Our human tendency to ascribe cause and effect to simply understood, local, phenomena results in some rather odd conclusions, sometimes. [stderr][stderr] Let’s consider a form of the trolley problem that someone posted on Facebook:
A man is walking down the street in Reading, England, and gets hit by a double-decker bus.
Spoiler: he comes out of the experience just fine. It is OK to watch, but it’s shocking.
Second spoiler: some versions have been re-titled to read “.. and afterward, he goes into a pub for a pint.” That’s not true – the pedestrian goes into the pub seeking shelter from buses and to ask someone to call emergency services; he was in shock and didn’t assess whether he was injured or not, and wanted to get help while he was still mobile. Good thinking. [thesun]
One of the comments on the video was:
That guy had an extra helping of luck for breakfast that morning.
That’s an example of what I mean, that our way of assessing cause and effect tends to be local and limited. I think that, to a certain degree, the AIs in our brains assess the relationship between events in terms of locality – we start with the nearest things and rarely work our way outward. We see the guy, we see the bus hit the guy, we’re more or less done. Therefore “luck” gets assessed in the same frame as the guy and the bus – the local incident.
My response to the commenter was that the man was unlucky: after all, he was hit by a bus!
The lucky person is the person in the starting frames, who is on the other side of the street, and the bus doesn’t come anywhere near them. The even luckier person is the one who was sitting in a nice cafe across town, enjoying a newspaper and a croissant, who had just opened the newspaper and discovered that the bitcoins they mined years ago were worth $20,000 and they were now a millionaire.
Another commenter wrote: “He is lucky he wasn’t one foot to the left or to the right; he’d have been killed.” Which is true, as far as it goes, but only in the local frame that the fellow was already getting hit by a bus.
Let me posit for the sake of argument that “luck” is an assessment of cause and effect – it’s the effect of an unknown cause. Fortuna was smiling on the fellow, and decided to give him a brief role as a hood-ornament on a double-decker bus. Is “luck” just a default root cause analysis for when we are too lazy to think of a better one?
My root cause analysis: the bus was going way too fast for in-city traffic.
Perhaps the luckiest person in the scenario is the bus driver, who didn’t kill someone. Of course he’d have been luckier if he had just stayed home and mined bitcoin.
I suspect that, as we talk about such things, there is an underlying Bayesian-like analysis, with different a prioris.
For the guy getting hit, there is the unstated “Given that he was hit by a bus”, his being able to get up is a fairly low-probability event, hence he was lucky.
For the others, the unstated is “Given normal traffic and drivers on the street”, and the probability of nothing much happening is a fairly high-probability event, and hence there is no special amount of good luck.
I did used to really believe in luck before, when I thought there was agency in the universe from some sort of imaginary being. I don’t think that anymore and no longer really believe in luck, good or bad. It’s just what happened, in a lot of cases. I guess he was “lucky” in that he was not injured worse, or did not get killed outright. But yeah, getting hit by a bus while you are on the sidewalk is not “lucky”.
I think the word luck is problematic… usually what I hear people refer to as “bad luck” is due to some risky behavior they insisted on indulging in, then what normally happens, happens. For example the governor of my state decided to invest _all_ of the state’s funds in oil. The price went down, the state is in financial trouble. Was that “bad luck” or a stupid plan?
I think claiming luck is partly to dodge agency, in some cases. Who wants to claim they were doing something stupid? It’s far easier to say it was “bad luck”.
This is a perfect example of a Miracle. God tried to kill that man and failed. It was an unsuccessful smiting.
In Czech we have a saying specifically for this kind of scenario. It is “mít štěstí v neštěstí” and it could be translated as “having a stroke of luck in a an accident/disaster” which of course does not roll of the tongue quite as much. Maybe “a fortune in misfortune” could be it?
… the pedestrian goes into the pub seeking shelter from buses and to ask someone to call emergency services; he was in shock and didn’t assess whether he was injured or not, and wanted to get help while he was still mobile.
He was lucky to live in a country where he could do that without first updating his financial statements and assessing what he’d have to sell to cover the deductibles in his insurance policy (if he had one).
No idea what this sentence means. Luck is a value we assign to the outcome of a (generally local) event, for which there seems to be a range of possible outcomes, apparently random, and including what we would call “good” and “bad” outcomes. So, “man gets hit by bus” has a spectrum of outcomes ranging from “unhurt” to “dead”. “Lucky” would cover the lower end of that spectrum. What does that have to do with the “human tendency to ascribe cause and effect to simply understood, local, phenomena”? Are “simply understood, local, phenomena” somehow divorced from cause and effect?
