I was a mathematician before I was an engineer so I have to laugh at what we might call the common man's perception of luck. Take, for example, the infamous 'law of averages' --
"After five heads in a row, by the law of averages the next one
must be a tail." The law of averages says no such thing. Here are a few more:
"Some people are just born lucky." No they aren't.
"If he fell in the river he'd come up with a fish in his mouth." Or botulism.
"Disaster is in their body language and they attract lightning." Did Alex Comfort really write that!
So what's the truth? Well, the science of statistics is built around the assumption that certain events, like the toss of a coin, have outcomes that are equally probable, in this case heads or tails. (The purist would add two additional possibilities: it lands on its edge or it doesn't land at all but we'll let that pass.
) This fundamental postulate has no proof but, if you accept it, a whole branch of mathematics follows and it tells us that:
After five heads in a row, the next one is just as likely to be a head as a tail.
Nobody is born lucky. Nobody is born unlucky.
The pessimist is no more likely to be struck by lightning than the optimist (though the pessimist won't be surprized if it happens).
So why do some people appear to get 'all the luck'?
It's a fair question with a simple answer. Take a million people and get them all to toss a coin. Heads represents good luck and tails is bad. Elementary statistics predicts that most people will have good or bad luck in roughly equal proportions. But it also predicts that about a thousand people will get ten heads in a row while another thousand will get ten tails. If you got ten heads, it's a fair bet that you'd be feeling lucky
. And what if you got ten tails?
It's pure chance; just like winning the lottery. A straightforward calculation shows that your chances of getting all six numbers are around fourteen million to one and yet somebody usually manages to do it.
So they do, but how many people died on the roads that same week? Which event was more probable? Logically you're much more likely be another RTA statistic so you should put your lottery money into a life insurance policy.
