The Student Room Group

Reasons why 'luck' does not exist.

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Let's be clear about this.

You can't have luck. It is not a real thing.

You can be lucky, in that some people will through random chance have more things happen in favour of them than the average person.

However a lucky person still doesn't have luck, because being lucky historically doesn't indicate luck will continue in the future.

In this sense, no luck doesn't exist as an object, but it does exist as a descriptive term for something that happens which is favourable to the most likely outcome.
Original post by tazarooni89
That's what luck is though - just probability, whereby one outcome is considered particularly desirable. When people win the lottery it's just probability - out of so many people playing, someone will eventually win. But it's "luck" because it's a desirable outcome which occurred even though, from a prior point of view, it didn't necessarily have to.

Yeah but we only say we have good luck or bad luck when expressing our interpretation of the events that happened. If luck existed there would be no probability as certain people would continue to defy probability and that would be counted as "lucky".
Original post by ChildishHambino
Yeah but we only say we have good luck or bad luck when expressing our interpretation of the events that happened. If luck existed there would be no probability as certain people would continue to defy probability and that would be counted as "lucky".


It depends on your definition of "luck" I guess. Some might consider luck to be an attribute that a person inherently has, which gives them the ability to consistently experience desirable outcomes in defiance of mathematical probability. There's no reason to believe that such a thing exists.

And because there's no reason to believe that this type of luck exists, I usually interpret the word "luck" differently - not as something that objectively exists, but just as a name for an aspect of our point of view. When there are multiple outcomes, with mathematical probability suggesting that they're all equally likely from our perspective, yet we still get the one we want anyway, then it's a matter of luck (as opposed to a matter of skill, or a matter of us having some trait which causes good things to happen to us).

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