Assuming he sustained some painful bruising or subsequent joint pain, he would have had to find the unbelievable amount of… wait for it… £8.60 for whatever anti-inflammatory meds the doctor prescribed, except in Scotland where it’s free. Yup, the wonderful NHS isn’t entirely free, so anyone in the States can just pretend their most-expensive-in-the-world-and-not-much-better-and-usually-worse system is only a tiny little bit more than $10.
Charly @#4
In Czech we have a saying specifically for this kind of scenario. It is “mít štěstí v neštěstí” and it could be translated as “having a stroke of luck in a an accident/disaster” which of course does not roll of the tongue quite as much. Maybe “a fortune in misfortune” could be it?
That’s a very common saying in European languages. In Latvian there’s the saying “laime nelaimē.” In Russian it is „счастье в несчастье” (schast’ye v neschast’ye). In German – “Glück im Unglück.”
“In my experience there’s no such thing as luck.” – Obi-wan Kenobi.
kestrel @#2
I think the word luck is problematic… usually what I hear people refer to as “bad luck” is due to some risky behavior they insisted on indulging in, then what normally happens, happens. For example the governor of my state decided to invest _all_ of the state’s funds in oil. The price went down, the state is in financial trouble. Was that “bad luck” or a stupid plan?
I think claiming luck is partly to dodge agency, in some cases. Who wants to claim they were doing something stupid? It’s far easier to say it was “bad luck”.
I’m not entirely comfortable with this line of reasoning. That’s how you justify victim blaming. And people’s judgments seem to be ridiculously inconsistent. A businessman takes a risk and earns a big profit, people admire him and say, “What a visionary, how courageous of him to take the risk.” A businessman takes an identical risk and loses money because of the same random chance, and people say, “What a fool, he shouldn’t have risked.” Where’s the consistency in judgments?
This gets even uglier when it comes to blaming crime victims, there the inconsistency goes through the roof. A crime victim installs a bad door lock and experiences burglary, it’s never the victim’s fault. A victim gets raped, it’s always their fault. (“What was that woman thinking, wearing sexy clothes and entering a male acquaintance’s room?”)
The way I see it, many events in the world are determined by random chances. Some people will do risky behaviors and still end up lucky. Other people will be careful, but end up unlucky despite all their precautions. It’s all a matter of probability. Even if you do something very risky with a 90% chance to get the bad outcome (a.k.a. “be unlucky”), there’s still the 10% chance to end up lucky. After all, there are some people who do risky things and get away with it. So how do you determine whether the unlucky person deserves scolding? At which point it is “their fault”?
Let’s use the risk of getting malware on your computer as an example. Do all the “stupid things” and your risk of getting malware is close to 100%. Do all the precautions, and your risk gets closer to 0%. Let’s assume you get the malware after all. At which risk percentage do you deserve to be scolded and blamed for your carelessness? If you did some (but not all possible) precautions and reduced your risk to 20%, do you still deserve scolding and hearing “it was your fault”? Do you deserve scolding at 50%? Or at 10%? How do we even determine it?
And even assuming the victim did something pretty stupid, is it really OK to blame them for lacking the necessary education (if a person does something really stupid, that’s generally because they didn’t know any better)?
Occasionally, when people do something extremely risky (and, in my opinion, also extremely stupid), I’m tempted to say that they asked for it. But ultimately I do think that it’s better to never blame the victim.
By the way, personally I tend to be pretty careful in most situations. For me it is a matter of reducing my risk of experiencing anything unpleasant to low enough levels to feel comfortable.
Sorry, Just Joking, says Dog.
@#10, Ieva Skrebele: first, I don’t think anyone deserves “blame” for this nor did I say so… if you make a mistake, just admit it! Putting all your resources in one basket is a well-known bad idea. In my scenario, the governor should just admit she made a mistake. But she does not do it. She does not want to ever admit she made a mistake, apparently; she just wants to claim “bad luck”.
Second, sexual assault I don’t see as “bad luck” I see it as a cultural failing. Nor would I dream of blaming the victim. It’s a cultural failing and we should just admit it and do our best to change it, not try and assign blame or fault.
