Re: Is it true that spirits and luck do exist?

Question: Is it true that spirits and luck do exist?
From: kurly Fries
Grade: 10-12
City: Santa Ana , State/Prov.: CA Country: SA
Area: Zoology Message ID Number: 1047676380.Zo

Luck is when there are two possible outcomes to an experiment, and the “better” outcome occurs. For instance, if I attempt to hit a home run on a pitch, I might only have a 10% chance of doing it. If it did occur, it could be characterized as lucky. The amount of luck depends on the probability p of getting the good outcome (in the home run example p = 10%.) Usually the amount of luck we ascribe to someone is very low when p is near 100%, and very high when p is near 0. When Michael Jordan hits a shot that he only misses 1 in 20 times (so p = 95%) we wouldn't say that he hit the shot because of luck. On the other hand, when someone wins a lottery with p = 0.0000001 we would call that person extremely lucky.

On the other hand, there is no such characteristic as “luck” like height or weight that a person has. The probability that a person wins a game is some value p, which is different for different people, but there is no such thing a naturally lucky person where the outcome is always good. A roulette game in a casino treats all the patrons equally. This can be a tough thing for people to accept, and so they turned to the several types of supernatural belief systems in an attempt to increase their “luck”.

The first is what is known as sympathetic magic. Ancient peoples (and some modern) used to think that being in close contact with something with certain properties would give those properties to the person. So holding a four-leaf clover that is a rare object would make the person able to win games of chance more often. All evidence indicates that sympathetic magic simply does not work. There has never been a documented case an inherently lucky object that can transmit it's luck to its owner.

The second was to appeal to the actions of external sentient agents such as spirits. If I found a good fishing spot in old Ireland, I might have attributed my luck to the action of a leprechaun. Unfortunately, no one has ever produced reliable evidence that any kind of supernatural agent is responsible for luck (or the lack thereof). As science progresses and we learn more and more about the universe we live in, the universe seems less arbitrary, less capricious. We no longer need spirits to explain why the wind blows or why flames are blue in the middle. And since we do not have any verifiable evidence of spirits, it is very unlikely that they exist.