Sometimes I find the weight of the knowledge that my father thought his proudest achievement in life were his children an unbearable responsibility.
Square root of 912.04 equals 30.2, it all seemed harmless.
I recently finished Mass Effect 2, which is one of the best games I’ve ever played, with some great writing, good voice acting, enormous depth and a great story. I found the Overlord DLC ending to be one of the best bits of gaming I’ve ever came across. I try to play through the game choosing the Paragon options as much as possible, and the paragon ending is bone-chilling. Just thinking about it gives me goose bumps.
Quiet, please make it stop.
Square root of 912.04 equals 30.2… it all seemed harmless.
Luck and Control
Today, someone on Twitter retweeted the following message:
It’s nice when hard work pays off. Luck is the residue of design.
Lately, I’ve seen more messages like this, that just strike me as patently false. Yes, it is nice when hard work pays off. But luck isn’t a residue of anything. Luck, by its very nature, isn’t something that can be influenced, it lies outside of your control. No matter how hard you work, or how well it pays off, luck was never anything you influenced by working hard. Working hard simply aligned the factors you could control, which is often very, very helpful.
I’ve spoken about this before, but I believe these statements come from a belief that wanting things hard enough will allow you to reach them, and that positive thinking will allow you to alter your life. The flip side to that belief is that people who don’t reach their goals didn’t really want it in the first place, and that if your life isn’t what you want it to be, you just weren’t thinking positively enough, or with enough earnest. I fully reject that idea.
Again, having a burning desire, or thinking positively, will align those factors that are within your sphere of control, but luck isn’t one of these factors. Luck is a disconnected and unexplained factor. Perhaps one day in the future, when we have the capacity to predict everything, we’ll rule out luck as an unknowable factor in the equation of succes, but until that time, the control freak in us needs to let go of the notion that we are the only master of our fate.
The Birthday Problem
How many random people do you need to gather together, so that you’ll have a fair probability (50+%) that two people share the same birthday? You need 23 people to cross the 50% mark. Intuitively, most people would guess you’d need many, many more people.
1 – ((1/365)^23) * (365 * 364 * 363 * 362 * … * 343)) = 0,507297
People are intuitively very bad at judging probabilities. This is one of the reasons a lot of people look for metaphysical explanations of coincidences, the chances of which they feel are so small, that they believe it’s not a coincidence at all. This could account for the high number of conspiracy theories out there (which, as anybody who knows me will attest to, I love), or religious or metaphysical experiences that people claim to have witnessed.
I shouldn’t forget this. About myself as well as others.