TED Radio Hour released a show on luck, fortune, and chance. One of the ideas is that we routinely underestimate the influence of chance on our successes and failures. Human brain is a relentless pattern-seeking machine; it does not tolerate randomness very well, and is always in search for an explanation. We look up to successful people, trying to understand what unique personality traits or strategies have made them so successful. No one wants to hear that those people just go lucky. It is because if success can be explained, we can, I theory, repeat it. If it is mostly by chance, we cannot, and it is not very inspirational.
Among the management types, the joke is that all successes are the results of our leadership, and all the failures are the result of external circumstances beyond our control. The joke contains more than a grain of truth. I have never seen a leader to say – we are very successful, because we got lucky. Very rarely one says, we failed, because I screwed up. I have never heard: “things are bad, because we ran out of luck.”
My College is doing slightly better in terms of efficiency – we are producing more student FTE with a lower faculty workload. To be completely honest, I have no idea why that is the case. I can produce a dozen different theories, including the theory of my brilliant leadership, but all of it will be pure guessing. There are too many factors in play, and it is impossible to isolate any of them to establish causality or even a plausible correlational hypothesis. In reality, it is most likely to be a random fluctuation, the statistical blip that is always present in complex social systems. My former doctoral student Ivan Smirnov keeps marveling at the fact that social scientists routinely underestimate the possibility of chance in their experimental work. Unless you repeat treatment 50 or more times, you are never sure if your success was just a random event. Well, management is not even a true social science; it is a lot of “intuition,” and “beliefs.”
Appreciation of the universe’ randomness is healthy. It makes us a little humbler, and a little more compassionate. People’s misfortunes are often explained by random chance, just like successes. By the way, the last segment of the show explains that chance is not distributed randomly across the population. It is much easier to get lucky if you come from a more privileged background. The lottery of birth is still the most powerful predictor of success. We know that intellectually, but it is so difficult to accept on the intuitive, subconscious level. Our brains automatically link what we do with the success we have. It is an evolutionary adaptation, for evolution wants to us to repeat successful behavior. Yet, how much of the Skinner’s superstitious pigeon is in everything we do?
Among the management types, the joke is that all successes are the results of our leadership, and all the failures are the result of external circumstances beyond our control. The joke contains more than a grain of truth. I have never seen a leader to say – we are very successful, because we got lucky. Very rarely one says, we failed, because I screwed up. I have never heard: “things are bad, because we ran out of luck.”
My College is doing slightly better in terms of efficiency – we are producing more student FTE with a lower faculty workload. To be completely honest, I have no idea why that is the case. I can produce a dozen different theories, including the theory of my brilliant leadership, but all of it will be pure guessing. There are too many factors in play, and it is impossible to isolate any of them to establish causality or even a plausible correlational hypothesis. In reality, it is most likely to be a random fluctuation, the statistical blip that is always present in complex social systems. My former doctoral student Ivan Smirnov keeps marveling at the fact that social scientists routinely underestimate the possibility of chance in their experimental work. Unless you repeat treatment 50 or more times, you are never sure if your success was just a random event. Well, management is not even a true social science; it is a lot of “intuition,” and “beliefs.”
Appreciation of the universe’ randomness is healthy. It makes us a little humbler, and a little more compassionate. People’s misfortunes are often explained by random chance, just like successes. By the way, the last segment of the show explains that chance is not distributed randomly across the population. It is much easier to get lucky if you come from a more privileged background. The lottery of birth is still the most powerful predictor of success. We know that intellectually, but it is so difficult to accept on the intuitive, subconscious level. Our brains automatically link what we do with the success we have. It is an evolutionary adaptation, for evolution wants to us to repeat successful behavior. Yet, how much of the Skinner’s superstitious pigeon is in everything we do?
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