Could there ever be a scientific way to measure luck?

[si_blakely]

@Telemark

It’s being conducted at casinos all over the world right now. I think it’s pretty much concluded that luck doesn’t exist, at least in casinos.

It does, if you own the casino

Casino owners are lucky that their target audience don’t understand statistics.

[TonySinclair]

As John Cleese (I think) asked, “Would Einstein have produced the Theory of Relativity if he hadn’t, by sheer chance, spent years working on the problem?”

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Chronos

Yes, there exists a way. It’s called statistics. The result of the measurements is clear: Luck does not exist as a trait, only as an outcome.

That is to say, some people have been luckier than others in the past, but those people are not in some way inherently lucky: Their luck in the future will, on average, be no worse than those who have had bad luck in the past.

This is all true, save for the fact that some people will inherently be more “lucky” through their lives; i.e. the random distribution of good and bad events will not be evenly distributed among members of a population, but instead some people will be ‘favored’ by ‘luck’, e.g. they will have experienced disproportionate fortune, while others will have experienced equally disproportionate misfortune. However, identifying which will be which beforehand is not fundamentally possible (provided that this fortune isn’t due to any deterministic factors such as education, intellectual capability, financial resources, other external influences), which is exactly what the casino gambling industry relies on to make a consistent and highly deterministic profit. The people who can consistently “beat the odds” do so not by being lucky but by identifying and exploiting specific trends or traits that can be predicted such as the statistical likelihood of playing on the home field or counting the number of face cards drawn from a card shoe.

Stranger

[Jragon]

If I had to, I think I would define a lucky person as “some whose actions, by pure chance, resulted in an actual utility that is significantly greater than the expected utility of taking those actions.”

A simple example would be a game with a fair coin, heads you get $5, tails you lose $5. A “lucky” person would have received “a lot” of money (the actual amount to be “lucky” is subjective, imo). Likewise, we could define someone who is “unlucky” as someone who lost a lot of money.

This doesn’t perfectly capture what people would refer to as luck (somebody who plays 5 games and wins all 5 may be considered “lucky” even though such a run isn’t particularly unlikely), but I think it’s a decent starting point.

The trick is, of course, giving the outcomes a value and calculating the probability of the events occurring. If you know how to do that cheaply and efficiently, please contact me immediately so I can solve AI.