A question on luck

I’m a long time member of this excellent site , where I’ve asked and got plenty of answers to various questions I posed over the years ….. http://www.askphilosophers.org

@Maxx a few years back asked  an interesting question on luck , I came up with another question on the topic and used this analogy and asked professor Allen Stairs the following, have a read of his response and tell me if you have anything to add……….

My question below ……

A question on luck which an acceptable definition would be ....... success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions. If I strike a golf ball from a tee and it hits a rock and goes straight in for a hole in one is that “luck”?   How is it deemed so if my intention is to strike the ball in an attempt to get it in the hole? If It happened to hit a rock and go in it would be deemed “lucky” , what if I aimed for the rock hoping for that result is it luck? Using this example would all golf shots be luck bad /good dependent  on the bounce of the ball?  What exactly is luck philosophically speaking? Surely luck exists only if a certain interpretation of quantum mechanics is true?

Allen Stairs

November 30, 2019

An interesting question.

Let's start with the word "chance," which you seem to see as an essential part of luck. If I follow you correctly, we have chance, hence luck, only if determinism isn't true.

I think we'll see that what people mean by "luck" doesn't presuppose indeterminism, but let's start with your golfing example, Joe tees off and his shot goes wild. That's not what he wanted to happen and not what he was trying to do. However, there happens to be a rock in the right place, his ball hits it and ends up in the hole. That he did want to happen. Was he lucky?

Since this seems to be a paradigm case of luck, we'd need a good reason for saying otherwise. Although it's doubtful that a real-life Joe intended to sink a hole in one (golfers seldom do), let's suppose he did. Given how things turned out, Joe himself would surely consider himself lucky: he got what he wanted but the way it happened was nothing like what he had in mind. He didn't intend to swing wild, he didn't mean to hit the rock, and he didn't plan to make the shot by carom. In fact, what he intended included not doing any of those things. These things didn't happen because of his intentions or even incidentally to them. They happened in spite of his intentions.

All this makes it apt to say that Joe was lucky. In fact it's safe to say that no one is a good enough golfer to make a hole in one with any reliability. According to statistics posted on this PGA page

https://www.pga.com/archive/odds-hole-in-one-albatross-condor

the odds of a professional tour golfer making a hole in one are one in three thousand. Pretty much anyone who makes a hole in one is lucky—even if they have Tiger Woods-level golf skills.

This suggests a first stab at an analysis. If you want something, but nothing you have control over makes it likely that your attempt to get it will succeed, then you're lucky if things work out as you hoped. The reasons here aren't deep and metaphysical. If I'm right, they're a matter of how we use words.

Still, this first stab is too strong. Turning to another sport, most of the time, even a skilled batter won't hit a home run. The statistics suggest that the chances are about three to four percent

http://theconversation.com/whats-really-behind-baseballs-home-run-surge-...

and even Pete Alonso hit a home run in less than ten percent of his at-bats this year (2019):

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/a/alonspe01.shtml

Nonetheless, if Pete Alonso hits a home run, it seems not entirely right to say that he was lucky and it would certainly seem off to say that he was "just" lucky. When Pete Alonso hits a home run, something unlikely has happened. But it's not out-of-bounds unlikely, and skill has a whole lot to do with it. It's not surprising when Pete Alonso hits a home run.

In light of this, we might tweak our analysis a bit. Nothing Pete Alonso has control over makes it likely that he'll hit a home run—at least not if "likely" means "more likely than not." But given Pete Alonso's skills, it's not surprising when he hits a home run. And so we might try this: we'll say you were lucky in getting something you intended or wanted if, even given your skills, what you had control over left it surprising that you succeeded.

This analysis has obvious limitations; "lucky" is not a precise term and neither is "surprising." That's fine. Luck is a loose notion and so we wouldn't expect an analysis of it to give us something precise. The hope is that the suggestion will account for a good many typical cases., but on to two other matters.

First, determinism; let's suppose it's true. Then given the full story about the laws and the initial conditions of the Universe, it was determined that our "lucky" golfer's shot would end up in the hole. In fact, relative to all of that, it was certain and therefore not in any way unlikely. But this is something that literally no human being could have known. In assessing luck, we aren't asking probability questions conditional on the unknowable total initial state of the world. We're assessing likelihood relative to what we could reasonably be expected to know. There are perfectly good uses of the word "chance" that have a similar character. It may be that given the initial state of the universe and the laws of nature, it was determined that a coin toss would come up heads. But someone who says the coin came up heads by chance isn't abusing words. Words mean what we mean by them, and it's both useful and intelligible to use the word "chance" in a way that takes what we can be expect to know into account, and sees coin tosses as examples. "Luck" usually isn't about metaphysics. It's a word we use to talk about our lives, and the way we use it is typically tied to an epistemic sense of the word "chance."

I'd like to bring the (already too long) discussion to a close with a different take on luck. One kind of luck has to do with what we might call salient contingency: things that deeply didn't have to be, but that we find ourselves caring about. Even if determinism is true, events didn't have to turn out as they did. That's because the initial state that serves as fodder for the laws is contingent—didn't have to be what it was. If the initial state had been even a little bit different, you wouldn't have existed at all. And even among the initial states that lead to your being in being, there are no doubt a great many in which you would have been much worse off than you are. There are things that each of us has no control over but without which other things we care about would not have been. In certain frames of mind, this can sit in the foreground. Most of us are sometimes struck by the thought that we are lucky for what the religious refer to as the blessings of our lives. This is not the usual usage of the word "luck," but it's one that I don't think we should undervalue. And since I'm writing this two days after Thanksgiving, perhaps this is the right place to stop.