Third, I will point out that the agency thing I was talking about works in another way: if I do something well, men will typically call it “luck”. (I am a female.) Because they want to take away my agency. Usually in fact the good outcome has nothing to do with “luck” it has to do with skill and knowledge. But claiming it is “luck” takes away my agency; saying I am “lucky” is another way of saying that I am not skilled or knowledgeable. So you see it does not just go one way.
I hope that clarifies my feelings on the matter. I do not claim to have all the answers or anything like that, this is just how I personally see the issue. I do appreciate your points! I am completely against blaming the victim. I do however think that the idea of “luck” is almost close to religious feeling, and I worry about that.
@5 He was lucky to live in a country where he could do that without first updating his financial statements and assessing what he’d have to sell to cover the deductibles in his insurance policy (if he had one).
Maybe he’s unlucky because he doesn’t live in a country where he can sue the bus company for $2.5 million.
He was in a local luck maximum, in a deeeep valley of luck. The tiny hill at the center of an enormous luck crater.
We can conclude from this that the transition to a state of higher luck would require a substantial input of activation energy.
@#12
if you make a mistake, just admit it! Putting all your resources in one basket is a well-known bad idea. In my scenario, the governor should just admit she made a mistake. But she does not do it. She does not want to ever admit she made a mistake, apparently; she just wants to claim “bad luck”.
I agree that putting all the money in one basket was a risky and stupid idea. And, yes, she might as well admit it, because that’s just a fact. But she did have bad luck. Occasionally other people commit the same mistake and bet all their money on this one thing, and they get away with it. That one thing they invested in ends up becoming more valuable and they earn a profit and get away with what was objectively a stupid and risky plan. When you make a bad decision, it is still a matter of luck whether you will get away with it or no.
Second, sexual assault I don’t see as “bad luck” I see it as a cultural failing.
I see becoming a crime victim as a matter of luck. This goes for every crime (burglary, rape, murder, fraud, anything). You can look at the crime statistics in your area and figure out what is your probability of becoming a victim of any specific crime. Then you can either increase or decrease your probability by doing certain actions (for example, putting a good lock on your home’s doors reduces your probability of experiencing a burglary).
Of course high crime rates are a cultural failing, society as a whole can do a lot in order to reduce crime. And you as a member of society can try to contribute to reducing crime rate. But, ultimately, whether you personally will experience some crap depends on your luck. Your ability to reduce your probability of experiencing crime remains limited and you cannot ensure that you are 100% safe.
Third, I will point out that the agency thing I was talking about works in another way: if I do something well, men will typically call it “luck”. (I am a female.) Because they want to take away my agency. Usually in fact the good outcome has nothing to do with “luck” it has to do with skill and knowledge. But claiming it is “luck” takes away my agency; saying I am “lucky” is another way of saying that I am not skilled or knowledgeable.
Ouch. This one really sucks. I have never experienced that one.
I do however think that the idea of “luck” is almost close to religious feeling, and I worry about that.
I’m an atheist and I’m perfectly fine with the idea of luck. Some outcomes are beyond human control (traffic accidents, losing or gaining money after investing it in something, accidentally meeting and getting to know other people, becoming a crime victim etc.) and these kinds of outcomes are determined by random chance. You may get a good or a bad outcome. That’s your good or bad luck.
Rob Grigjanis, #4:
So, “man gets hit by bus” has a spectrum of outcomes ranging from “unhurt” to “dead”. “Lucky” would cover the lower end of that spectrum.
“Man walks on sidewalk” has a spectrum of outcomes ranging from “unhurt” to “dead”. I would say “broken shoulder and ribs” is pretty damn unlucky for a pedestrian minding their own business on the sidewalk. It’s weird to call that outcome lucky.
Does that sentence make more sense now? Here it is again:
@13 naturalcynic
He does. He can sue for that, but under UK tort law he won’t get it because he didn’t suffer that level of damage. There have been a few skynormous settlements where someone’s life has been so fundamentally altered to require £millions for decades and decades after, though it’s far from common.
He is, however, lucky to live in a country where he doesn’t have to plan to pay off his medical debts by hoping for the impossible chance of minting it for life off the back of an accident which would require him to be so astronomically lucky as to survive that accident relatively unscathed.
Meh, it’s just language games.
Both Rob and Marcus have it right, and neither refutes the other.
