I was wondering if luck could be quantified and measured? Who is the luckiest person alive?

Are you a Puppeteer?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 1:01 PM on June 4 [8 favorites]

tl;dr? According to Wiseman, Lucky people . . . are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good. 5 min BBC vid on What do lucky people do differently? featuring Wiseman, Obama & Robert Frank. They say that you might be able to tilt the process and make more 'success' by consciously adopting some of the behaviours of lucky people. I don't think this is the same as beating on 'unsuccessful' people who work like bejaysus but don't progress because shit happens again. Willing to be corrected. Wiseman's research was given the MetaFilter treatment in 2010.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:08 PM on June 4 [4 favorites]

The problem with the culture of trying to become luckier, well, one of the problems with it, is it's another way to blame people for their lack of success. Don't have much money? You didn't work hard enough. Success is largely luck? Then you didn't work hard enough at improving your luck.

And what determines whether you worked hard enough? By whether it's more than the countless other people playing the same game. It's zero-sum! There will practically always be someone willing to network, gladhandle or suck up that little bit more. Someone is going to get left out, and actually, the great majority of people fit into that category of "someone."
posted by JHarris at 1:22 PM on June 4 [3 favorites]

For a fictional treatment of luck featuring Max von Sydow, Intacto has some really interesting scenes where generally lucky people compete to determine the luckiest of the bunch. Including a blindfolded race through a forest, which I found delightful
posted by edward_5000 at 1:25 PM on June 4 [1 favorite]

Intacto is great.
posted by mrphancy at 1:28 PM on June 4

Was it Pasteur who said: Chance favors the prepared mind?
posted by BrotherCaine at 1:38 PM on June 4 [3 favorites]

Are you a Puppeteer?

Is that you, Teela Brown?
posted by doctornemo at 1:43 PM on June 4 [2 favorites]

I get the lucky decision making but Explain this guy though

By the third time he won the lottery his friends were like: what??? Again?????
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:21 PM on June 4

Also earlier on Metafilter, Wiseman features.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:33 PM on June 4 [1 favorite]

You have to be lucky AND good.
posted by hypnogogue at 2:42 PM on June 4

Ok so apparently he was a $250 a week gambler but STILL
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:44 PM on June 4

I have a friend who is on the "bad luck" side. She has a lot of medical problems, is literally a medical mystery that nobody can figure out, they seem to have no clue how to treat her. She tends to fall through the cracks on technicalities, like "you probably need a heart transplant but you also don't quite fit the criteria perfectly." Her diagnoses change. I say she has "Schrodinger's POTS" for the number of times she's had/not had POTS, as an example. She's lost her SSI because she was caught having $20 over the limit by mistake in January and obviously hasn't been able to get it back all 2025, and she's got a year to get it back before she turns 26 and loses her insurance and then is really screwed. She inherited a fair chunk of money that she was not allowed to keep or give away and had to spend on a car she can't drive ASAP before triggering SSI loss again (even though she'd already lost it). Literally ANY attempt to get her any kind of help--medical dog, services, in-home aide to drive her places like the ER, ANYTHING--goes awry and falls through on some kind of technicality or someone flakes out or has no clue or WHATEVER.

Frankly, I'm not sure how Positive Thinking! would really help improve her odds of Shit Going Awry. I think the article makes some good points about how making random chance work out for you and that's nice, but I'm not sure how to make a bad streak go away beyond that.

I can say from my own life that I had a longtime bad luck streak about jobs, and it finally changed, but it took a LOT to finally come about to make things work out. My love life, so far that streak's even worse :P I do admit that being forced to apply at places I normally didn't apply at did pan out, but also I just got really lucky because the luck changed.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:36 PM on June 4 [2 favorites]

Thank you for posting, ianhorse! I heard Richard Wiseman speak at The Amazing Meeting 3, 20 years ago. His presentation really stuck with me, though his name did not. I feel very, dare I say, lucky to be able to reacquaint myself with his research.
posted by mpark at 3:53 PM on June 4

I get the lucky decision making but Explain this guy though
---

Here’s the twist: there are millions of people playing the lottery, often for decades. And each draw is a new chance.

Even though the chance of winning once is tiny, when you multiply that tiny chance by millions of people and thousands of draws, the odds that **someone, somewhere** wins more than once start to become pretty reasonable.

Imagine you’re throwing darts at a massive dartboard — the bullseye is almost impossible to hit. But if billions of darts are thrown by millions of people, it’s not shocking if a few people hit the bullseye twice.

It’s not that those people were super lucky. It’s that there were just so many chances for it to happen, it eventually did.

If you had 10 million people playing every week for years, the chance that **nobody** wins more than once gets lower and lower. In other words:

* With a small number of players and games, it’s *very* likely no one wins twice.
* But as more people play over more time, it becomes more and more likely that **someone** will win twice — just by chance.

See also the Birthday Paradox.
posted by storybored at 5:00 PM on June 4 [2 favorites]

When I was a kid another kid retold me the plot of an SF novel where the future version of NASA or whatever does a series of tests to find the luckiest person on earth for a dangerous and desperate space mission. Roulette wheels, the lottery, whatever. Once they've found the luckiest person in the world they put him in the spacecraft and launch. Everything onboard starts going wrong. And they realize: they've picked the unluckiest person in the world, the one who succeeded in getting chosen for this mission.

This comment creates a chance opportunity for a lot of knowledgeable people to see my remembered version and tell me if they recognize the story.
posted by sy at 5:45 PM on June 4

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