PJEby claims that Wiseman claims not just correlation, but causation, that “believing you’re lucky will actually make it so.” Does he make such a claim? Does he provide any evidence for it? Under such a claim, it seems useful to call it “luck.” But just under the claims you make, it seems bad to call it “luck,” as many others have explained.
PJEby claims that Wiseman claims not just correlation, but causation, that “believing you’re lucky will actually make it so.” Does he make such a claim? Does he provide any evidence for it?
IIRC, Wiseman’s book on his research said he investigated whether people could be trained to be “lucky”, using the measurements he developed for luck (i.e., the noticing of unexpected opportunities), and that people cultivating a belief in their own luckiness increased their measured luck on his own tests as well as collecting their own evidence.
TBH, it’s been a long time since I read the book, so I wouldn’t swear to any of the above.
But just under the claims you make, it seems bad to call it “luck,”
Again IIRC, Wiseman defines luck empirically as something like “noticing and taking advantage of unexpected opportunities”, which is reasonably close to the colloquial meaning, i.e. “having unexpected opportunities”.
From a practical perspective, a person with Wiseman’s luck (luck-W?) will perceive him or herself as having colloquial luck (luck-C?), and vice versa. Likewise the absence. So there is sufficient causal entanglement to not quibble over the word choice. For most people, It’s easy enough to either:
Convince them to change their definition, or
Let them continue with their old definition, and increase their luck anyway by using Wiseman’s methods.
There’s plenty of precedent for both; we don’t generally go around fretting over people using the word “day” without qualifying whether they mean a solar or sidereal day, or to double-check whether they’re thinking the word has something to do with the sun going ’round the earth. For practical purposes, it’s more than close enough.
Totally agreed with above. People talk about what they perceive, without noticing that different people perceive different things.
People know that some people benefit from unexpected opportunities, and call those people lucky. Lucky people notice unexpected opportunities, but don’t know that others don’t see them.
PJEby claims that Wiseman claims not just correlation, but causation, that “believing you’re lucky will actually make it so.” Does he make such a claim? Does he provide any evidence for it? Under such a claim, it seems useful to call it “luck.” But just under the claims you make, it seems bad to call it “luck,” as many others have explained.
IIRC, Wiseman’s book on his research said he investigated whether people could be trained to be “lucky”, using the measurements he developed for luck (i.e., the noticing of unexpected opportunities), and that people cultivating a belief in their own luckiness increased their measured luck on his own tests as well as collecting their own evidence.
TBH, it’s been a long time since I read the book, so I wouldn’t swear to any of the above.
Again IIRC, Wiseman defines luck empirically as something like “noticing and taking advantage of unexpected opportunities”, which is reasonably close to the colloquial meaning, i.e. “having unexpected opportunities”.
From a practical perspective, a person with Wiseman’s luck (luck-W?) will perceive him or herself as having colloquial luck (luck-C?), and vice versa. Likewise the absence. So there is sufficient causal entanglement to not quibble over the word choice. For most people, It’s easy enough to either:
Convince them to change their definition, or
Let them continue with their old definition, and increase their luck anyway by using Wiseman’s methods.
There’s plenty of precedent for both; we don’t generally go around fretting over people using the word “day” without qualifying whether they mean a solar or sidereal day, or to double-check whether they’re thinking the word has something to do with the sun going ’round the earth. For practical purposes, it’s more than close enough.
Totally agreed with above. People talk about what they perceive, without noticing that different people perceive different things.
People know that some people benefit from unexpected opportunities, and call those people lucky. Lucky people notice unexpected opportunities, but don’t know that others don’t see them.