getting tired of line jumpers

All men are created equal? Has anyone looked at Africa lately? They seem to be a quite a bit less equal than the rest of us.

And I thought the whole point of the American Dream was to get rich so you could buy stuff that other people couldn't...like q-bots!

Gonch: if the lightning bolt hits the tree next to your house, toppling it into your roof rather than the house next to yours, that's luck.

Now, the deductible you choose on your insurance policy, not so much. :)

There's always going to be line jumping. People will try their hardest to rationalize why they should be in front of you.

Brian: I don't believe it is.

I chose to leave that tree there knowing full well it was large enough to fall on my house if something would happen.

I allowed a bad situation to have the opportunity to play out. If I had cut the tree down and lightning struck there my house wouldn't be damaged.

Sure, I had no influence over whether the lightning would strike or where, but I am able to influence the effect when it does.

Or what if I chose a different house entirely?

In both situations one choice changed a bad luck situation into a non-event. I believe this applies in some capacity to every last situation we can find ourselves in.

*** Edited 7/8/2008 6:46:36 PM UTC by Lord Gonchar***

I don't buy the logic. That works in the lightning/tree scenario, but I can think of many others where it doesn't.

For example, say your wife gets breast cancer. This is despite the fact she may have spent her whole life eating well, exercising, and not drinking or smoking. Is she somehow responsible for the cancer? Did she 'allow a bad situation to have the opportunity to play out'? Of course not. There are many events and circumstances that are beyond our control or any foreseeable possibility to predict.

Breast cancer is not bad luck, it's life. Like a heart attack or a stroke or whatever natuarally occuring illness might take you out. We all get ill and die. Death is the only certainty we all have and there's nothing unlucky about it - it just is. It might be sad, it might be crappy, but it isn't bad luck.

I don't think genetics, natural illnesses and death are luck. They're life.

EDIT - and just to add some more:

Even if you do get breast cancer, you could neutralize the threat by detecting it sooner with regular checkups (mammograms) and by choosing the right doctor to do surgery to remove the cancer (or the breast).

Then people would talk about how 'lucky' you were to survive such a scare. But it wasn't luck, it was being smart. Creating your own good fortune through your choices.

Someone without the check-ups would find the cancer too late and more likely ultimate succumb to the disease. It would seem like a sad run of bad luck, but ultimately, their choices created their bad luck.

I suppose you could argue that the lightning or the cancer is the dice roll or the luck, but I don't think so. They're just one part of the equation and luck is the sum of the equation, not the parts.

*** Edited 7/8/2008 7:10:43 PM UTC by Lord Gonchar***

Semantics. One person's random chance is another's luck is another's "That's life".

Hohoho, you're moving out on a mighty thin rhetorical branch, Sir Gonch. So if a meteorite crashes through your roof, killing your infant in her crib, that's not bad luck? I'm betting to the parents of that child it sure would seem like it.

Or are you just reserving an exception for death?

The choices we make in the world have a large impact on our trajectory through that world, to be sure. But there is such a thing as fortune outside of our control.

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Ensign Smith said:
But there is such a thing as fortune outside of our control.

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There's such a thing as events that occur outside of our control, but the second they enter our influence, it's the choices we've made that determines how they play out.

It's no more complicated than that. Luck is a series of events that plays out and ultimately ends in our favor (good luck) or against it (bad luck). I still can't think of a single situation where we as individuals don't have some degree of input into the final equation.

Lucky people tend to make the right choices - whether they know they are or not.

I'm not even saying we can know which decision to make at any given time, but we still make a decision. Obviously, I wouldn't think to cut down the tree or choose a different house because lightning was going to strike, but face it, people who don't live under large trees don't have their houses crushed by them. :)

I'm not with you just yet.

A rational person would weigh the chances of a healthy mature tree being struck and damaged to the point of collapse as low---so low that the benefit of the tree (casting shade on the roof in the summer and reducing cooling costs) outweighs its risk.

If the lightning hits anyway, that's bad luck.

If you take your argument to the extreme, no one would ever do anything with even the slightest risk---for example, drive.

