Given that, Alice will describe herself as "lucky", because she finds more bills on the ground. That same traits also makes Alice more likely to notice the text about getting $250 if she points it out to the researchers.
What I really want to know is how fast "lucky" vs. "unlucky" people would have counted the photographs if there was irrelevant intentionally distracting text on the page, rather than relevant text. My hypothesis is that "lucky" people would take longer than "unlucky" people, because they were attending to something irrelevant to the task.
A programmer who spends a lot of time looking at what libraries can do when he needs to be writing something that isn't included in them is unlucky- while a programmer who has already spent a lot of time looking at what libraries can do will be lucky when he needs an obscure function from one of them. But the chef who is distracted by C+ libraries when he burns his hand is also unlucky, as is the programmer who forgets a close-parens because he is thinking about what he will make for dinner.
Luck, then, is the skill of attending to each task the appropriate amount, when the appropriate amount cannot be determined from priors.
What I really want to know is how fast "lucky" vs. "unlucky" people would have counted the photographs if there was irrelevant intentionally distracting text on the page, rather than relevant text. My hypothesis is that "lucky" people would take longer than "unlucky" people, because they were attending to something irrelevant to the task.
Note that this is not a logical requirement: brains have LOTS of parallel processing, so having more stimuli be considered salient does not necessarily equal more time spent atten...
Here's a draft of an article that I want to post soon, but I figured I might as well get some feedback before I go ahead. If anyone else has exercises or experience with this I'd love to hear about it.
The popular science article version of the research mentioned can be found here: http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
There's no fundamental propensity to good outcomes, but it looks like Luck is a thing.
There were some experiments done by Richard Wiseman (of 59 seconds fame/recommendation) investigating luck, and they found that there was a statistically significant factor which led to some people being more likely to receive unexpected benefits.
He took two groups of people, one self-proclaimed “very lucky” and the other normal, and asked them to do simple tasks, like to count the number of times a photograph appeared in a newspaper. He didn't tell them was that he had rigged the magazine to have a few convenient conveniences, like a giant sentence telling them that there were 43 photographs, or large text about how if the reader pointed this out to the researchers they could get $250.
Still, to a statistically significant degree, the “lucky” people noticed them more. What gives?
Have you ever missed an important detail because you were focused on something else? Once you're looking for something, you throw out details that fit. If you're looking for things that fit into the steps of a plan, then you're more likely to throw out stuff that's not already included.
If you weren't trying to count the number of times a word appeared, you probably would have caught the sentences. Planning on counting makes you miss details like it already being done for you.
Engineers bump into this sort of problem a lot. How many times have you spent a long time trying to code something before you found out that it was included in a library? Or tried to write a piece of code that doesn't actually wind up being used because what it accomplishes isn't actually needed?
This failure mode is child of lost causes and priming. If you try to do X in order to get G, then you're primed to miss Y even if it's relevant to G. If the bottom line is written, then you're going to leave stuff out.
Insofar as Luck exists, it seems to be the ability to use unexpected but useful information.
Not quite sure how to practice this skill. A few things I've tried:
You could probably actually walk around outside right now and try this. See what it feels like to notice details.
Walk around outside and see if any small animals catch your eye. Try to use the feeling of your attention being grabbed more often.
Look around the room you're in and see if there's anything that you've forgotten about, but is useful.
When given a plan, ask yourself what kinds of functions or adjectives something could have that would make it useful, without drawing a picture of what that thing is.
One time at a Rationality Minicamp someone asked if there was a sceptre-like object. Most people said no, and I said yes, even though I didn't know where it was. I was able to quickly find one in the room because I ran the algorithm of “find the cylinder-ish thing in this room” rather than the algorithm of asking myself what cylinder-like things there are, then go get it.