing your own luck" to some degree. It's probabilistic, not certain, but it fits a known model. I forget where I read it but some time back I came across this idea of measuring “luck” as something akin to radiation doses. I think the author used the term “mililucks”. Their argument was that if it takes X amount of luck to get married/get a promotion/have a healthy life/etc, then one should examine which of those things they want, and then examine how many “mililucks” any given choice you have will give you towards that goal. There’s still no guarantee, just like a given dose of radiation isn’t a guarantee of getting sick, but a house party might contribute 200 mililucks towards your goal of finding a romantic partner, but since the party also has lots of alcohol and greasy food, maybe only 1-2 mililucks towards your healthy life. You don’t get to decide the ultimate outcome and you don’t get to even know for sure whether you’re really doing to right thing, but you can reasonably see how going to a lot of house parties increases the chances of you lucking into a romantic partnership, while doing little to increase your chances of a healthy life style. In this way you “make your own luck”, simply by increasing the number of chances you have to “get lucky” in any given direction. The caveat of course is that not everyone is starting from the same baseline of luck. If you grow up in a safe area you are much more likely to not get mugged than in you grow up in a crime ridden area. But in both areas “nothing good happens after midnight” is probably a worthwhile approach to increasing your “luck” with regards to being mugged, and probably has the same number of “mililucks” regardless

abhaynayar 2y ago

> He told me that his father’s experiences in the RAF led him to insist that the family sat at the back of the plane – and the only survivors were seated at the back. He had the right parents. Interesting... will be getting seats at the back from now on!

heresie-dabord 2y ago
It's hard to say how serious you are, but this is a good example of casual notions of "luck". Aircraft are often struck by lightning. US airlines (for example) are very safe statistically. Looking at the probabilities, I would suggest that you can optimise your actuarial projection by insisting on sitting in centre-rear position in all passenger vehicles. From the fine article: > Of course, we wouldn’t be here to muse on our good fortune if this chain of events had not occurred [...] But perhaps the fragility of this chain should induce some humility about our self-importance. If we hope for humility, maybe we also need to hope for the right kind of humility. We need to understand that the metaphor of a "chain of events" implies some purposeful causation. However we came to be was an accident; where we are going depends on our ingenuity and ability to reason ourselves out of the mud and pathology.
- OJFord 2y ago
  > optimise your actuarial projection by insisting on sitting in centre-rear position in all passenger vehicles As long as your seatbelt's on. Takes quite a low-speed collision to be extremely bad for a seatbeltless middle-seat passenger, whereas those either side might have a nasty bang against the seat in front but be basically fine.
hackernewds 2y ago
Classic survivorship bias /s

Mistletoe 2y ago

I was just thinking yesterday how me and my three brothers wouldn’t exist if my Mom’s father hadn’t had a box fall on him in the back of a delivery truck, crushing his hip and making him have to move his family several states away to convalesce. Later my Mom would grow up there and meet my Dad. Nevermind the astronomical chances that the single sperm that made you achieved success and you aren’t some other version of your siblings. Life is weird and the chances any of us exist is so remote. Enjoy your beyond lotto win and that you were able to pop into existence in the universe at all! What a gift.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Kind of puts a brake on the whole notion of time travel. I know "just world" is a fallacy, but thinking about ethics of such hypothetical temporal interventions, I have this strong sense that time travel is not possible in our universe because otherwise it would be too abhorrent a place.
- bena 2y ago
  It’s one of those weird paradoxical things. Yes, the chances of all that happening is astronomically small, but the chances that something happens is nearly 1. So, while that specific person may not have existed, it’s likely his mother would have had children, etc, etc. And it kind of ties into the general idea. Luck is favorable variance. So put yourself in situations where you can experience variance. Eventually, you will have something favorable happen to you. There’s a post on this site that gets linked about how success is like a carnival game. And it’s about how many chances you can afford. It’s also the mentality behind “fail fast and fail often”. Increase your exposure to variance and you increase your chances of success.

sigzero 2y ago

You mean that there is no such thing as "luck"?

xyst 2y ago

what if luck is just proof of the infinite parallel universe theory? Each event, action, or outcome with even a slight variance is in each its own reality. Buy a powerball lotto? Lose in 292,201,337 realities, but win grand prize in 1 reality.

