Good luck/bad luck! Do they balance out?
 

Howdy All,
Any theories out there?

Fortuna
 

Hey Xavier,

The "Good Luck" must always come out ahead,elseways we'd all be dead.

(OR pray like Everything depends on God,and work you ass off like it don't!)

I'm gonna second the good luck side. Face it, humans are not the greatest of animals. We run slow, don't climb very well. For our size we aren't that strong. We don't see, hear or smell near as well as some others. We do have the power of reasoning, but don't use it often enough or very well. ( just think of any case of "here, hold my beer and watch this!") Probably our biggest advantages are the opposable thumb and written language (which gives us the advantage of immense knowledge transfer). But the Lord protects children and fools and I usually get double credit. The biggest thing keeping humans around seems to be good old lust. Through war, famine pestilence and disease, lust has kept the species going. That and a wierd little collection of emotions: Compassion, loyality and and a sense of community. The idea that you can do something that in the short run is against your own best interest but in the long run benefits if not you, at least your prodgeny. Like pay taxes, join the volunteer fire department or the Army-all of which in the short run may seem to be a bad idea for your own health or wealth.
The bad part of the equation seems to be that it is in the aggregate. That is, overall it comes out a plus. On an individual basis, some folks seem to just get hurt over and over for no reason and others seem to have all the good luck. That's where the compassion comes to the rescue- at least sometimes.
Myself, I have had way more than my share of good luck. (and I hope it continues!) I would say I have been blessed (and I'm not terribly religious). others would view it a bit differently and that's ok too.

It may balance out in large scale, but not small scale. I've known a few people who have never had a bad thing happen to them. Opportunities fall out of the sky for them, if they're doing something that has a small chance of success, it comes in that time, etc.. Then there are people like me. None of my opportunities pan out, nothing comes my way by chance, when I'm doing something that has a high rate of success, one of the few times it fails is the time I'm doing it.
I think there are lucky people and unlucky people. In terms of the human race, maybe it evens out. I do not think that an individual person's luck averages out. Statistically it's impossible because people die. There's going to be X amount of good luck and Y amount of bad luck for someone, a total amount XY when they die. And a std. deviation.

No.

Too many uncontrollable and unknown parameters that dictate the course of everything in the universe to be able to correlate any of it as "luck".

But if I were to quantify luck, I think it would balance out 50-50...meaning, for every "lucky" situation, someone somewhere had to experience an "unlucky" situation in order for the "lucky" situation to come to fruition.

What is luck?

Marrying Madonna without first executing a pre-nup.

Not necessarily. Bad luck doesn't always mean death.

"The House" generally has the edge.

Luck is the times statistically unlikely things happen. If something were to go a certain way 90% of the time, the 10% is luck.