There’s no such thing as luck.

That has been my motto for some time. Whenever someone decides to bust out luck, especially if it’s their blessing to me, I will often come back with that scoff. Some people don’t like to be reminded of this, which always makes the certainty of the anti-luck invocation risky business—but I always did it anyway.

Before I dive into the subject proper, I’d like to point out something I’ve found curious about luck. It seems to exist independently of everything else; and by everything else, I mean “religion”. Luck is a superstition all to itself. I find this strange, because people who are highly religious will still, off the cuff, say “good luck” when the situation demands it. Why is this? I mean, nobody seriously believes in luck (do they?), and in the case of the strong Christian, wouldn’t it make more practical sense to give them some sort of blessing from the Lord? If it’s not that big of a deal, then the wishing of luck is nothing but a token gesture—but if you didn’t really believe in it in the first place, why even say it at all? I find the wishing of luck to be such an odd ritual that I can barely comprehend it. I’ve mastered the situations in which I should say such a thing; this is easy. But I have a hard time believing that people are earnest when they say it. Very odd.

Before I go too far off topic, let’s return to my main point. Luck: there’s no such thing, right?

Well, I’ve just changed my mind. There is such a thing as luck, and it’s not just all psychological.

This started from a discussion among myself and some friends (most of whom are the only ones who read this blog—though I like to think my audience is expanding a bit) over the game Settlers of Catan. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a rather complex board game that involves the players acquiring resources on an island and trying to be the first to ten points. It’s a lot more fun to play than it is to describe, but the main thing to know is that the game is built on probabilities. How the resources are doled out depends on which number is rolled on two dice. Using two six-sided dice, some numbers, such as 6 come up more often than other numbers, such as 12. This means that people are going to get the commonly-rolled numbered resources more often than the not-so-commonly rolled ones. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless you’ve played the game, I admit.

What you should take away from the whole thing is that there’s a lot of probability involved with planning long term strategies, versus the individual turn-to-turn rolls of the dice. The point some of us were trying to impress on one of my friends was that the game isn’t random at all; quite the contrary. It’s very predictable over the course of an entire game. Only each individual turn is unpredictable. My friend remained unconvinced, and lamented the fact that he had picked lower numbered resources (3, 4, 5), but higher numbers came up over the course of the entire game (8, 9, 10)—against average probability—which didn’t help him.

And that’s when it hit me.

Since probabilities fall over a standard bell curve, you’re always going to have a couple games that have skewed rolls. This is nothing unusual. In theory, you could have a game that’s 80 turns of 12—every roll is double sixes. It doesn’t happen, but if you played enough games (it would be a lot of games), it should. This theoretical game of 80 double-sixes would be something to behold, indeed, but not impossible.

The great thing and also the great curse with the brain is its ability to recognize patterns, or to create meaningful relationships out of noise. This means it only takes a small skewing of the probability one direction or the other for people to attach significance to it, and if it happens enough times in a row (really only like three), then there must be something big there.

A neat thing about probability patterns is that if you put multiple probability patterns together into one “metapropability”, it’s still a valid way of doing things. We do see this every day, if perhaps not in such esoteric language. Any given person has a series of probabilities happening to them at any given time. Everything that happens in life is completely off the wall improbable, if you think about it. But if you consider that something would have had to happen anyway, it’s not really all that different if it happens to you or someone else. But everyone also has strange things happening to them, like thinking about a friend they haven’t talked to in five years and then having the phone ring at that exact moment and it’s your friend. Spooky! Well, no, not really, because there were 8,000 times yesterday afternoon that you thought about someone and the phone didn’t ring (or it did, but it wasn’t that person). No laws of mathematics have been violated.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is that—probabilistically speaking—there should be some people who fall on the “good things happening” side of the spectrum more often, and other people who fall on the “bad things happening” side of the spectrum more often. This is, for lack of a better term, metaprobability because it’s a probability of the probability of events happening to people.

That’s luck!

See, some people are lucky. Or rather, they’re just one of those people who falls on the “lucky” side of the curve more often than not. No, there’s no such thing as “luck” in the sense that there’s a mysterious force in cahoots with Fate conspiring for or against you. There is such a thing as luck when you consider that some people will be more fortuitous overall. It should happen, according to probability.

I would like to use a personal anecdote at this point to illustrate this. This isn’t exactly luck, per se—but then again, it kind of is. I’ll just explain.

All my life I have had a knack for fixing computers. I don’t mean like fiddling around with them and getting them to work; I mean like simply walking up to a broken computer and have it suddenly start working. This has happened so many times that it doesn’t even faze me anymore. People will complain to me that something isn’t working, so I go over to see what the trouble is. They show me what they just did—and it’s fine. Computers which have been locked up for half an hour have suddenly snapped out of it just as I walked in the room. Laptops which refused to boot will boot perfectly when I turn them on—and stop working after I leave.

It’s the closest thing I have, I think, to a super power. Computer Repair Man! It’s not a reliable skill, though—which is part of my point. Probabilistically speaking, again, there should be at least a handful of people who just always happen to show up at the same time the computers get fixed for other reasons. Perhaps the user didn’t replicate the problematic action the same way when I’m standing there. Maybe the unbootable laptop needed an extra few minutes to cool off (due to a broken fan inside), which caused it to work when I just happened to walk in. It’s happened enough that I don’t try to explain it anymore, but it should make sense that there’s someone with this “power” in the world. I’m just fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time, that I hit the high end of the probability spectrum between the values “getting in close proximity to the computer” and “computer gets fixed”.

You might be thinking at this point that if there’s someone who “fixes” computers as he nears them, that there should also be someone who breaks computers as he nears them. Indeed there is. It’s my boss. It’s a running gag that he’s not allowed in the room where any testing is going on, because it will inevitably fail. It’s annoying, because he is further on the anti-computer side of the curve than I am on the pro-computer side of the curve, so even when I’m in the room with him, it’s not enough to cancel out the probabilities and, more often than not, the computers will still fail. (They become fixed again after he leaves, however.)

So it does happen, there’s no doubt about that. People who are lucky are only demonstrating a piece of the probability curve that we already know to exist. Sucks for people on the other end, too, but what are you going to do? Certainly there’s also a part that’s psychological. They say psychics work because people remember the hits and forget the misses. (I’d be willing to bet that psychics fall on the high end of “correctly guessing random information about people” probability curve, too.) Plus, it goes both ways. So someone who’s pessimistic might be so because they’re on the low end of the curve—which reinforces their pessimism when they see how often they have bad things happen to them. With that in mind, one thing someone could do to change it would be to recognize that this happens—and also make peace with the fact that there just has to be a couple people on the far low end of the spectrum. Probability demands it.

With this in mind, I’m not going to wish people luck anymore. Sure, I recognize that it’s a short-hand way of wishing someone to the “good” end of the metaprobability spectrum for whatever task they’re undertaking, but it just doesn’t help to spread misinformation by using the word “luck”—especially when you don’t believe in it. No, from now on, I’m going to be wishing people, “good probabilities”.

-Ted