

The difficult choice - bdfh42
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/the-difficult-c.html

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bdfh42
As Thomas Jefferson is reputed to have said:

"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of
it."

~~~
stcredzero
<http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/2195>

Chance favors the prepared mind. -- Louis Pasteur

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keefe
There is a dangerous kind of boolean thinking here :

"Either you believe that luck is dominant, in which case, why bother with
effort? or You believe that luck is random, in which case it can be eliminated
from your thinking and you can focus on all the stuff you can control."

Life is full of stochastic processes which all have a bit of randomness to
them. Luck actually does not exist. There is just random chance that some
event may happen which a certain subjective point of view interprets as
favorable.

Take poker as a simple example. There is random "luck" in that at each point
in the game, certain sequences of cards could fall that are more or less
favorable to the cards in your hand. You win money at poker by considering how
likely each random outcome is and making rational decisions based on this.

I think the likelihood of each random or apparently random is just another
factor in the decision making process. Just like in poker, it's a volume game
- make good bets on likely outcomes and if you get screwed a few times it'll
all even out if you play enough. Repetition is how we can get randomness under
control.

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akeefer
There's no binary here between ignoring luck and fatalism, and most people
inherently realize that even though luck is a factor the best they can do is
improve their average result rather than completely controlling things. The
best people in any field will focus on what they can control and not worry
about the rest.

To me the problem is that people generally want to explain luck away in
hindsight: the team that won the game on a last-second shot won because they
"wanted it more," the business that comes out on top "executed better," etc.
It even comes into play in ethics, whereby the exact same action (say, driving
drunk) often has different outcomes (hitting someone versus making it home
safely) that cause us to judge people completely differently.

In other words, people hate the thought of luck determining things, and thus
we over-ascribe outcomes to individual differences, overly glorifying the
winners and shaming/demonizing the losers.

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13ren
When is it bad luck? Sometimes it's obvious you're making mistakes, not
working on the right thing in the right way. Sometimes it's not. It would be
nice to know.

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lisper
When you look back and can honestly say that if you had it to do over again
you wouldn't do anything differently, then it's bad luck.

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nostrademons
Since when do you ever look back and say that you wouldn't do anything
differently? That indicates you haven't learned anything, not that it was bad
luck.

I usually go by "If I look back and can honestly say I wouldn't do anything
differently _given the information I had at the time_ , then it's bad luck."
That doesn't mean that I made the right choices, or that I'd make the same
choices in the future. But it means that I did the best I could with the
information I had available to me, and didn't have any rational basis for
choosing differently.

~~~
lisper
Yeah, that's what I meant. Given the information you had at the time...

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KevBurnsJr
Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.

