"Never trade luck for skill."

This is a loading screen quote in SE, the origin is listed as Anonym. I think it should be the other way around? Or at least replace it with Han Solo's wise quip - "In my experience there's no such thing as luck."

You gain skill by having experiences - luck as a concept just seems risky. As an engineer you cannot rely on luck to consistently achieve desired outcomes.

 

Just saw star wars again a few nights ago (beginning the indoctrination of my kids). Wasn't it Obi Wan who said that?

 

@beelzerob Ah yes, you're right. Makes sense - a valid point of view coming from a Force-sensitive being.

 

Heh..Probably my must useless post ever (I'm not the super fan that knows every line), but I had JUST seen it....

 

Do you really think that? A friend of mine had that same opinion, that luck doesn't exist.
Speaking a bit too seriously about it... you know, i studied echonomics at university, people doesn't usually know it but that's lots and lots of statistics and statistics focused maths. At a deep level, to study all that stadistics is just like trying to see a pattern in things that apparently are only luck based.
Following that experience, i learned that luck is just a combination of circumstances that humans can't control. Once we was analizing tourism where i live (happens that we have a lot of tourism here, Canary Islands) through past decades. The majority of the time it was as expected: at winter people of north Europe come here massively f.i., and other logical things like that. But there were certain years that the data got absolutely mad, we thought we were doing something wrong but after investigate it more thoroughly, i realized that certain unexpected and very particular world events was affecting it: if other tourism area suffered a terrorist attack (Egypt f.i.) more people came here, if there were some sort of an echonomic recession at some country people of that country came less here, and things like that.

So, that's luck. For the people expecting tourists coming here but they didn't, it was bad luck, something happened that they couldn't control by themselves, they couldn't do anything about it, just wait and hope they didn't lose so much money.

Lot of thinks like that happens once and again. Not speaking about terrorists attacks (although it happens too), but combinations of circumstances that we can't control. Sometimes skill is useful to "minimize damage", other times it's just useless, things happens and one have to endure it.
And that's what the quote means

PD: Btw, i thought it was an ancient rome quote.

 

Skill can be acquired. Luck cannot.
You can learn skill without giving up yor luck.

 

"Luck is no matter of coincidence or propability, but of attitude and perspective !"
Oh, and "Skill is when Luck becomes a habbit!"

 

The two are intertwined - skill is a metric determined by the ability to respond to unexpected circumstances. The more skilled you are, the more patterns you understand, and the more adept you become at responding to the events beyond your control.

 

Of course! You have to learn and practice adequate skills to do all that you can, but there are always things that you can not do anything about, with skills or without them, that's what that quote is telling you. It isn't telling "don't acquire skills and trust in luck", it's just telling that, because you can't control ALL, better to have luck.

Also take in mind it's a single quote, it's like proverbs, there are a ton of proverbs (in Spanish we have hundreds), and most of them have one that means the exact opposite. In this case, i don't know what's the translation to english, but you should search for "Audentes fortuna iuvat" (something like "fortune smiles bold ones" or "fortune smiles those who are bold"?).

 

This is not the thread you are looking for ...you can go about your business

 

@noxLP, that would be the "Fortune favors the bold" proverb. Basically means those who take action are most likely to succeed (because you can never succeed if you don't at least try).

 

Thanks for the translation, didn't think in "favors" And yes, that's what i was trying to say, they're both proverbs, you will always find one that says the opposite.

 

You can have all the skill in the world when creating something in SE. Luck still plays a big part, if you are lucky Lord Clang does not pay a visit even though you may have used pistons and rotors as intended. In fact, the more skill you apply using pistons and rotors to do stuff on your creationg the more luck plays a part.

 

"Never trade luck for skill" the engineer says as he finishes his piston rotor landing gear walking machine before it exploded violently killing him

 

I live in Las Vegas. The capitol of "luck."

Luck doesn't exist. We deal in statistical probabilities. No one builds a billion dollar property based on the hopes of getting lucky. The more times the experiment is run, the closer the results will be to the calculated statistics. If you flip a coin twice, there's a good chance it will come up heads twice. If you flip it 1000 times, the probabilities fall in line with statistical outcome. If you deal 10,000 hands of Blackjack the house comes out ahead. Winners are generally taking home other players' money. It's a redistribution of wealth with the House taking a nice cut.

