Dungeons and Dragons famously uses a 20-sided dice to introduce randomness (read: realism) into a game of imagination. Get into a bar fight while on a quest for treasure? You can try to win that fight, but it will require a roll of 12 or higher. Otherwise, you’re going straight to the town barracks.
We may not all play D&D, but nonetheless we are all very, very experienced dice rollers. Nearly every aspect of our lives is dominated by chance, including the circumstances of our birth (gender, race, sexuality, geography, time in history, societal class, genetic health predispositions, parental competence, etc.) that are set before we even take our first breath.
At the beginning of our lives, every single thing that happens to us could be described as a random variable outside of our control. But as we grow older, our influence over our lives steadily increases. By organizing our efforts, we can improve the likelihood of certain outcomes. Said another way, we are able to exert various degrees of influence on the weights of those dice- but we can never stop rolling them. Sometimes we have a modest amount of influence, such as choosing to follow a healthy diet in order to slightly decrease the odds of disease. Sometimes we simply don’t have much say in the matter, such as college seniors in 2008 graduating into a global recession. But everything that happens to us, from the mundane (traffic makes you late to an interview), to the consequential (granted a modest scholarship to attend University), to the utterly life changing (meeting the love of your life on a blind date) has an intrexicable element of luck.
Some people are born with dice heavily weighted against them, and can change that with great effort, and some are born rolling natural 20s but still lose that edge over time with poor choices. With 8 billion people in the world, the odds that some of them will happen to roll 20s (or 1s) their entire lives are very high. There are lifelong smokers who live to be 100, and terrible businessmen who get rich. There are rigorous health enthusiasts who die young and brilliant creative minds who never find recognition. The simple inescapable fact of life is that for the most part: we are all just rolling dice.
Questions To Consider
If randomness often dominates outcomes, how can we know who to trust and take advice from vs who was simply lucky?
What do you think has been the luckiest rolls of your life? Including the circumstances of your birth (gender, race, parents etc.) How about the least lucky? In aggregate, have you been a “lucky” person?
Who is the luckiest person that you know? How about the least? Do you think differently of them for this? Who are currently the luckiest and unluckiest groups of people in the world?
Hypothetically would you want to live in a world where there is not such extreme variety of lucky outcomes? Whether your answer is Yes or No, do you think that was influenced by whether or not you consider yourself a “lucky” person?
Do you support welfare programs such as orphanages for unlucky children? How about progressive tax systems where the wealthier pay a higher % of their earnings? Are these examples of attempting to equalize unlucky outcomes in society?
What was the best time period, race, gender, societal class, etc. to ever be born into? Be careful- Roman Emperors did not have air conditioning or ibuprofen!
Really enjoyed this. The D&D dice metaphor is such a sharp way to capture how much randomness is baked into life. I completely agree that we never stop rolling, and that the starting dice aren’t distributed evenly.
Where I’ve landed is similar to what you wrote about influence: while we can’t control the outcome of each roll, we can change the number of rolls we take, the tables we sit at, and the people rolling alongside us. That’s how I think about “increasing your surface area for luck,” not denying the dice, just giving them more places to land.
Would love to hear your take: do you think there’s a point where effort stops mattering, no matter how many rolls you line up?
1. I think the credibility of the advice is not just based on the specific giver's 'track record' (which may be lucky). It is also tempered by common sense, how it reconciles with the receiver's previous experiences and views, and the aggregate influence of others in their orbit. Note this very 'tempering' also poses a problem when the 'truth' is sharply inconsistent with one's previous views, which likely biased their orbit, and [insert loop here]. This is where rational thinking and analytical skills come into play and is my answer to your first question.
4. Yes. I would like to raise the floor on poor luck for the worst affected in particular and would gladly lower the ceiling for those who most benefit from luck. I appreciate the evolution only afforded by some degree of luck (speaking beyond just biology), but I am not personally comfortable with the brutality of this for the sentient.
5. Yes, yes, and yes, in general. These are examples of artificially lowering the ceiling for some to raise the floor for others where luck may have been extreme. I recognize there are problems with this though, looking only at ‘financial status’ as a measure of ‘luck’. Just because someone is well off does not mean they came by it via ‘extreme good luck’, nor does someone suffering mean they came by it via ‘extreme bad luck’. “Hard work” and “bad choices” complicate use of income as a measure of luck, but in general I think these help address the original question of extreme luck.