Re: Does Luck Exist?

Well, hi Bonnie, it's Tom. One of the things that, one of the things only, that I really enjoy about YouTube is that everybody's videos, all of our videos, are up there so far forever. And so you get a chance to go back and catch up on ones that you might have missed. And your video, Does Luck Exist, is This is one of those videos that I missed first time around. I just found it by following a new subscriber who had made a comment on this video. And this one really got me thinking, as a lot of your videos do. And what I was thinking about is that luck, you know, what is— what do we think about when we think about luck? Well, you know, you talk about a sea of possibilities, others talk about probabilities, and the thought that came to me is that all of these are explanatory systems, aren't they? Explanatory systems— what is that? Uh, trying to figure out the meaning of things, why things happen. And obviously, since the beginning of time, we've been trying to figure out why things happen, and we've created explanatory systems in order to help us to do so. And luck, you know, which— the idea of luck goes back forever. I mean, the Greeks, the Romans had a god, Fortuna, from which we get, of course, the word fortune in both senses of its meaning. The Greeks had a god, I think it was Tyche, I think it was Tyche, who was the Greek god of fortune. And so, you know, trying to figure out why things happen is part of this, um, historical, uh, record of our species that we've kept. And, uh, we continue as we— and here's where things get interesting for me— as we make progress, we We believe that we have essentially gone beyond the explanatory systems that preceded us. So, you know, superstition is superseded by science, and, you know, many will talk about how religion has been superseded by science. And here we have the concept of luck having been superseded by the concept of probability. Perry's— I saw Perry's video about probability and preparedness and all of that, and that's certainly the way modern thinking would have us go, is in the direction of, you know, the more rationalistic de-mythologized, demystified explanatory systems that in the past had been, uh, based as the foundation for understanding things in talking about luck. So, uh, so I think about luck, uh, in a similar way, of course, because I'm a modern person, and so probability and so on, and is all part of my cognitive repertoire. It's part of the things that help me to understand things. But I also think that there is some aspects— the, the, the— when the mysteries of life occur, uh, it's for me unsatisfying to simply talk about the probabilities. Of things. I find myself, whether I believe myself to be an eminently rational, modern person or not, I find myself saying, "Damn, that was lucky." Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a quote that may very well be apocryphal, was once said to have said— he was asked if he was lucky, and he said, "Yeah, I am lucky. Usually I get lucky at about 3 o'clock in the morning in the library when I'm doing research." You know, and that experience is an experience I think that all of us have had. Yes, we put ourselves into positions, like being in the library at 3 o'clock in the morning, to have beneficial things happen for us, to us. And yet sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. And yes, it's possible to explain those things in terms of probability, But yet many of us, you know, I saw Perry knock wood, that was funny, still have this element of the past explanatory systems that sort of live within us. And luck is one of those. I've talked in videos before about enjoying, really enjoying horse racing, thoroughbred horse racing. And you know, the racetrack is a place where luck is very much a part of— it's in the atmosphere. It's, you know, damn, that was— you know, racing people will talk about racing luck, for example, and say, you know, the horse was coming up, was just about ready to make a move, and then suddenly this happened and that happened, and it precluded the horse from being able to do what the horse was going to be able to do. And, you know, that was just racing luck. It just— and horse racing people just accept that as part of the game. You know, they'll say, well, it's just part of the game. Racing luck is part of the game. And yes, there is this, you know, I think about In a Beautiful Mind, you know, when the numbers are all kind of there and Nash is seeing the, you know, the shape of the curves of, you know, derivatives and functions and how that is his his perceptual world. Most of us don't perceive that way. Most of us don't live in that world. Most of us live in kind of the everyday world where we say, damn, that was— damn, that was— I just got— it was just unlucky that I just got there at the wrong moment and, you know, the wrong place at the wrong time sort of thing. So I think that while we have these cognitive structures that, you know, ways of thinking and understanding the world, giving things meaning, we also have this other residual part of ourselves that continues to have luck be a part of our everyday lives. One more, just one more quick thing about, about luck and fortune. We all know that, that there are aspects of ourselves and aspects of our accomplishments that really can't be attributed to our effort. Were born with a genetic makeup that we had nothing to do with, and some of us are born with a genetic makeup that includes various kinds of deficits that we had nothing to do with, that simply are, yes, probabilistic kinds of events in the genetic pairings that produced humankind. But it feels like a lot of the time, like the things that we have been— the gifts that have been given to us, they feel like gifts. Gifts are something from Fortuna. If you go back to the mythology, you know, Fortuna the goddess of luck, bequeathed gifts upon humans and withheld gifts from humans and, you know, was also sort of had a black sense of humor, you know, she would give you bad gifts that looked like they were good, but they were really bad and, you know, so on. So there are aspects of our lives that cannot be attributed to anything that we've done that feel sometimes, like good luck or bad luck. So a little ramble, but you're going back and catching up on a video that's a little more than a month old triggered those kind of thoughts for me this morning. So take care. Hope you all had a great Christmas, and get ready for the New Year's bash here on the tube. It should be fun. Take care. Bye-bye.