Personal goal: Increasing the surface area for luck in my life! I feel like I’ve always relied on hard work as a way to achieve my goals (Chance II), and so it’s been hard to accept that sometimes I can get lucky (Chance I), or that I can work to get luckier. But maybe all I need is that tilt of your head that shifts your perspective: luck could be a skill issue, or a probability game.
I want Chance IV: luck from individual action, from exercising agency, via:
- Meeting people from as varied backgrounds as I can
- Making connections through my interests, particularly through the internet
- Showing my work: just like how my primary school math teachers wouldn’t mark me right unless I showed my steps, I’ll show my work and my journey, not just the end products
Chaos Theory
types of chance
- I: blind luck, or the force that’s entirely out of our control
- II: luck is attracted based on hard work and persistence
- III: luck comes to those who are really good at spotting it
- IV: luck engineered from individual action
getting found is about being findable
increasing the surface area through which luck can enter their lives — in the age of the internet, it is an act of self-invention and hopeful intervention. It is a chance to reclaim agency
In the aftermath of luck, we have agency. Chaos teaches us to expect the unexpected, but what happens after that is up to us. Proactive people don’t wait for life to happen to them; they make their own luck. Serendipity finds its way into your life when you are always learning, always building, always sharing your work
Reboot: Kernel vol 4
A Bid, Adieu
a totalizing bafflement, a white-hot vicarious indignation at the fact that my love could be felled by something so insubstantial as chance
Probability is not inscribed on the soul. It’s an act of framing.
Where subjectivity is smuggled into frequentist probabilities by way of framing, the Bayesian interpretation of probability makes this move explicit with the use of priors. This feature of built-in subjectivity is actually what makes Bayesian statistics well-suited to digital capitalism. That’s because the closed form of Bayes’ rule makes it a recipe for mechanistically churning data into probabilistic beliefs about the world, upon which actions like assessing potential matches, pricing a walk, bidding on ads for the app can in turn be automated