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Old 04-11-2017, 02:58 PM   #69
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#39): Daredevil, Luck, Super Luck

Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
Luck, in GURPS, is a trait which allows for characters that consistently beat the odds by surviving. In the real world, such people exist, at least over certain periods of time, but can obviously only be evaluated after the fact.
No, that's just wrong. That is not what "luck" means.

Being able to take advantage of random fluctuations in the environment certainly exists as a trait. It's called "intelligence" or "evolution" or "life." As Pasteur said, chance favors the prepared mind. And all those things are emergent qualities that cannot be reduced to simple physical variables.

But consider a poker game. The aim of poker is to take advantage of random variation in what cards you get by an intelligent strategy that involves things such as knowing the odds of getting the card you need if you draw, or in the next deal, and knowing how to size up your fellow players' behavioral signals, and knowing how to bluff effectively. If you can do those things, you can expect to win over time.

But you can also win a particular hand, or even a string of hands, by happening to get good cards. If you get five hearts, or three fives and two jacks, you likely will do better in that hand than the more skilled player across the table. And we can imagine that a person might happen to draw good cards in a series of multiple hands.

Now, (1) getting good hands like that is not an emergent quality at all. There are attributes such as person-who-knows-the-odds or person-who-has-a-poker-face, but there is no attribute of person-who-gets-good-hands (assuming they don't have cards up their sleeve!). And (2) of those two qualities, the one we call "luck" is not the specialized emergent quality of being a good poker player; it's the particular history of getting good hands in a particular game.

Using "luck" to refer, not to having favorable random outcomes, but to having favorable outcomes that other people don't know how to reduce to something straightforwardly predictable, is an abuse of language. That was the point Rand's character was making: "You'll never be rich, because you think what I do is gambling."
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