Labor of luck - Letter to the Editor

Richard Wiseman's article "The Luck Factor" (May/June 2003) was extremely interesting. I would like to add my two cents. Luck, or as Wiseman points out, picking up on fortuitous coincidences, is a matter of seeing what is available at a given time and in given circumstances. That is, of being alert to patterns of possibility. There are two aspects of this. The first is having a knowledge of the patterns, and the second is being open to recognizing them as they occur. The first is a matter of learning, but the second is more related to detachment. As Louis Pasteur is reputed to have said, "Fortune favors the prepared mind." We place much emphasis on the learning aspect of preparation, but very little on the other aspect, on maintaining a detached point of view that, at the same time, allows a question of concern to be present in the mind as something that can act to organize perceptions of opportunity, rather than fixate attention on the concern itself.

Burton Voorhees

Edmonton, Alberta

Canada

Kudos to Richard Wiseman for his scientific elucidation of luck ("The Luck Factor," SKEPTICAL INQUIRER May/June 2003). However I was a little surprised that he didn't acknowledge the pioneering work of Dale Carnegie, who brought "positive thinking" to the world and made a great deal of money showing people exactly how to change their luck using essentially Wiseman's techniques (of course, I haven't read his book). Wiseman basically provides scientific evidence for efficacy of positive thinking techniques.

Dave Zook

dzook@paonline.com

I am having trouble comprehending the suggestion that to increase one's luck, one should make new friends and try out new experiences. Apparently the author has lived in the same place for years, and has clients who have also done so. When one lives in the some place for a long time, habits become entrenched, and it takes the shock of new experiences to blast a person out of his well-established ways of doing things, possibly increasing the person's luck. (Mother Nature uses a similar system with chance mutations to improve the lives of living organisms. With no new ideas, or genes, there is no change good or bad. When some changes are tried, a few of them turn out to be improvements.) I salute him for improving the lives of people who desperately needed changes for the better, but what about people who move every few months? For them, new experiences are the last thing they need. If you don't even know the street names, you are not going to be in search of new experiences. Only after one has been in place a couple of years, having learned the local geography, climate, customs, speech impressions, stores, school system, neighborhood politics, educational system, medical care, etc., can one "improve one's luck" by trying new experiences. The last thing a transient or a short-term resident needs is new experiences! We are overloaded with new experiences already, and cannot assimilate any more. Can the author address the problem? ...

Elin Larson

Purcellville, Virginia

The delightful article on the "Luck Factor" reminded me of some classic demonstrations of "superstitious" behavior in rats. An animal behaviorist I knew used to demonstrate this in laboratory rats that were previously shaped to the Skinner box procedures. Minimum rewards were doled out at totally random intervals, yet many of the subjects developed curious repetitive actions. Some of these were as obvious as circling and nipping tails, while some were more subtle, like nose-rubbing or sniffing a particular corner of the cage. In all cases, the "superstitious" actions were slight departures from normal activities, but could, in some subjects, become quite exaggerated. It may have taken only a few chance coincidences of an action with a "reward" for an association to become established. The extrapolation of this demonstration to humans is too tempting to resist. With the human abilities to communicate, such associations can be established by just hearing or reading about them.

William N. Tavolga

Sarasota, Florida

The pitch: A scientific study of luck. I was skeptical. Then confused. Where was the science? Or even a working definition of luck? And one of the four habits of lucky people is to "make lucky decisions?" C'mon.

The promise(s): love, romance, dream job, promotion. This from the Luck Factor Web site, "Lucky people meet their perfect partners, achieve their lifelong ambitions, find fulfilling careers, and live happy and meaningful lives. Their success is not due to them working especially hard, being amazingly talented, or exceptionally intelligent. Instead, they simply appear to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time and enjoy more than their share of lucky breaks." ...

In other contexts, such as late-night TV infomercials, this would be forthright hucksterism. But what is it doing in the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, the magazine for science and reason? Were the science, along with the references and endnotes, inadvertently left out? ...