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Heh. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/washington/articles/2018-02-09/man-shot-by-bainbridge-island-cop-in-satisfactory-condition
I think we all know what is meant by “satisfactory condition”.
cvoinescu @16: Sure, and “woman walking in park” has a spectrum of outcomes, including possibly being struck by lightning. The events we (as humans) select for this sort of consideration are ones in which the hazard is inherent to the event. So, “person slips on soap bar” rather than “person takes a shower”. And “man gets hit by bus” rather than “man crosses street”.
I suppose I could go through my day thinking how lucky I was not to get hit by a meteorite just then, but that would be silly, wouldn’t it? An example of what most folk might call luck: I was riding my bike down a busy road, and briefly turned my head to see if I could move a bit further from the parked cars. Just then, a bloke opened his parked car’s door. I’m knocked into the road, which by sheer chance was clear of traffic just then. A torn muscle in my landing arm was all I suffered. I suspect that most people, including me, see the crucial event as my running into the opened door. Given that, I was bloody lucky.
So, no, the sentence doesn’t make any more sense.
“which by sheer chance was clear of traffic just then”. I mean a small stretch of the road was clear around my “landing zone”.
I know that as a recreational cyclist my chance of being hit by a vehicle is much reduced by reducing my use of traffic infested spaces as much as possible. Fortunately my city and state abounds in low traffic paths suitable for a good ride. By lengthening the odds against a vehicle accident I hope to fit in another 60,000km before I die, if I remain “lucky”.
@Ieva Skrebele, I am glad to meet another person who realizes how much of our life is out of our direct control. Virtualy everything we do has a probabilistic outcome and all we ever can do is to shift probabilities around in/against our favor. And that means that some people have shitty lives despite doing all the “right” things and vice versa. It also inevitably means that most people on either end of the spectrum (for example the filhty rich and the filthy poor) are there due to an accumulation of probabilities, not due to their effort.
One thing that buggers me in this regard is when succesfull people try to advice unsuccesful ones as if they personally have a foolproof recipe for success. If you leave a large amount of people to predict the outcome of a coin toss ten times, the 1‰ of those who get it right are not psychic and neither do they have a “recipe” for how to get there. The same goes for those who get rich investing (gambling) on stock markets etc.
But doing some things that are known to shift probabilities towards the “bad outocme”, like putting all your eggs in one basket, deserves to be consistently called stupid regardles of the outcome.
@#22
One thing that buggers me in this regard is when succesfull people try to advice unsuccesful ones as if they personally have a foolproof recipe for success. If you leave a large amount of people to predict the outcome of a coin toss ten times, the 1‰ of those who get it right are not psychic and neither do they have a “recipe” for how to get there. The same goes for those who get rich investing (gambling) on stock markets etc.
This reminds me of this video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv-3EfC17Rc I found it pretty fun to watch. It’s a perfect example of how our limited perspective (we know only our story) makes us believe that we can reliably do things that are actually a matter of luck. By the way, Derren Brown’s piece on luck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuRGzZAk7S4 was pretty fun too.
The claim that rich and poor people somehow deserved their outcomes seems outrageous for me. If you are born white, male, in a rich country, and in a rich family, you are already lucky. You didn’t do anything to deserve it, you just got lucky. And if you are born non-white, and female, in a poor country, and in a poor family, no amount of hard work can change the fact that you are screwed and there are no opportunities for you. Yet people who happened to get rich claim that somehow they earned their good life.
I work as an artist, so I constantly feel like luck and random chances are determining my income. If some rich person accidentally sees my work and decides that they want to buy it, I get a commission. Otherwise I’m unemployed. Of course, I can do things to improve my chances. I can practice in order to improve my artistic skills (the better my artworks, the higher the probability that whoever sees my work will like and buy it). I can also try to increase the number of people who see my artworks (the more people see my work, the higher the probability that somebody among them will like and buy it).
Luck and random outcomes influence pretty much everything in our lives. For example, we meet other people as a result of random chances, and that’s what determines who will end up our friends and spouses.
Rob Grigjanis@#6:
Our human tendency to ascribe cause and effect to simply understood, local, phenomena results in some rather odd conclusions, sometimes.
Sorry about that – I wasn’t trying to be obscure, though I was.
Here goes:
– It appears to me that humans ascribe cause and effect relationships to the things that they immediately perceive as being involved in an event (Aristotle’s causes)
– It also appears to me that humans’ assigning cause and effect relationships has to do with how easy it is to make that perception
– My use of the word “local” was to imply that ease of perception – we tend to see what is happening around an event as influencing or belonging to the event
– It appears to me that inherently simplifies our idea of cause and effect to the simplest, most understandable things that happened in the immediate frame
So, that’s what I meant, unpacked. And, I think there will be some of you who will think “yes, that’s what cause and effect means” (barring flaws in my formulation) we look at what happens around an event and point at the most comprehensible, nearby, other event that came before, and say “that is the cause.”