To clarify: I'm not arguing that luck isn't often the result of choices. I agree with that whole-heartedly. However, I disagree with your claim that there is *never* luck. Never is a strong word---strong enough that the burden is on you to prove it in debate.

I'd agree with "rarely," but "never" just sticks in my craw.

Luck doesn't make a distinction between cancer and lightning!

Gonch, you are right 99% of the time. But I think this is a 1% situation.

My original point is that your actions contribute heavily towards your "fortune", but luck is something you don't have control over.

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Ensign Smith said:
So if a meteorite crashes through your roof, killing your infant in her crib, that's not bad luck?

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No, that's a matter of science, physics, and statistics. Awful, horrible things happen to people all the time they have little to no control over but ascribing it to "luck" makes it sound like some sort of voodoo power over all of us, in the same league as superstition, Fairy God Mothers, and karma.

If a one in a million awful thing happens to me that I truly don't have reasonable control over, then that's just what happens, chaos has rendered it my turn. "Luck" is just human nonsense we use to comfort ourselves when faced with things we feel should be unexplainable but certainly are completely explainable.

In turn, it works for one in a million "good" things, too. Winning the lottery, to me, isn't a matter of good luck, it's a matter of accepting a certain set of odds and then having the chaos play out. Of course, for most sensible people, we don't accept the odds and don't play the lottery. The difference with life and the lottery is that you can't opt out of life, unless you figure the risk isn't worth it and you just kill yourself preemptively. Just by living you passively have already accepted the odds of a meteor flying down and blowing you up. *** Edited 7/8/2008 7:58:38 PM UTC by matt.*** *** Edited 7/8/2008 7:59:45 PM UTC by matt.***

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Brian Noble said:
To clarify: I'm not arguing that luck isn't often the result of choices. I agree with that whole-heartedly. However, I disagree with your claim that there is *never* luck. Never is a strong word---strong enough that the burden is on you to prove it in debate.

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I don't think there is ever luck because to me luck is the result.

something + something = luck

Random things can happen, but they aren't luck (good or bad) by themselves.

The lightning striking in your example is a random event. It has no consequence to me without my choice. My choices (to leave the tree, to live in that house, to cut the tree, to live elsewhere, whatever) combined with that event create the 'luck' - good or bad.

lightning striking + me leaving a tree over my house = crushed house & bad luck

lightning striking + me choosing not to live under big trees = nothing & (in theory) good luck

There's some things that are random events (lightning strikes and cancer can be two examples), but a random event alone is not a case of luck. The random event has to affect me in some way before it becomes good luck or bad luck and the way it affects me is going to depend on my decision.

Another random event - the choosing of lottery numbers. If the numbers 4-5-6 randomly happen that means nothing unless I played the lottery. A that point if I chose 4-5-6 then I had good luck. If I chose anything else I had bad luck.

4-5-6 coming up + me choosing the number 4-5-6 = a lottery win and good luck

4-5-6 coming up + me choosing 2-8-7 = a lottery loss and bad luck

The random event alone (lightning striking, getting cancer, the numbers 4-5-6 being chosen) isn't luck. It becomes luck (good or bad) when combined with my actions.

Am I making sense?

matt: "good" or "bad" luck doesn't imply causality. Rather, it's simply a description of whether or not an improbable event happens. The "polarity" of goodness/badness is just a description of whether the outcome is favorable or not.

Gonch: I think you are still conflating irrationality with rational consideration of likelihood. A rational person can find situations in which playing the lottery is a positive-outcome event. In any event, you are certainly straying away from your original argument that fortune favors the brave.

There are several things being mixed in here: whether circumstances of birth are destiny (or not), etc. I think many of us are talking about completely different concepts when we say the word "luck".

But, you want to really muddy the waters of the conversation?

Start bringing in The Secret!

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metallik said:
The only difference between the systems are the restrictions - you're still stepping in front of people. I used a fastpass to ride space mountain at Disney. I walked along a secondary path and passed (read: cut in front of) hundreds of people in the main queue.

