Can someone be said to be unlucky? I know that what we call “luck” is really the random workings of the world, and when someone’s is said to be “lucky” it means that he or she has had a string of positive things happen. Of course, over a normal life the positives and negatives should even out to around a 50/50 ratio. However, I have observed certain individuals who seem to be chronically unlucky. Let me illustrate: a friend of mine, in a 6 month period, managed to purchase a (new) car, TV set, and stereo system-all of which were defective. Products today are generally pretty good-many manufacturers boast of having “six-sigma” quality levels-this means that only 3.4 products 9in a million) are defective. Let’s assume that the products this guy bought were much worse-let us say they had defect rates of 1000 Parts per million. Even at this, his chances of buying all three bad would be something like (0.001 * 0.001*0.001) or 1 in a billion. Clearly this seems to indicate that the guy is in fact, extremely “unlucky”. I know this line of reasoning is wrong-will some kind statistician please enlighten me?
Think about it like this: Out of the statistical set of all people who bought a TV, a stereo, and a car in a six-month period since the advent of big-screen TV’s, it is likely probable that a few people had problems with all of them. Your friend was just one of that (small) statistical subset.
I believe that there are “lucky” and “unlucky” people, but that is just a description of the subset of random results that happen to them. The real thing to remember is that in life, we’re dealing with a statistical sample set that is mind-bogglingly huge- the number of people currently alive! So over all of these lives, there is a probability that some unfortunate individuals will be on the bad side of a majority of their random chances.
stoli
Well, blessed is just about everyone with a vested interest in the status quo, as far as I can tell.
I think that Richard Feynman addressed that sort of question once, and now I’m going to horribly misquote it from memory:
I was driving to campus this morning when a most unusual thing happened to me. I saw a car with a license plate that read “ZGL-6412.” Please calculate for me how fantastically small the probability is of my seeing that particular license plate number.
The concept of “luck,” when applied to situations such as the one you have given, often fails to take into account how many things actually could have gone wrong. Your friend likely drove to work every day his car wasn’t in the shop and did not once drive into an enormous sinkhole. He never got hit by a bus when he walked to work. Several satellites’ orbits probably decayed during that period, yet not once was he stricken by falling debris. It is possible that he walked over several sidewalk steam grates, and never fell through. His toaster didn’t explode, he didn’t drop his hairdryer into his bath, the IRS didn’t add a zero to his taxable income, and he didn’t get struck by lightning.
All in all, I’d say your friend was very lucky indeed.
But why “unlucky” and not just “a bad shopper”? Perhaps he makes poor decisions when it comes to major purchases. Get him a subscription to “Consumer Reports” and maybe his “luck” will change.
All mathematical properties of luck aside:
In real life, if you want to avoid meeting bad luck, simply identify the places where bad luck tends to hang out, and stay away. Vice versa for good luck.
Your brain-in-a-jar,
Myron
Common sense is an oxymoron.
egkelly wrote
I don’t know squat about the reliability of consumer products. Further, I’ve never heard the term “six-sigma”; your knowing certainly implies you have more knowledge of the area then me. But…
In my last job, I was responsible for the manufacturing arm of the company, which built a product that was basically a PC. (It was a firewall, but that’s irrelevant.) We were able to bring the DOA rate down from 1.5% to under 0.5%, which impressed others in the company and in other similar companies. That is to say, people were happy when 1 out of every 200 boxes failed at startup.
Now, the bulk of the problems came from shipping problems, and the products you describe may have gotten tested once they got to the show room. And the product I was shipping had a hard drive and a fan, both of which are pretty sensative. But 3 products in a million failing sounds mighty impressive to me.
On the general topic: the example you give (failed appliances) truly does involve luck. But I suspect that most “lucky” people are really bringing it on themselves. I think of things like: finding a good job, finding a good girl/boyfriend, getting a good price on something, making a good sale, meeting an important business contact, etc. Being at the right place at the right time type things. Some people actively put themselves in potentially good places, then look lucky when the right thing happens.
Larry Niven, in his classic novel Ringworld, discusses the attempt by the race known as puppeteers to breed for luck. In the attempt, Earth is induced to pass birth control laws that limit the number of children allowed to a couple. Some people are allowed to exceed the limit by winning a lottery. In the novel, one of the characters, Teela Brown, has been the result of something like seven generations of lottery winners, making her extraordinarily lucky.
My take on the issue is that luck suffers from the difficulty of establishing that lucky coincidence is a result of causation.
I tried, back in my D&D days, a little probability test. According to the graphs, three six sided dice should most often yield a 7 and least often a 3 or 18. In the case of the game rules, 3 would be unlucky and 18 lucky.
Having nothing better to do on a miserable winter day, I tossed 3D6 1000 times and charted the results.
I can’t print them here, but the 3 end was high, the 18’s non-existent and the bulge (highest count) occurred around the 5 mark.
I knew I was naturally unlucky and now I had proof!! (Or bad dice…)
Since then, I’ve had two bad cars, all my VCR’s have been short-lived, and this computer required replacement of the CPU, hard drive, RAM, video card, and CD Rom drive within 6 weeks.
Is there a connection with the streetlight-dousing phenomenon? Who knows…all I DO know is, I’ve never won the lottery!
It’s almost guaranteed that when you die your over ‘luck’ will not be average, because of variance. If you get cancer and die at 35, your overall life was dominated by bad luck. If you win the lottery, the cash winfall will probably overshadow any bad financial luck you’ll otherwise have.
But if you want to know if people are predisposed towards bad luck, absolutely not.
One of my favorite quotes: “There is no such thing as good or bad luck. There are only varying degrees of ability to deal with a statistical universe.” - Robert Heinlein
The people that have ‘good luck’ are typically the ones that know how to maximize their good opportunities and minimize the effects of the bad luck.
George Will once wrote that good luck is created. His theory is that those most capable of exploiting fleeting opportunities often appear to defy probability, and in a sense they do, because they are able to turn a situation to their advantage where many folks don’t see an opportunity at all. The key is that many things which appear random are not, at least not entirely.
From personal experience, I surmise that the contrapositive holds true as well.
I know a guy who I consider a very ‘lucky’ individual, and I suspect I know the reason why. He’s single, jovial, old enough to garner a small degree of respect, doesn’t have a lot of debt or other obligations, naturally curious, and generally looks at the possible benefits of an opportunity rather than unfortunate consequences. Therefore, he’s the one who will happily snap up the extra ticket to a baseball game, drop all his plans to go on vacation to the Carribean with a couple of girls, has the time to stop by a yard sale and pick up a Matisse for five bucks, et cetera. My other friends who have constructed a constrictive life around themselves experience such windfalls much less often. Because they aren’t as flexible, I think.
And as I said, the reverse may be true as well. Those who thrive on woe just might be the ones who aren’t concerned that the corner of the box of that stereo is crushed, that the car stalled out during the test drive, that there’s a crowd of technicians frantically working on the tail assembly of that 727 just before takeoff. It’s even possible, I think, that one might be able to learn how to throw a handful of dice in such a way that they come out below what is considered to be average, without the roller being fully cognizant of how he is doing it. The power of the human mind is immense, but often not entirely concerned with its own well-being.
I should add that my buddy still hasn’t won the lottery.