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p.3 Luck... is a reality that makes itself felt in every aspect of daily life.
p.4 The human significance of luck stems from the fact that it is one of the characteristic factors that define our condition. For while we are intelligent agents who make our way by thought along the pathways of a difficult world, we are agents of limited knowledge who do and must make our decisions in the light of incomplete information. And for this reason we are inevitably at the mercy of luck.
p.8 Luck pivots on having things go well or ill fortuitously from the angle of its beneficiaries.
p.10 Another important way of representing luck arises in connection with games of chance. After all, the analogy of human life and games of chance also dates from classical antiquity, with Fortuna regarded as governing both the unfolding of human destinies and the outcome in matters of gaming and gambling.
p.16 Wherever we invest our hopes and aspirations - good or bad luck can come into operation to realize or disappoint our wishes and our needs. Our best-laid plans go awry for reasons entirely beyond our knowledge and control.
p.21-22 The only ultimately rational attitude is to sit loose in the saddle of life and to come to terms with the idea of chance as such.
p.22 Be it for good or bad, what actually happens to people is all too often a matter of luck... It is often luck alone that determines the status and significance of our actions.
p.24 Luck as such is a matter of things going well or ill for someone in a situation of unexpectedness and unforeseeability.
p.27 Deliberate effort and the exercise of skill, talent, and insight remove luck from the scene. Matters that go awry through lack of diligence, skill, and exertion - or that come right through their exercise - cannot appropriately be laid at the door of luck!
p.37 Luck involves departures from the expectable
p.45 while individual chance events are indeed unpredictable, the very randomness of chance fluctuation means that large-scale phenomenology may well be predictable via the "laws of chance" codified in probability theory... But, of course, impredictability of any manner or description opens a doorway to the entry of luck.
p.46 Chaos too paves the way for luck by presenting a major impediment to prediction. A physical system is said to be chaotic when its processes are so highly sensitive to conditions that very minute differences in an initial state can nevertheless engender very great differences in result, with minuscule local variations amplifying into substantial, large-scale differences in eventual outcomes.
p.47 In many social processes we encounter factors so minute as to seem negligible, which can nevertheless become amplified to the point of making an enormous difference in the course of events.
p.49 Chaos (in this somewhat technical sense) pervades our human situation and means that luck - that is, the impetus of chance on matters of human weal and woe - seems to play a major role in our lives.
p.50 In general, systems whose development is self-determined - whose modus operandi evolves over time in ways proceeding spontaneously from within an otherwise inscrutable interiority... will for this very reason function in ways that are not completely predictable for external observers. Human choice is one particularly striking example of this phenomenon.
p.53 Ignorance - the lack of information - is yet another prime obstacle to prediction.
p.59 It is the lack of foreseeability that is the crucial factor for luck, irrespective of whether it is objectively rooted in chance or subjectively rooted in imperfect information.
p.61 Once present for any reason - chance, choice, uncertainty, or whatever - impredictability always ramifies over a far wider domain... spreading like wildfire to diffuse itself throughout the environing domain of cause-and-effect relationships.
p.62. Luck calls for the absence of foreseeability. [JLJ - yes, but what about preparations which look instead at what typically happens? A high school football team prepares for an upcoming game by simulating the plays that their opponent will likely run, combining this with general physical fitness to provide an adaptability for plays that are not foreseen. The game is played and the team that prepared in this way wins the game. Were they lucky? Keep in mind, they did not foresee ahead of time exactly what their opponent would do. If the head coach of the team had 30 years experience in high school football and had relied on scouting films or the like, then the outcome likely would not be lucky. But if the head coach was a first-year coach who had never played the team before, and only perhaps relied on statistics from previous games, then yes, the outcome might be considered lucky.]
p.67-68 What we cannot foresee we cannot control [JLJ - but we can improvise and adapt - and we can use a layered system where fall back on general purpose plans. All is not not lost if you retain the creative ability to respond, in some form. We can prepare for what typically happens, when we cannot foresee. It would be better to say "What we cannot foresee we cannot guarantee that we can control."]
p.71 Unforeseeable opportunities for gain and loss represent yet another major form of luck.
p.75 the fact remains that fortuitous encounters represent one of the principal ways in which luck impacts on our lives, for good and bad alike.
Often luck pivots on anomalies.
p.76 Opportunities taken at the tide lead on to success. And the person who fails to capitalize on the possibilities that happen to arise - who squanders the gifts of chance - has much to lament.
p.77 It is unforeseeability from the standpoint of the recipient - the beneficiary or maleficiary - that is standardly at issue with luck.
p.78 Luck, as we have seen, involves the chancy occurrence of something harmful or beneficial.
p.79-80 What counts for real (as opposed to apparent) luck is the impact on the actual (objective) condition of the beneficiary rather than what he happens (subjectively) to think about it... What counts for (real) luck is - clearly - a realistic appraisal of the predictabilities involved.
p.80 Luck is a state of affairs and not a state of mind.
p.83 Luck is something that does not hinge on individual outcomes in isolation: its attribution is unavoidably context-dependent.
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