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That is not correct. You didn't get on the ride any faster than anyone who entered the line when you got your FastPass. You just did something more productive with your time instead of waiting in line.

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Ensign Smith said:
But that doesn't make it any less antithetical to our peculiarly American mindset.

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Depends on what the mindset is. If it's capitalism, I'm with you. If it's everyone gets treated exactly the same, I know a couple of place where that didn't pan out so well. If it's that everyone has a fair shot, well, I'm with you there too. Everyone has a shot to pursue wealth. (And I'm not naive enough to think that there aren't socioeconomic and cultural barriers involved, but even in this case the same rules of supply and demand apply just as much as they do other luxury items, like expensive cars and caviar.)

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Ensign Smith said:
Does 'All men are created equal' sound like communism?

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No, but I think you're confusing that phrase with, "All men are created entitled," which is what you're describing.

We started to touch on this in the podcast a little bit, but whenever this discussion comes up, what people are really arguing is entitlement. It's ingrained into American culture to the point of absurdity. We're entitled to having the upper hand on trade, to not have to play in a global economy, to not be hated by other countries or cultures, etc. You know what? If we're so sweet, then why can't we work the problem and fix it instead of crying "it's not fair" every time the world won't jump when we ask it to? I think that attitude is at the core of so many of our problems, whether they be international or personal.

And I need to remind y'all that amusement parks are not essential in the first place. The decisions of these businesses to charge what they want for whatever is up to them, and you can either pay it or not. It's not more complicated than that. Issues of haves and have nots are a different debate. As I said, there is no question that there are things in place that cause people to fail, but eventually people need to start taking responsibility for their destinies and do their best to learn how best to function in the societal machine that they're a part of.

Take the whole mortgage crisis. A bazillion people get adjustable rate mortgages, buy more house than they can afford, and now sit on TV crying, "How can this happen to us?" Well, did you read the covenant before you signed it?

I partially agree with Gonch on the whole luck thing, when it comes to the factors in life that you can influence. I think his point is that when it comes to this particular topic, not random medical issues, you control your destiny, and you work within the system to your advantage or you don't. The people who are really good at it manage to do it for themselves and the world at large.

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Brian Noble said:
I think many of us are talking about completely different concepts when we say the word "luck".

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I think that's what is at the bottom of it. I'm regarding "luck" as a fallacy because it's essentially probability filtered through irrational humans, as some sort of way to rationalize freak accidents and things we can't avoid. "Fate" and stuff like that. I'm not arguing against any sort of notion of luck as in, the existence of whatever happens that is outside of our control. Chance happenings and things like that.

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Brian Noble said:In any event, you are certainly straying away from your original argument that fortune favors the brave.

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You might be right.

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Jeff said:
I partially agree with Gonch on the whole luck thing, when it comes to the factors in life that you can influence. I think his point is that when it comes to this particular topic, not random medical issues, you control your destiny, and you work within the system to your advantage or you don't. The people who are really good at it manage to do it for themselves and the world at large.

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Exactly. This is where I was originally headed, but it got weird and now I'm worried about being struck by cancer lightning while playing the lottery under a tree.

I find that there's not very many things that happen that I can't figure out in hindsight. I don't think there's been much luck in my life - only good choices and bad ones...regardless of how conscious I was of the potential results of those choices.

I guess my point was that I think people have much more control over things in life than many would believe. It's easy to blame this or that on bad luck or good luck, but in my experience, the 'lucky' are the people who position themselves correctly in any given situation.

Bingo.

And since every event has some sort of "luck" involved, the notion is meaningless.

So you do what you can with what you have, but don't blame others for the position (in line) that they are in. You don't know their story, so you can't make any assumptions about how hard they tried. In other words, you can throw your sense of entitlement out the window.

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janfrederick said:
Bingo.

And since every event has some sort of "luck" involved, the notion is meaningless.

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Maybe. Still not sure luck is part of the equation. I still think luck is the result of a series of events that we have varying degrees of control over.

But whatever - we're all in the same neighborhood, I suppose.