Should we be thinking about luck differently?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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
A life lived lived through such brainy analysis of small things is a recipe for anxiety and depression. For all the millilucks towards this or that you might attribute to your house party, you've already allotted decilucks to your chances of a life mired in your own head and its imaginings.
As much as you can, just trust yourself, talk to people, trust that you can roll with consquences as they come, and save the deep analysis for things of much greater consequences and much lesser frequency.
If I implied this was supposed to be a "deep analysis" sort of thing, that was a failing on my part. The original that I read (and what I mean to convey) was less about building some deep pursuit of perfection, but more putting some thought and weight behind the "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" aphorism. It's wasn't about analyzing the min maxed path to your romantic partner, or huge masses of muscle. Instead it's about (to couch it in the language of pop-psychology) being mindful about the choices you make with respect to what you actually want. If you also want to be "lucky", well you can't control the starting luck, but you can certainly "make" some of your own luck by engaging in activities that have higher "mililuck" values for those goals. If you imagine that it takes 300 "lucks" to achieve a given goal and you are "unlucky", the question you have to ask yourself is whether you believe that you're unlucky, but at 299 "lucks" so it doesn't really matter what you do, you'll cross that line soon, or if you're unlucky and you have 50 lucks and it's going to take you a long while to get there. Since you can't know, and you can't know how many "mililucks" any given action/event actually gave you, the best thing you can do is make choices that are more likely to put you in a place where you can be lucky.
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.
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.
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.
p=0 and p=1 both satisfy this. Given the probability exists (and, you know, we’re talking about it) only p=1 satisfies.
If you think there is a symmetry, there isn’t, because no reason would be required if nothing existed.
And how did you came up with that? Evidence suggests the contrary.
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.
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.
Interesting... will be getting seats at the back from now on!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Then compare in ratio to the number of planets that don't hold life, and in general the vast absence of life in the Universe. Which is far more impressive in its commonness than the existence of Life.
Not feeling "Lucky" to be here is arguably a spiritual crime and, whether or not one is amenable to that type of guilt, perhaps also one of intellect. Sincerely, this is fully a generalized comment and I'm not trying to insult you.
I'm not sure where you are getting "vast absence of life in the Universe" from... Our search for intelligent life has been limited to looking for radio transmissions. I wonder what the stats are on an intelligent species in our nearest neighboring galaxy happening on our own transmissions?
It's good to feel lucky/thankful for ones own fortunate circumstances, but merely existing isn't really one of them. If you are a drugged-up child soldier in Africa, who has just been forced to kill your own parents, then should you be feeling lucky to be alive?
This math gets to be complicated even for people skilled in it. But with the assistance of Claude 3.5, using a specific estimate of one septillion total stars in the Universe, and fitting only a couple of extra (beyond the Goldilocks distance) yet basic likely required variables like Star type and axial tilt (my position is that there are very likely many more required variables), the total number of possible planets in the entire Universe is around 100 million iirc. And that's without variables for multiple Solar System bodies that may need to further align. With the closest possible planet probably being a distant 2.5 million light years away. The possibilities could rapidly reduce in probable number, if one or more extra variables were fitted. The number of extra variables that may need to be fitted is unknown. However, multiple characteristics of Earth exhibit multiple remarkable correlations with characteristics of the Sun, Moon, and possibly more. Are correlations of these types required for a Planet to form a life supporting atmosphere and surface? It's a strong possibility in my opinion.
There are a lot of planets. Though, the number of planets that could hold life may be overestimated given probable underestimation of the required confluent factors needed for life.
>I'm not sure where you are getting "vast absence of life in the Universe" from.
Really? Even "close" distances between intergalactic bodies tend to be beyond most people's ability to comprehend them. Life is absent in those spaces, and these distances comprise almost 100% of the Universe. In addition, the only known life in the entire Universe is on this planet. Everything else is speculation until proven otherwise.
>It's good to feel lucky/thankful for ones own fortunate circumstances, but merely existing isn't really one of them.
I and many more would disagree. Perception on this matter is personal, and in part a factor of intentional specific use of one's cognition to appreciate how rare and unlikely this is.
>If you are a drugged-up child soldier in Africa, who has just been forced to kill your own parents, then should you be feeling lucky to be alive?
That this is hypothetical aside, in my opinion there's nothing more true on this matter than the assertion that you'd have to ask them. Whether or not you and I approve of their existence is another matter.
Nightmarish miseries have always existed here. As has bliss. They've never been justly meted, and about as far from evenly as possible.
Still, that dichotomy and everything else that characterizes life is a part of the total human experience. We've never had one without the other, and may never unfortunately. That may be the nature of life.
Therefore the essence of the question may boil down to whether or not you and the median child soldier would rather this collective existence of unjustly partitioned joy and misery, or instead nothing but the cold vacuum of a completely lifeless Universe.
I don't think that it's rational to marginalize the specialness of the experience of this Life just because misery exists. Though, for sure many people would agree with you while many would agree with me. Both miserable and not.
Most people have been miserable at some point and most have gotten through it, extreme circumstances aside. Are most people who come through their misery happy to have remained alive to see the other side of it?
You're likely to have had ancestors that lived extremely short, violent, and miserable lives. Possibly somewhat parallel to that of the hypothetical child soldier. Yet, they or their siblings persevered to reproduce, and down the line some their relatives likely experienced lives full of relative happiness abetted by the possibly unlikely gifts of this Earth. Would it have been better for none of them to exist at all? Alternately, we might accept that Life here is a unique miracle, to our knowledge, which has a striking and inescapable dual nature.
That said, everyone looks forward to a future wherein we can eliminate such nightmarish human misery as much as possible: ideally to zero.
What do you mean exactly? Say, the notion of karma in Eastern religions is a way to explain at least some amount of what is commonly dubbed "luck".
But from the perspective of someone ignorant of karmic ties, can't it only be considered luck/random? Furthermore, isn't more genuine luck/randomness (free-will?) causing such initial ties?
From a holistic and wider perspective of wholeness, everything may be said to be predestined. From a spiritual perspective, it's about how everything is set up in order to have certain experiences and maybe "lessons". Mathematically, if you have all the variables, everything that may happen can be solved by calculation, however that is done on the cosmic scales.
If the idiot is guided by a higher mind, then there's no room for "luck" on the grandest scales, but it will look like luck to the person, as a unique and individual experience.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
Also, it has nothing to do with luck as being discussed here.
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.
1. 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.
You are absolutely correct - there is nothing about the MWI that implies such a thing. Such a thing is implied by consciousness itself.
Here's a thought experiment. You implement a conscious system on a computer. After letting it run for a year, you interrupt the software but save all of its state. After waiting 20 years, you restart the software from the same point on a completely different computer running an emulator for the old system.
The consciousness, whose reference of time is entirely independent of the real world, does not "feel" the 20 year pause. It "magically teleports" to the new computer.
Anyway, my point is that, I can't see how to go from "I observed something with small probability happening to me" to the conclusion that "MWI is correct". There is no logical connection between the two statements as far as I can discern.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS7eyAg13HM&list=PLzPhBo3i-o...
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.
"The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM
"Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street", Peter D. Norton https://www.jstor.org/stable/40061474