“Touch Wood” will not help. Lucky numbers do not exist and Friday the 13th is a myth!

A very common discussion that I have with friends and relatives is whether luck exists! Is it true that there are people who are luckier than others? In this post I am going to pose my views regarding such a question.

To start with, for me “Luck DOES not exist!”. For instance, a lot of people consider a group of numbers luckier than others, since according to them they seem to get drawn more often in a lottery. From a scientific perspective such hypothesis does not make sense. Given that all the balls in an urn are the same (size, weight and dimension), then all the numbers have the same probability to get drawn equally. The same concept can be applied to gambling. There does not exist a lucky card, side of the coin or colour. Everything is based on probability.

Good luck has nothing different than bad luck. Since I don’t believe in good luck, I don’t believe in bad luck. Yes, I don’t believe in Friday the 13th and I don’t mind flying in seat 13. With reference to the scientific method, it requires only one counter example to proof that a conjecture is flawed. Hence if there was at least one Friday the 13th during which no tragedies occurred to you or your family, and there were many, then we can safely conclude that Friday the 13th is a myth. I have concluded that a long time ago
Do you still believe in luck and bad luck. If yes, why not believe in witches, giants, and other totally unfounded insane things. When you believe in such stuff you are only enslaving yourself in a world where you think you do not have control. You are resigning control to things which do not exist. You become superstitious and start looking for explanations when there are none.

The important thing to learn is that our brain can recall extreme situations much better than normal life. The human brain thrives on change. Therefore, whenever something really good or bad happens we tend to remember that event more easily than the other stuff.  Thus, the instant something bad happens to you when a black cat crosses your path you tend to remember that vividly, whilst you will forget the other hundred times when a black cat crossed your path and nothing happened. The same principle applies to good luck.

Remember, human perception is sometimes very skewed and illogical. I will give you just one example to make my point. I bet you know someone, maybe yourself, who is afraid of catching a flight on a plane. Now this phobia of flying might sound logical. After all when a plane crashes hundreds of people die. Yet the same person will quite confidently go on a car. Sounds logical no? Not at all. Each year millions of people travel around the world with planes. Yet only a few thousand people die annually from plane crashes. On the other hand, millions of people make use of cars to travel. But you know how many people die annually in car accidents. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) 2004 report on road traffic injury prevention, an estimated 1.2 million people die annually in car crashes worldwide.

This article, “How Scared Should We Be?“, by columnist Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times sheds more light on this phenomenon of unfounded phobias.

This goes to show how sometimes our mind plays tricks on us. Therefore we all should trust facts over fiction, and that is why I strongly believe luck is a myth.