A commercial for a poker site is advising us that Lady Luck hangs out with the better players. In fact, she demonstrably doesn't.
The only meaningful conception of luck that I'm aware of is the statistical one. I am identifying luck with the statistical concept of error, which, as we shall see, is well suited to be a conception of luck. Anyway, any result (winning a poker game, for example) can be statistically analyzed as the consequence of an effect (poker-playing skill, say) and error. Error is the sum of all those things that affect the result but aren't related to poker-playing skill — the specific cards you get, how alert you are, and so on.
Error is randomly distributed with a mean of zero (these characteristics follow from the mathematics required to distinguish effects from error). Since the effects of the variables that produce the error are not correlated with poker-playing, that means the mean error score for good players is zero, and the mean score for poor players is zero. And after all, there should be nothing about being a good player that makes you more likely to be dealt a pair of aces.
No comments:
Post a Comment