I’m not sure I buy that, unless we say “cause and effect is a term that humans use for what humans call cause and effect” (I’m skidding into nihilism again, damn it!) If we want to say that how we interpret causality is, for all intents and purposes, what causality is on a human scale, then it’s like free will – it’s a matter of whatever we want to call it. But if we are treating causality as some understanding of the causes of a sequence of events, then we have to go farther back in time and we may have to consider things that are not immediately perceptible in our casual assignment of cause and effect.
In the case of the bus driver: why was the bus going too fast? I can argue that the entire incident happened as an effect of the bus’ going too fast. If the bus had not been going too fast, it would have never gone out of control and it would have never hit the guy. Now, why was the bus going too fast? We don’t know. Perhaps the brakes failed. Perhaps the sun was in the driver’s eyes. Perhaps the driver had just been txted that a loved one had died. Perhaps the bus driver was a nihilist terrorist. We don’t know. But if we say that the bus’ going too fast was one of the causes of the incident, then we have something that is not simply understood, and not local (maybe).
I’m not a physicist (and I get the impression you’re much more familiar with physics than I am) but if I understand correctly, the idea in modern physics is that everything in the past light-cone are causes of the present (and the future light-cone is effects of the present) so then cause and effect are a question of the time-frame we’re looking at. But that doesn’t work how human perceptions of cause and effect operate – even a fraction of a second before the bus hit the guy, all of England was involved. That seems, to me, to make sense but it means that human perception of cause and effect is very very simplified and we tend to reduce it to the most obvious local causes.
Charly@#4:
In Czech we have a saying specifically for this kind of scenario. It is “mít štěstí v neštěstí” and it could be translated as “having a stroke of luck in a an accident/disaster” which of course does not roll of the tongue quite as much. Maybe “a fortune in misfortune” could be it?
I like that a lot.
It neatly captures our perception that someone was miraculously spared when they are the only suvivor of a plane crash where all the other passengers were killed: miracle for them disaster for everyone else.
Luck is a value we assign to the outcome of a (generally local) event, for which there seems to be a range of possible outcomes, apparently random, and including what we would call “good” and “bad” outcomes. So, “man gets hit by bus” has a spectrum of outcomes ranging from “unhurt” to “dead”. “Lucky” would cover the lower end of that spectrum. What does that have to do with the “human tendency to ascribe cause and effect to simply understood, local, phenomena”? Are “simply understood, local, phenomena” somehow divorced from cause and effect?
I think it’s implicit in the idea there was a cause for the guy’s getting hit by the bus. It appears to me that we can’t sort out the cause and effect and throw our hands up in the air and say, “he was hit by a bus” (true!) and stop asking “why was he hit by the bus?” – if we look at it from “he was hit by a bus” and after, then he was very lucky in how he was hit by the bus. If we go back a bit and look at it from “he was walking down the street” he was unlucky to be hit by the bus at all; there were 5 or 6 other people who weren’t. I don’t know the right words for it, so I am calling our understanding that “he got hit by a bus” as a simply understood local phenomenon.
In other words I am trying to use “simply understood local phenomenon” in lieu of a definition of cause and effect – it’s what we perceive.
invivoMark@#14:
He was in a local luck maximum, in a deeeep valley of luck. The tiny hill at the center of an enormous luck crater.
Since a certain amount of what’s being measured at the LHC is probability over time, does that mean that they are deliberately filtering out effects of the luck field?
John Morales@#18:
Meh, it’s just language games.
It seems to be; that’s why I am interested in this stuff – we keep trying to describe the reality we are in and language is not quite a good enough tool for us to achieve understanding with.
kestrel@#12:
Third, I will point out that the agency thing I was talking about works in another way: if I do something well, men will typically call it “luck”. (I am a female.) Because they want to take away my agency. Usually in fact the good outcome has nothing to do with “luck” it has to do with skill and knowledge. But claiming it is “luck” takes away my agency; saying I am “lucky” is another way of saying that I am not skilled or knowledgeable. So you see it does not just go one way.
Good point; I’d never thought of it that way. Thank you.