Given that, Alice will describe herself as “lucky”, because she finds more bills on the ground. That same traits also makes Alice more likely to notice the text about getting $250 if she points it out to the researchers.
What I really want to know is how fast “lucky” vs. “unlucky” people would have counted the photographs if there was irrelevant intentionally distracting text on the page, rather than relevant text. My hypothesis is that “lucky” people would take longer than “unlucky” people, because they were attending to something irrelevant to the task.
A programmer who spends a lot of time looking at what libraries can do when he needs to be writing something that isn’t included in them is unlucky- while a programmer who has already spent a lot of time looking at what libraries can do will be lucky when he needs an obscure function from one of them. But the chef who is distracted by C+ libraries when he burns his hand is also unlucky, as is the programmer who forgets a close-parens because he is thinking about what he will make for dinner.
Luck, then, is the skill of attending to each task the appropriate amount, when the appropriate amount cannot be determined from priors.
What I really want to know is how fast “lucky” vs. “unlucky” people would have counted the photographs if there was irrelevant intentionally distracting text on the page, rather than relevant text. My hypothesis is that “lucky” people would take longer than “unlucky” people, because they were attending to something irrelevant to the task.
Note that this is not a logical requirement: brains have LOTS of parallel processing, so having more stimuli be considered salient does not necessarily equal more time spent attending to the page. The amount of extra time (if any) would depend on the degree of stimulus discrimination that can be applied outside of conscious awareness.
That is, the lower the false positive rate that subjects’ unconscious minds have in identifying opportunities for conscious attention and exploitation, the greater the tradeoff-free ROI.
Hence the ‘further study’ aspect. All I did was make a clear hypothesis that, if true, would indicate a further study or perhaps a direction in which we could direct ‘unlucky’ people in which they would be more successful than ‘lucky’ people.
Given that, Alice will describe herself as “lucky”, because she finds more bills on the ground. That same traits also makes Alice more likely to notice the text about getting $250 if she points it out to the researchers.
What I really want to know is how fast “lucky” vs. “unlucky” people would have counted the photographs if there was irrelevant intentionally distracting text on the page, rather than relevant text. My hypothesis is that “lucky” people would take longer than “unlucky” people, because they were attending to something irrelevant to the task.
A programmer who spends a lot of time looking at what libraries can do when he needs to be writing something that isn’t included in them is unlucky- while a programmer who has already spent a lot of time looking at what libraries can do will be lucky when he needs an obscure function from one of them. But the chef who is distracted by C+ libraries when he burns his hand is also unlucky, as is the programmer who forgets a close-parens because he is thinking about what he will make for dinner.
Luck, then, is the skill of attending to each task the appropriate amount, when the appropriate amount cannot be determined from priors.
Note that this is not a logical requirement: brains have LOTS of parallel processing, so having more stimuli be considered salient does not necessarily equal more time spent attending to the page. The amount of extra time (if any) would depend on the degree of stimulus discrimination that can be applied outside of conscious awareness.
That is, the lower the false positive rate that subjects’ unconscious minds have in identifying opportunities for conscious attention and exploitation, the greater the tradeoff-free ROI.
Hence the ‘further study’ aspect. All I did was make a clear hypothesis that, if true, would indicate a further study or perhaps a direction in which we could direct ‘unlucky’ people in which they would be more successful than ‘lucky’ people.