Many who are successful don’t believe in luck. They do believe in manipulating the odds in their favor.
None of these was an advertised job, and because of unusual circumstances it just happened that, through no previous connection, I bumped into someone who needed an employee at a time when I was interested in doing what that person needed someone to do. And, we happened to strike up a conversation about that fact.
I agree that often people merely attribute good things that happen to them to luck. However, at least as often, people attribute bad things that happen to them as luck. You’ve never heard the phrase, “that’s just my luck”? That phrase only refers to bad things.
What I was trying to get at, and maybe it’s just constant optimism that causes me to ascribe happy coincidences to luck, is that serendipitous things happen often. They happen to me a lot. I will be faced with a major life decision, and suddenly little things will jump out at me to point the direction I should go. As a a trivial hypothetical example, suppose I am debating whether to buy chocolate made by Hershey’s or Godiva. Suddenly, people on the train will be talking about Hershey’s. Barbara Hershey will be starring in a movie that is on instead of a show I usually watch. I’ll find out a friend is moving to Hershey Pennsylvania all of a sudden. I’m just as sensitized to things associated with Godiva, but suddenly, the world is full of Hershey. That is synchronicity, and that is what I’m talking about.
I think it exists and not just in my head. Although plenty of other things do exist only in my head.
The odds of your one ticket winning are exactly the same whether one million are sold or one billion or one dozen. The odds of your ticket winning have nothing to do with how many others are playing.
This becomes apparent when you simplify the situation. Let’s say that instead of guessing three, five or seven numbers you only have to choose one and it’s between 1 and 10. The odds of your single guess being correct are 1 in 10. It doesn’t matter if you are the only one playing or if there are millions playing. Granted, the more people who play, the more likely you will have to share the jackpot, but that has nothing to do with whether or not you might win.
Let me address the idea that there is something more magical that mere randomness going on here. Let’s say that there is some sort of mystical power that causes such coincidences to happen. The behavior of this magical power is so arbitrary, so unpredictable, so beyond our ability to control, influence or harness that it may as well be nothing more than randomness. If you know of a way to tweak this mystical power in the slightest, James Randi has $1 million waiting for you.
This is actually a common phenomen. A few months ago I was considering buying a truck. Suddenly truck commercials were everywhere. Was there something magical to this? No. I simply had a reason at that time to be attuned to the ads. Now that I’m no longer interested in buying a truck, I couldn’t tell you if I’ve seen a truck commercial in the last week. No one started playing truck commercials for my benefit.
The problem I have with assuming that there is a benvolent mystical power that helps to point the way is when that belief influences a significant life decision. My sister-in-law is considering a divorce. So what does she look to to help her in her decision? Astrology! Her life and that of her husband and two small children hang in the balance, and she’s putting her faith in astrology.
Bottom line is, I think, people never hear about the times the odds play out against us because that doesn’t have that magical quality, it is the expected outcome. It has to do with human nature.
The lottery is a fine example to kick in some perspective.
And don’t take offence but I think that the emotion coupled with the unlikeliness of that event prompted the Aunt to say she felt an urge to go to the post office.
Mangetout that post made up for the day’s net bill (and wedged a smile out of me).
As my husband pointed out to me, there are distinct survival advantages to believing in causality even when you don’t really have enough evidence to support it: for instance, the fact that George got sick after eating the purple berries may just be a coincidence, but over all it is better to assume the worse, and go for the green berries instead. People that stoped to say “How do I KNOW this lion wants to eat me?” did not reproduce as much as people who said “Homly shit! This zebra may well want to eat me for all I know! Run!” Our brains seemed to be hard wired to look for, and believe in, patterns. The gambler’s fallacy makes intuitive sense–it is probability that is counter-intuitive. However, one of hte advantages of being civilized is that we can strive against our intuition when we find it to be misguided. However, I have found this to be a constant struggle. The tendency to think “oh, that’s a good sign” seems to be deep in the bones.
No offense intended, but I still think “synchronicity” (in the mystical sense) is in your head. 
Consider the Hershey example. While the Hershey-theme everywhere might seem incredible, think about how many thousands of small decisions, small and large, the average person makes in a week, or a month, or a year. What would be incredible is if coincidences like this didn’t happen to you from time to time.
But humans are wired to remember the unusual occurances, and not the mundane ones. That causes people to think that unlikely things are happening unsually often, even though you should expect them to happen from time to time.
