Well, I guess this really is one for which reasonable people can apply very different interpretations and end up with completely different answers!
I suspect that John might have it right, that the test judges Agreement as being prone to the superstition and gullibility which indicate an authoritarian position - anyone who can be bothered doing the tick-all trick could confirm this for us.
When I first read this question, it struck me that many would Strongly Disagree from a “people have only themselves to blame” perspective, which I wanted to distance myself from. Of course I understand statistics, and that one fortuitous outcome has no effect whatsoever on the next “roll”. The point I wished to make was that there is a natural statistical variation in decision-making ability, and thus that those whose decisions leave them as losers in the Game of Life are, in effect, unlucky in just as natural a way as the universe giving us cancer.
And to clarify: if that really is how the Test scores this, I’m happy to make an about turn to Strong Disagreement and receive the accompanying socially liberal (South) nudge.
I think there’s two ways of looking on this:
-Can you look back over some people’s lives and see that they had an unusual manner of things happen during their lives that were out of their control? (Born into poverty/with inherited nasty disease/abused by parents/invaded by rival nation/sold into slavery/dead of dysentary on slaveship)? Of course: strongly agree.
-Can we look at someone’s history of having experienced such unlucky events and predict that they’ll experience similar unlucky events in the future? Nope.
I suspect that everyone (here, anyway) would agree with the answers to both those questions.
**LHoD[/d]: Yes, that’s the way I look at it, and was thinking along the same lines as a way of finding common ground. Another question might be: would you change your thoughts about this question if it had been written in the affirmative: Some people are naturally lucky. Any reason the tester would have worded it in the negative sense?
Being born retarded is a very unlucky break indeed, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be prone to a further streak of bad luck. Mental retardation will provide a constant challenge but it was still just one bad roll of the dice.
But they don’t get the chance to roll the dice again and possibly achieve normal intelligence. I would consider someone mentally retarded to be naturally unlucky. This is one of those Political Compass questions that is problematic. I’d choose “Strongly Agree”. How would you answer?
It appears that John Mace is right. I just ran through the test, when I ticked agree to this proposition, my social score was -6.77. Ticking strongly disagree bumped it down to -7.13. The economic axis was unaffected. Previously I had ticked Agree, under the interpretation that the question was akin to saying “some people have a series of unfortunate events happen to them”, (as Left Hand of Dorkness pointed out in his first example). Consider my answer officially changed to Strongly Disagree.
Thanks for that, Dr Love. It seems that a lot of strong social liberals are rather misreading this. Any suggestions for a rephrasing which would still have superstitious or gullible people Agreeing but would have strong social liberals Strongly Disagreeing less ambiguously?
How about “Some people are predisposed to being unlucky”? I think I’d find that rather less confusing, while superstitious people would still presumably find it Agreeable.
And John, I think they could have phrased it positively, but they just want the test to have no bias one way or the other (ie. had they rephrased this one, they would have had to phrase a different, currently positive proposition negatively instead).
Are we looking at results or looking at tendencies? You can look retrospectively at any series of unfortunate events and characterize someone as “unlucky” if you want to, but unless you’re willing, nay, eager, to bet that that person’s bad luck will continue bad, the characterization has little to no meaning regarding his natural tendencies towards bad luck.
Say the odds are a million-to-one against winning the lottery. A person buys a ticket every month for decades, wins nothing. Is this guy “naturally unlucky”? If you think so, then please bet me that he won’t win next month, and of course give me odds of a few billion to one. If you voted for “Yes, he is unlucky” you’ve got a safe bet, no matter what odds you lay down, right?
Now I’m not the type to put much stock in luck. Good things happen to people indiscriminately, as do bad things. That’s just how life is, it has little to do with luck.
But where we start from, that’s up to chance. A black kid born to poor parents in the slums of Chicago and my white husband born to middle-class parents in rural Missouri simply do not start from the same place. They’re not even comparable. Dave already has opportunities far above and beyond our hypothetical other kid, simply due to accident of birth. Is the kid capable of achieving far more than Dave can? Sure, just as any person is capable of great achievement. But the deck’s already stacked against him.
Yeah, some of it’s choices. But why do you make the choices you do? At least partially due to environment, to how and where you were raised. And you don’t get much control over who you’re born to.
I don’t think you are interpreting the question correctly. (Just IMHO.) You might want to read through the thread; experimentation suggests the question did not mean what you might have thought it meant.
Being born to a certain family may be am unlucky break but it does not make you naturally unlucky, as if you are predisposed to continued unlucky coincidences.
What I am missing from all of the previous discussions is a usefull consensus on what “naturally unlucky” means.
IMHO I do not think an external observer can objectively state that a person is lucky or unlucky, or naturally lucky or naturally unlucky. Subject to mis-fortune, yes. But what we may term unlucky (they were born without legs) the person may not (I was born without legs, but I’m so lucky to have a large loving family who takes care of me).
I believe that a person would only be able to subjectively state such a thing about themself. And I would go so far as to say that a person’s subjective statement about their own luck quotient is more a reflection of their positive/negative outlook on the world than an assessment of their own life experiences.
That said, if we define unlucky as repeatedly subject to mis-fortune then I could make many of the same arguments about what I call mis-fortune vs what you call mis-fortune.
I think the problem in the question isn’t with the word “unlucky” as it is with the word “natural.”
Consider rolling a fair die. If you rolled it 12 times you would expect to come up with a six twice. But you would not be too surprised if it came up six once or three times or four times. Even if it came up six twelve times in a row that would be stange and startling and it might lead you to investigate whether the die was truly fair, but, assuming the die was in fact fair, it would not lead you to overturn the laws of science and you would not need to postulate any supernatural or occult force at work. It would just be one of those weird things that happen now and again.
Now, apply that reasoning to human life. In all our lives there are things that are beyond our control, at least in part. We can get cancer, or be struck by lightning. Sometimes we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time or the right place at the right time. Say your car breaks down on the way to work and you miss an important meeting and get fired. That’s bad luck. Say your car breaks down on your way to your job at Cantor Fitzgerald on 9/11/2001. That’s good luck. Life is full of these complex confluences of events.
Now, there are about six billion people in the world. It stands to reason that some of them will just get the statistical short end of the stick. That is, some people will just consistently be in the wrong place at the wrong time many times and in the right place hardly ever. There is no need to postulate anything occult or mysterious such as “natural” bad luck. Like the die that rolls a six twelve times in a row, it’s just one of those things that happen now and then given a large number of trials.
This isn’t to endorse some radically fatalistic or deterministic view of human life. It’s simply to acknowledge that we are all affected to some degree by events beyond our control, and that some people will simply be more adversly affected than others.
Economic Left/Right: 2.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.33
I agreed. I believe in luck and that one can have a preponderence of it, whether good or bad. That doesn’t mean that folks can’t often times make their own luck, that’s why I just agreed instead of strongly agreed.