bugbuddy 2y ago
Infinite parallel universe is nonsensical to me. It is an unprovable metaphysical contraption that offers nothing of value besides copium for the less fortunate and the gullible among us. Also, it has nothing to do with luck as being discussed here.
- jeremyjh 2y ago
  I think you can prove Many Worlds Interpretation correct for yourself. You do the Schrödinger's cat thing on yourself. If MWI is correct, you'll observe yourself surviving indefinitely even if every second there is a 50% chance determined by a quantum event that the trap triggers and kills you. I'm not sure this would convince anyone else even if you open the door after 6 hours and come out alive, and regardless the vast, vast majority of total observers would conclude the experiment failed since in most universes you'd be dead. But you'd either know the theory is true or just be dead. Not really worth the risk but I think it is testable.
  - fwip 2y ago
    Jesus Christ. No, this is not supported by the MWI. There's no clause in there about your consciousness getting magically teleported to worlds in which you survive. There's science-fiction with that as the premise, but it's fiction.
    - jeremyjh 2y ago
      A lot of people smarter than me think it is supported by MWI. Max Tegmark, for example wrote about this in Our Mathematical Universe[1]. No "teleportation" is required, you simply aren't observing the universes in which you die. So there is a selection bias. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality#Thought_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit... edit: Note that I do not agree - as some do - that you can extrapolate from this that MWI means we are all immortal. The "continuous fade" argument made by Tegmark is quite convincing, as are other objections to this idea.

Mordisquitos 2y ago

This comparison of different understandings of "luck" really resonates with me. I have a personal experience that, when I talk about it, I often mention the paradoxical levels of "luck" involved. Given this is a lazy Sunday, I am taking the luxury of typing it all out. Content warning: badly written self-centred personal anecdote involving serious injury and death. TL;DR: I was almost killed in an accident due to terrible circumstantial luck (wrong place, wrong time), I survived with no medical sequelae thanks to incredible outcome luck (great doctors), and with no psychological trauma thanks to partially-learned partially-intrinsic ability to accept circumstances out of my control. Part 1: TERRIBLE CIRCUMSTANTIAL LUCK In late 2019 I was on a long-weekend trip to another city in my country, in which me and some old friends who were living elsewhere were meeting up. While I was there, I was walking on the pavement at around four in the afternoon and I was hit from behind by a car at a speed of ~40–50 km/h (the driver had briefly lost consciousness, there were no drugs or alcohol involved). Last thing I remember was being in the area walking normally before the accident; I do not remember anything about the accident itself nor the car bursting onto the pavement. The impact left me with a broken hand and a fractured skull, and I was fully unconscious (GCS of 3) when the ambulance that rushed me to hospital. According to eyewitnesses I believe I was unconscious from impact. A CT scan in hospital showed I had an epidural haematoma of 19mm (bleeding inside the skull, pressing against the brain) which was pushing my brain midline by 3.7mm to the other side. I was taken to the operating theatre and was undergoing emergency neurosurgery ~2 hours after the accident. This bad luck was even worse than that of a plane crash. With a plane crash, you were unlucky to fly on that aircraft, but in my case literally anything I had done differently that day, to the very last minute, could have led me to being at that same spot 1 minute later or 1 minute sooner and thus could have saved me from the accident. Part 2: INCREDIBLE OUTCOME LUCK If you know anything about TBIs, after reading my description above you may already know I'm lucky to be able to type this. And if you don't, let's put it this way: after surgery, my parents and my partner at the time (who flew in as soon as they heard) were warned by the doctors that though surgery had gone well they had to be ready that I may be left with severe long-term sequelae. The doctors warned them that I may need training to be able to walk and talk again, and it was impossible to tell to what extent my personality and mental capacities may have been damaged. There was a chance I may need some level of special support for the rest of my life. And yet, as soon as I came back from anaesthesia, it seems that I was able to recognise everyone and I was trying to escape from my hospital bed—needing to be physically restrained by hospital staff—and loudly demanding my release. Apparently these are common reactions after waking up from a concussion. Post-op I was in ICU for 1 week and in normal hospital wing for another week. I have no memory of the first half, but it appears that all tests of cognitive ability were coming back extremely promising and signalling a shockingly good recovery. Don't get me wrong, I was in a terrible state, with a massively swollen skull, clumsy, no sense of smell (before it was cool) due to damaged olfactory nerves, and my full recovery would take many months of rehab. But the fact remains that, probably in a large part to the amazing skill of the neurosurgeons and their team who did an emergency craniotomy on me, I had no perceptible brain damage. Every doctor who saw me in the followups would say how surprised they were after reading my clinical history of the event. Part 3: GREAT CONSTITUTIVE LUCK Some of my first memories of when I was in hospital (at first I had no idea why I was there, it felt like a no-context dream state) was that, when asked what I wanted for my meals, I would intentionally ask for fish because I was aware that omega-3 fatty acids are good "brain food"—and apparently I was brain injured? In other words, even not knowing why I was there, my mind was already focusing on improving my chances. More important than this was my long-term well-being in the days, weeks, and months after the event. I have left out an important detail so that it didn't distract from the point I was making, but it was not only me who was hit by the car: it was me and one of my friends whom I had not seen in years, and she died on the spot. My partner intentionally didn't tell me this detail until after I was released from hospital and we were spending a night at a hotel. She wanted to tell me only when she was sure I could fully understand what had happened (for which I am grateful), and it made me terribly sad to head about it. Now, what made the initial circumstantial luck even worse, was this: it was I who suggested travelling to that specific city to meet up. And guess why me and my friend were on that pavement at that specific moment? We were walking to pick up the rental car in the rental place at which I had chosen to make the reservation. As you can imagine, all these things are a recipe for disaster regarding traumatic memories and needing years of therapy. I had suffered an unexplainable severe accident which left me unable to work and doing rehab for months ("so unfair! Why did this happen to me?"), my friend whom I had not seen in years —and mother of two young sons— had died in the same event ("why did I survive and not her?"), and I had made two of the arbitrary choices that led us both to be in the wrong place at the wrong time ("I am ultimately responsible for what happened!"). And yet, thanks to having internalised ideas of stoic philosophy —and to some extent, thanks to my personality— I never believed any of the italicised thoughts in parentheses above. My partner and her mother, as well as a friend of ours, all initially insisted that I should look for psychotherapy to deal with the situation —not in response to any observation of my behaviour or feelings, mind you, but just because it is "normal" to need therapy after going through a traumatic event. But I didn't need therapy, I was fine. I was able to completely accept my radically new circumstances that I had to deal with, as well as having no feelings of guilt over what was simply a series of fucked up coincidences. In the words of Epictetus, "some things are in our control and others not". How I ended up in that situation was not in my control.

