What if chance is nothing other than noise, a necessary artifact of the complexity of the Universe? What if chance, given powerful enough driving force, could simply be ignored (and hence luck made irrelevant)? How would this change our lives? Would we still spend extraordinary amounts of time, effort and money to isolate chance, seek the kind that works to our favor, and make our life decisions based on it? Would we realize that we are so preoccupied with chance–the second order effect–and are paying no attention to the important things in life (after all, losing sight of the goal and focusing on the unimportant details only because they are more concrete and easier to fathom is undeniably part of human nature) that determine our path in the universe?

Why would one liken chance to noise? Chance, just like noise, carries information. Noise appears in any sufficiently complex system due to effects that we either don’t understand, or don’t want to harness (it may simply be too expensive to reduce noise in a cable due to heat because with a strong enough signal we can have the cable carry enough useful information). Similarly, we talk about chance (or luck, which we’re using interchangeably but probably shouldn’t) when we mean things that happen to us in life that we don’t have control over–but that simply means we either don’t understand them or don’t want to bother doing the detective work to figure out what combination of factors led to the particular effect. For example, a couple of years ago a car I was riding in lost traction on a highway and spun out of its driver’s control. The car didn’t crash into another car, or a tree, or even a divider or a barrier. Some may say it’s luck. But us not crashing into anything was simply an outcome of a large number of factors–the ability of the driver to retain basic control, the geometry of the portion of the highway we were on, the cautiousness of other drivers around us. If I had known all those factors and the interplay between them, I would understand why we didn’t crash into anything. Of course, such an understanding would be prohibitively costly to gain, so most of us give up and accept things happening to us in life due to luck.

Interestingly, one man’s chance is simply another man’s logic. Most physicists, for example, pride themselves on the deep understanding of the world around them. They can reduce events to combinations of factors, and depending on how well they understand the factors, they can make predictions with much greater confidence than other people would. As more information is brought in, and as more rules are understood, chance disappears, at least partially.

I say partially because you can’t get rid of chance entirely. Even physicists come up against things they don’t understand- rules are replaced with quantum probabilities. We can do better, but is it worth it? If I offered you, at an extraordinarily high price, insurance against quantum effects in your life, would you buy it? Similarly, we could spend large amounts of money trying to reduce noise in information-carrying media but it probably wouldn’t be worth it given the needed bandwidth.

If chance is like noise, then instead of trying to eliminate it, we should ensure that what drives our lives is powerful enough to make chance insignificant. Being flexible helps- if your life’s design is robust to noise (an equivalent of error correction), you will worry much less about it. In fact, people who have mastered such designs don’t care about chance at all. They may be seen as lucky, but in reality they are simply not susceptible to the quantum probabilities appearing in their life’s equations.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 18th, 2009 at 23:44 and is filed under reductions, retrospective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.