With respect to definitions (in this case of the words “lucky” and “unlucky”) I rarely have problems with them as long as everyone participating in the conversation agrees on them, or at least is aware of what they are.
One corollary of that, though, is that if you use some words in a nonstandard way, you have to explicitly say so and specify the meaning you attach to them. Here, in this discussion, there is good reason to use “lucky” as that’s what the book under review uses. That’s fine. The issue is that Dr.Wiseman, as far as I can see, defined “lucky” as “having good skills to deal with life”.
It is true that people tend to perceive self-inflicted problems as “bad luck” and successful people sometimes humbly brush off their achievements with a “Oh, I just got lucky” remark. However the difference between the internal and the external view is rather important in this context and “lucky” is clearly an internal label. I think it can be misleading.
I feel the lucky/unlucky terminology was just a bit of makeup applied to a book to make it look sexier and stand out in the mass of “let me tell you how you suck at life and help you fix that” books.
My problems with the word “lucky” are that it mostly references things that happen to you instead of things you do. And, as a consequence, it implies lack of effort or the need to work on things.
nod although in a certain sense, that’s actually accurate—“lucky”, in Wiseman’s sense, is about behaviors that naturally improve outcomes without any conscious effort to maintain those behaviors. The statement “luck can be taught and trained” breaks into “there are behaviors which naturally improve outcomes without any conscious effort to maintain those behaviors, but if you are not currently in that self-reinforcing feedback loop, it will take conscious effort to break out of whichever attractor you’re currently orbiting and start moving into that attractor’s control locus instead.”
With respect to definitions (in this case of the words “lucky” and “unlucky”) I rarely have problems with them as long as everyone participating in the conversation agrees on them, or at least is aware of what they are.
One corollary of that, though, is that if you use some words in a nonstandard way, you have to explicitly say so and specify the meaning you attach to them. Here, in this discussion, there is good reason to use “lucky” as that’s what the book under review uses. That’s fine. The issue is that Dr.Wiseman, as far as I can see, defined “lucky” as “having good skills to deal with life”.
It is true that people tend to perceive self-inflicted problems as “bad luck” and successful people sometimes humbly brush off their achievements with a “Oh, I just got lucky” remark. However the difference between the internal and the external view is rather important in this context and “lucky” is clearly an internal label. I think it can be misleading.
I feel the lucky/unlucky terminology was just a bit of makeup applied to a book to make it look sexier and stand out in the mass of “let me tell you how you suck at life and help you fix that” books.
I think “lucky” is fair—Wiseman was talking about getting what look like implausibly good outcomes.
My problems with the word “lucky” are that it mostly references things that happen to you instead of things you do. And, as a consequence, it implies lack of effort or the need to work on things.
nod although in a certain sense, that’s actually accurate—“lucky”, in Wiseman’s sense, is about behaviors that naturally improve outcomes without any conscious effort to maintain those behaviors. The statement “luck can be taught and trained” breaks into “there are behaviors which naturally improve outcomes without any conscious effort to maintain those behaviors, but if you are not currently in that self-reinforcing feedback loop, it will take conscious effort to break out of whichever attractor you’re currently orbiting and start moving into that attractor’s control locus instead.”