You can get lucky, certainly. Meaning that the events you cannot calculate or are unable to calculate lead to a favorable outcome.

Think about the Titanic. If that iceberg was 100 yards to the left or right relative to the ship's position, the outcome would have been considerably different. Many wealthy and influential people on-board would not have died and the world may have wound up a completely different place. The people on board weren't unlucky. There was a statistical probability of an iceberg. The latitude the ship was traveling at increased that probability. The ship was moving too fast to avoid it. The iceberg wasn't spotted in time. Should the crew have been more lucky? Or can we see a chain of events and a disregard for safety stepping past the threshold of safety in order to make up for lost time? If you're ignorant of the details... it seems they were unlucky. If you study the decisions made, you realize that the captain was foolish.

"Never trade knowledge for ignorance."

 

Except that, in a sense, they still are.

Because your example is not quite right, it should be: If you deal 10,000 hands of Blackjack the house almost certainly comes out ahead. Which admits the possibility, however small, that they can lose. The house may have stacked the odds in their favor, but they are still relying on their "luck" to overcome the tiny possibility that they can still lose.

 

Cum at me clang.

 

Well played, sir. Well played...

 

They aren't relying on luck. They are relying on a statistical model. No one runs a casino based on luck. You can't use luck to overcome ANYTHING. It doesn't exist. That's like arguing how the color blue should taste. Luck is a marketing idea pushed to people in order to make them believe that the statistical model doesn't apply to them.

 

Actually, they are. Luck is the intangible attribute that can be described as achieving a favorable outcome in an uncertain (probabilistic) situation. Luck is being that 1 person out of 185 million to pick the winning lottery numbers for the Powerball (or whatever it is now). Luck (or lack of it) is being that 1 in 9 million person who gets hit by lightning twice in their life. Luck and probabilities are entirely intertwined. You cannot guarantee which portion of the probability you will ultimately fall into. Now, I'll definitely agree that casinos market luck as THE thing that will determine whether you win or lose (which helps to obscure the real probabilities of such occurrences).

Knowledge and planning (like the casino model) allows you to heavily stack the odds in your favor and reduce randomness, but if you can eliminate randomness then you are no longer talking probabilities or luck. To take the Titanic example, yes everything stated was a poor decision that increased risk and reduced safety. Was there 100% of a chance the iceberg would be right there? Unless we have data to prove the existence or recurrence of icebergs right there consistently, no. Luck is basically like that last little drop in the bucket of circumstances coming together in a positive or negative manner, after factoring in all of the various elements that are controllable by one or more parties, which IMO in our society now have the vast majority of influence over the outcome of events.

To the point of the proverb, the proverb is saying that you should not rely solely on skill, because of chance occurrences outside your ability to control that may make your skill useless.

 

Statistical models help explain why things happen to a population.

Luck (or, lack-thereof) helps explain why something happens to an individual.

The only thing that is 100% true in statistics is that I have the same exact odds of ending up in a sample group as everyone else that has ended up there. It is pure, dumb luck that I actually ended up there.

 

I was almost 100% certain that was a typo because the developers are not native english speakers but I looked it up on google and sure enough the same thing repeated in other sources.

Now I'm wondering if this is even a good quote, lol.

I guess if I think about it, you could be lucky once, win the lottery and never have to be skilled in your life again, haha.

 

It is a real quote that gets tossed around every now and then. Engineers tend to latch on to it because it implies the ability to attain a successful outcome with little or no effort. As such, luck is generally viewed as the most "efficient" path to a favorable result.

We engineers love to expound upon how efficient we try to be, but that really is just a way for us to justify our laziness in that we have an incessant need to achieve goals without having to really do anything!

 

I've never heard of someone planning a military mission based on luck. The ability to adapt to a situation comes from training and the ability to think on your feet. Favorable circumstances does not make a person lucky. There is no such thing as luck. It doesn't exist. There's such a thing as coincidence. There's such a thing as ignorance. But there's no such thing as luck.

