Three flavors of luck

For The Guardian, statistician David Spiegelhalter describes three kinds of luck:

  1. Circumstantial luck — Right place, right time or wrong place, wrong time
  2. Outcome luck — Randomness outside your control
  3. Constitutive luck — A series of events leading up to the present

He emphasizes the third with a story about his existence that starts with his grandfather surviving the war and then his parents in a cold winter:

Of course, if one of those shells had fallen a bit closer, or if my grandfather had had to lead his men into attack, I would not be here to tell the story. And this is only one of the long chain of fortuitous events that led to my existence: my mother being captured by pirates in China and later escaping Shanghai in 1937 under shellfire; my parents meeting during the war; my father closely avoiding plane crashes in the RAF and then nearly dying of tuberculosis. Then, when a cold snap hit the UK in November 1952, they were living in a barely heated stone cottage, with no television and nothing to do but go to bed early to keep warm … and here I am.

Spiegelhalter is very good at communicating statistics to the public. He has a new book on uncertainty already out in the United Kingdom and available for pre-order in the United States.