mrangle 2y ago

Be careful Spiegelhalter, lest you flirt with religion.

MailleQuiMaille 2y ago

Fate, Destiny, Logos, God(s), and so on... It seems that for most of History, we personified luck and lived along that knowledge that something someone wanted some things out of that collective human experience, and thus was guiding events and people to a goal. I'm wondering what we lost by trying to explain that. For sure, religions and mythologies are still here and kicking, but I'm curious if "Science" will ever get to a point where stuff like this becomes as trivial as "Well, it's God's Plan, I'm just the character in their cosmic drama". WHat happens when the character want to change the story themselves ?

zdragnar 2y ago
It isn't so much religion specifically as philosophy, or a mindset. Looking at the stoics, for example, the message is to not despair or be angry at misfortune. Such emotions are a result of the world not meeting your expectations, and are a lesson to adjust your expectations. Rather than focusing on what you cannot change, the focus is moved to what you can. The trendy term for this is "resiliency", the emotional quality of capability to endure hardship. That it the very first step to "changing the story", as you say. There's no use crying over split milk, but now you can take steps to avoid spilling it in the future.
bsbsjsusj 2y ago
Religion and science in general are not incompatiable. Immutible religions and mutable scienece are incompatible though. God didn't create the world in 7 days. As a theory this is disprovable. So the bible needs to be edited! But that is not allowed but we have an out! We can imterpret it as metaphor.

m3kw9 2y ago

People hate it when most of their success is actually based on luck. Sequence of events that allows them to do what they do. This isn’t dumb luck but luck that enables. (The downvotes or lack of there of will prove it).

gmuslera 2y ago

Like with the Murphy’s Law, you are looking at the wrong side of the stick. It’s like the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, you paint the target after the shots has been made. I remember some critics on Ringworld’s Teela Brown superpower, that was basically the author taking care that everything go well for her. Because that is what really implies being having luck as implicit attribute, that the universe conspires to make everything go well for you. Situational awareness to avoid or get involved in bad or good events is not luck, truly random events won’t be biased towards you.