To use another coin-flip example, imagine that you’re sitting down and flipping a coin a thousand times. Every once in a while you’ll look at your flipping record and say: “Wow, I just got 10 heads in a row! The odds of that were 1024 to 1!” But there’s actually a 60% chance that you’ll get at least one run of 10 heads in a row, and an 85% chance that you’ll get either a run of 10 heads or a run of 10 tails.
And while things happen in our lives whose odds are worse that 1000 to 1, we get a lot more than 1000 “flips.”
-Fezzik
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Originally posted by bnorton
**The problem I have with assuming that there is a benvolent mystical power that helps to point the way is when that belief influences a significant life decision. My sister-in-law is considering a divorce. So what does she look to to help her in her decision? Astrology! Her life and that of her husband and two small children hang in the balance, and she’s putting her faith in astrology. **
Lots of people use some crutch, whether it is a benevolent mystical power, a deity, or “fate” to avoid hard choices and to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. People who do not believe in any higher power use crutches just as often as those who do. They just use different crutches–like nature or science. And, before you get all worked up about nature or science being more real than belief, it is good to remember that science is being revised constantly as scientists realize that what they thought was going on was actually something entirely different.
[quote]
Originally posted by Fezzik
No offense intended, but I still think “synchronicity” (in the mystical sense) is in your head.
No offense taken. I have to say, though, that whether synchronicity exists, be it magical, mystical, spiritual, or natural (in the sense that my brain makes it up), I enjoy it. It gives me a good feeling–a feeling of connectedness to a greater community. That in turn fosters my committment to help my fellow human, which results in occasional good deeds that actually improve something for someone. So, in the end, I don’t care whether anyone agrees with me, and I don’t care whether it is true in some sort of able-to-be-reproduced-in-a-physics-lab sort of sense. It’s fun anyway!
This morning I was running late for work. Normally I would be out of the house by 7:45, but this morning things were out of sync. For example, for some reason two newspapers instead of the usual one were wrapped up in a single rubber band and lying on the lawn. As I pulled out of the driveway I noticed an old woman whom I had never seen before walking her dog. Just then I remembered that it was garbage day, I pulled back in the drive and ran in to get the garbage. I rolled the garbage to the street then brought out the recycled cans and plastics. Just as I dropped the recycle container on the sidewalk - just at that very exact instant - the neighbor’s water sprinkler shut off. What are the odds of that?! Coincidence, you say? Harumph!
Well, I wouldn’t so much raise the issue of nature or science being more real than religious or mystical beliefs so much as I would ask exactly how someone could use science or nature as a “crutch”. In particular, science isn’t so much a body of facts as it is a method of learning things, involving rigorous testing of your own ideas about how things work. It’s kind of hard for me to see how that could be used as a “crutch”.
I guess “nature” could be used as a crutch, in the sense that someone could say “Well, I was cheating on my wife, but that’s just the way men are–millions of years of evolution have left guys with a nature which practically requires them to screw anything that moves”. In this case, you might see “nature” as the body of facts discovered by science (the method); of course, what we think “nature” is will be subject to revision by the continuing application of science.
I like to do this magic trick. Have the person pick a card, look at it, and put it back in. Shuffle the deck, split the cards, ask for a word, count that many number of cards off the top, take those cards, put them on the bottom of the deck…
Basically do a bunch of random, completely unrelated card-trick-like things. When you have sufficiently confused (or bored) the other person, flip over a card and say… “Is this your card?” If it doesn’t, play it off like you were fooling around.
But if it does work, man, they will be SHOCKED. “How did you DO that?” They’ll think it’s a bad-ass trick. Refusing to elaborate only adds to the illusion.
I’ve tried this quite a bit. Had to do it a lot before it finally worked. It wasn’t luck, it was just bound to happen if I did it enough. And with all the occurances that occur every day around the world, some of them are bound to be interesting, and seemingly unexplainable. Like my “card trick”.
MEBuckner, I apologize for my imprecision. I was not considering science as a method but was equating it with nature–the kind of nature not easily discernible to the untrained human. And, I did think of it in the terms you described–it doesn’t matter that I cheated on my wife because by nature I’m a sexual “hunter.” Science as method can be a crutch also in that it encourages us to distance ourselves from things, which is valuable to analyze and learn about them. However, taken to the extreme, that practice can allow people to avoid engaging in life. In that sense, it can be a crutch, as well.