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Luck: Sophocles among the Dinosaurs

Statistics distinguishes three sorts of luck,

circumstantial, resultant, and constitutive:

(a) being in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time, (b) the outcome, and (c) fortunate or unfortunate context, such as, e.g., the asteroid that killed the flightless dinosaurs sixty-six odd million years ago.


Philosophy's hair-splitting distracts!

What was the luck we really had?

Why me, why you? Well, good or bad?

What did we do? And was it fun?

Perhaps luck is feeling, feeling facts,

and not a haphazard chance outcome?


I’d be content (imagining Sophocles

and the big dinosaurs'd both survived)

to be a thoughtful little thunder lizard

or perhaps a blue jay in an apple tree—

a perch convenient to the birdie's gizzard!

Luck's but “chance, taken personally."

it's said, and taken thus, as far as

can today be told, looks after me.


Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/07/the-big-idea-should-we-be-thinking-about-luck-differently. The writer, Sir David Spiegelhalter, is emeritus professor of statistics at Cambridge and the author of The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck (London: Pelican Books, 2024).

"Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best," the Chorus declares in Sophocles' play Oedipus at Colonus.

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Photo by Peter Dreyer

 Cyclops by Christos Saccopoulos, used by kind permission of the sculptor.

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