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| I managed to see the lunar eclipse last night. Exactly as expected, the Earth's shadow started munching on the lunar orb a bit after midnight, and it was almost fully dark (matter of fact it's all dark) at around 2:30. And it was dark indeed, darker than previous ones I've seen; I suppose there's less dust in the Earth's atmosphere to create the refracted, then reflected, red glow. But the important thing is: for once, I managed to see a celestial event without clouds interfering. Later this morning, I woke up to thick cloud cover, so it seemed that the atmospheric water vapor held out so I could see the eclipse. One might say I got lucky. Which segués smack into this article from Wired. And here I thought the secret to being lucky was to be lucky. Alexa’s approach to prediction is a revelation: “Today you can look for sunny weather, with highs in the mid-70s.” I was wondering why they'd open the article with a quote from a spying device. Really, what more can or should be said about the future? Look around and see what happens. You can look for your crypto windfall. You can look for the love of your life. You can look for the queen of hearts. Seek and ye might find. You can even look for a four-leaf clover, though the chances are about 1 in 10,000. But if you find one, the shamrock is no less lucky because you looked for it. Oh, I get it. It's going to be about looking. But wait. A shamrock is a clover, but not all clovers are shamrocks. The whole point of shamrocks, at least since Christianity subjugated Ireland, is that it's got three leaves and somehow symbolizes the Trinity. I can't be arsed to look up whether four-leaf shamrocks are a thing, but if they are, I don't know why it would be lucky to break out of the Trinity metaphor. And every four-leaf clover I've ever seen has been non-shamrock in origin, perhaps because shamrocks aren't exactly native to Virginia. I do know that their name has nothing to do with being a fake stone. Anyway. “Diligence is the mother of good luck” and “The harder I work the luckier I get”—these brisk aphorisms get pinned on Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, lest we earnest Americans forget that salvation comes only to individuals who work themselves to dust. I consider this trolling (Franklin) and propaganda (Jefferson). If hard work led to good luck, there would be some damn lucky sharecroppers out there. In truth, the luck = work axiom does nothing but serve the regime and the bosses, by kindling credulity in a phantom meritocracy instead of admitting that virtually every single advantage we get in the world is one we lucked into—by being born to the right parents who speak the right language in the right zip code. Like I said. Trolling and propaganda. Even possessing the capacity for "hard work" (whatever that really means) is a matter of luck. How about we invert the meritocratic fallacy in those aphorisms and create a new aphorism that makes “work” the delusion and “luck” the reality? “The luckier I get, the harder I pretend I’ve worked.” I'm not big on jumping on board bandwagons, but I'll give this one a climb. After all, the chances of the precise sperm colliding with the exact egg in the right fallopian tube and convening to make you—or me—are so low as to be undetectable with human mathematics. And then the article undermines a good point with a spurious example. And not even an accurate one. "Undetectable," my ass. What I mean is this: so what if the odds were really, really low? It obviously happened, so the prior odds are irrelevant, except as an intellectual exercise. Some sperm collides with some egg and whips up a unique combination of genes every fucking minute. Pun absolutely intended. If there’s any method of prediction that never fails, it’s luck. You look for your horse—or your candidate—to win, and she wins? What luck. What if she loses? Better luck next time. If Alexa says you can look for rain, and you look and find it—lucky you, you brought an umbrella! Luck is fate and fate is what happens and a prediction of what happens is a perfect prediction. Is it just me or is that argument as circular as something drawn with a compass? If so, we were lucky to be treated to this article (selected at random from around 60 possibilities) on Pi Day. But work and diligence can never be the parents of luck, because luck has no mother, no father, no precedent or context. Luck is a spontaneous mutation, signaling improbability; it shows up randomly, hangs around according to whim, and—as every gambler knows—makes an Irish goodbye. I can't let this slide by without cringing at the more-than-slightly racist final words of the quote. But apart from that, I got to thinking about the possibility that evolution is really selecting for luck. I can't take full credit for this idea; Larry Niven proposed something similar in Ringworld. But his version was more narrow: a character was lucky because she was the result of several generations of ancestors winning a lottery that allowed them to reproduce. I'm taking a broader view, that species survival depends on not the strongest or the fastest or even the fittest, but the luckiest (which might include strong or fast or fit). As luck is pretty much unquantifiable, it's not a scientific hypothesis. Just something to contemplate for stories and whatnot. So where does the “looking for” luck come in? Ah—your agency comes in the almost-passive search for luck. The noticing. Congratulations. You've just rediscovered the power of observation. When opportunity knocks, it helps if you don't have your noise-canceling headphones on. Einstein didn’t like the idea of God “playing dice” with the world. Lucky for Einstein, dice, in a world determined by luck, are not thrown by anyone, much less a God who is said to have Yahtzee skills. Instead, the chips fall where they may—and really they just fall, unpredictably, spontaneously. And that's a bit misleading, too. It's like, okay, let's limit ourselves to the standard cubic six-sided dice for the sake of discussion. It's true that we don't know what number will come up on the roll of a pair of dice, absent some cheating-type intervention. But there are boundary conditions. Most obvious is that the result will be between 2 and 12 inclusive. A fair throw of 2 standard dice will never come up with a 1, or any number greater than 12. It certainly won't come up with a noninteger number, a negative number, zero, or an imaginary number. Those are boundaries. Perhaps a bit less obvious is that the chance of rolling a 7 is much greater than the chance of rolling a 2 or a 12 (specifically, 1 in 6 as opposed to 1 in 36). No, you can't predict what the next throw will bring (assuming no cheating, of course). But you can predict, with a very high degree of certainty, the frequency of each result occurring after multiple rolls. If that were not true, casinos couldn't stay in business. Point being, even randomness has constraints. That's why "everything happens at random" is just as nonsensical as "everything happens on purpose." We then look for patterns in them. And humans are, probably for reasons related to the luck of evolutionary development, very, very good at spotting patterns—even when there are none. The arrangement of tea leaves at the bottom of a tasseomancer's cup is random with constraints. Sometimes, the leaves seem to form patterns. Whole books have been written about interpreting the patterns. Whole books have been written about a lot of bullshit things. You'd be lucky to ignore them. |
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