Thursday 1 May 2008

Luck?

I'm sure we all know people for whom everything just seems to fall into place, where luck always seems to be on their side.

Equally I'm sure we know other people who just seem to be working against the world all the time, people for whom disaster is commonplace.

I wonder whether this is anything that can be linked statistically to specific individuals.

Are some people more susceptible to car breakdowns, holiday cancellations, traffic hold ups, computer failures, domestic appliance failures, lightening strikes, being underneath a bird when it needs a poo....

You know what I mean. Do these things happen randomly to people, or are some people statistically unlucky?

2 comments:

Rana said...

I don't know people for whom luck seems to consistently fall on their side - because they do not exist. Equally nonexistent are people for whom theoretically unrelated events consistently conspire against them.

I do know that some people are luckier than others with particular examples of particular critical variables - genes without obvious hereditary disease, being born into a rich/stable family/country, winning the lottery, etc.

But each individual chance influence is still random. And within any given social group, the biggest difference in people is not the tendency of luck but the reaction to luck.

(and that is without looking up the word in the dictionary)

Ann Cardus said...

Uh huh. You reckon? Read on.