No one is lucky. I've never seen the word "lucky" on job resume or a list of skills.

One's "luck" can only be determined in hindsight. It can't be predicted. It doesn't exist.

Now about Santa and the Easter Bunny... I've got bad news for you there too.

 

You never plan something around luck due to the very nature of luck, which by the way, in your declaration of its supposed non-existence, defined it quite well. It is not tangible, or measurable, and is invariably extremely dynamic. It is a vague, qualitative description of the combination of circumstances and coincidences that can (which doesn't mean it always will) alter a chain of events. It is truly only identifiable ex post facto, with reflection upon the events in a broader and more comprehensive view. Just because you can't predict something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The entire process of "on your feet" thinking is a mixture of analytical skill and speed in eliminating choices that will most likely have unfavorable outcomes and attempting to select the best decisions for adapting to an unknown situation to maximize the possibility of a favorable outcome. Since there is no certainty, all you are doing is stacking the odds in your favor, but it is still up to luck whether your choice works out, with that luck being the fusion of external factors and the decisions of others in comparison to yours.

Favorable circumstances makes a person luck only in those circumstances. A person's luck fluctuates all the time, and the use of statistics and pattern identification can help identify general patterns across people who are undertaking similar behaviors. Going back to your Casino example, the operators have developed extremely detailed statistical models based on both mathematics and psychology exactly for measuring this intangible attribute and stacking the odds in their favor so much so that "the house always wins" holds true.

 

There is no such thing as luck. There is no such thing as a unicorn and I can define that too. I can also define a number being divided by zero. But the resultant doesn't exist either.

There is nothing that makes another person luckier than another individual. There is no quantitative or qualitative descriptor of luck. Luck is only defined in terms relative to the judgment of someone else's "luck"

But if you still believe in it, I have a vorpal blade to sell you and only at a price of $30,000USD; an instant bargain compared to other vorpal blades of its quality.

 

I believe the original quote could be paraphrased as:

"If you happen to find yourself non-statistically lucky, don't. trade. it. for. ANYTHING. else."

Because nothing else is of equal value.

Luck, in the Engineering and Clang sense, is not about "figure out the probabilities and make a choice"...

its more like "your rover crested a hill and discovered it wasn't a hill, but a CLIFF drop off." In the snap decision, you gun the throttle and energize the Gyros, and over you go... Now. in THAT moment.. Luck? or Skill? which would you AFTER THE FACT have rather taken with you over that ridge?

Luck, absolutely. Anyone can tumble off a cliff with skill.

 

This is a fantastic illustration; however, and not to split hairs, but I think a better example would be to state that: You generally do not operate your vehicle in a gravity well with your flight equipment powered up, but they just-so-happened to be on at the time that you crested the hill because you were toying with settings earlier and forgot to turn them back off. In this case, you likely would not have had time to react - but you "lucked out" in that you had forgotten to turn them off when you were supposed to previously.

The example; as you explained it, could be argued against in that one's own impressive reaction time is a skill and that it was the catalyst for your eventual success. In reality, I would much rather have those kind of reaction times rather just rely on a prior mistake leading to a happy ending in my present situation. However; I'm not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. I took no deliberate action to ensure my success and still won. I got lucky, plain and simple.

With all of that being said - it does not prove that luck is better than skill. As to why the quote has relevance, I'll have to fall back on my prior assertion that engineers like luck because it means that they succeeded with minimal (or no) effort. Basically, you didn't even intend to accomplish what you just did - but you did it all the same.

Engineers are ALL about efficiency, and the most efficient way of accomplishing a goal is ALWAYS the one that requires the least amount of energy in doing so. Nothing requires less energy than not even taking a direct action to achieve a result. Period.

 

On that funny note a man was hit 4 times in his life by lighting and after his death (not from lighting)
his grave was hit too, unlucky

 

I can't imagine that luck; or lack-thereof, has anything to do with that occurrence. There is definitely some sort of causality to discover in that situation.

Did someone check to see if that dude as actually some kind of alien android made from some super-conductive metal alloy? Good grief...