User Reviews

Three cases are presented, which purport to show a "force" of "luck", and later re-interpret that as a "higher power", despite having no evidence. Anyone taking this at face value is likely to emerge with a warped idea of statistics and physics.

The first case is of Clive of India, who tried to shoot himself twice, but the gun didn't fire. The chances are stated as 1 in 20 twice, or 1 in 400, despite the likely dependence relationship between the two original shots, and less dependence with the third shot, taken by a different person at a different angle (and not at anyone).

The second case is of Roentgen, discoverer of X-Rays. A number in the millions is presented as a calculated chance of rays from a oblong tube would hit a fallen cardboard screen and the effect be noticed by Roentgen so that he'd pick it up and see his hand bones. It's unclear at all what is being measured here, but I suspect they are defining how this could have happened far too narrowly, and they aren't reporting any error range around their millions estimate, and surely there would be a wide range of possible error in that calculation.

The third case is of a man who received a drunk-dialed call that woke him up in time to save his family from natural gas poisoning. They say the chance his number would be dialed is one in 10 million, and the chance of it coming at that time is incalculable. First, it's not one in 10 million. The drunk is trying to dial a specific number and is failing. Maybe they get the digits out of order, or miss a digit, or duplicate a digit. But there are not 10 million ways to make these errors. Closer to a few hundred. Also, people are likely to be drunk at night, which is when you'd likely be asleep. Depending on the size of the leak, it could take quite some time for gas concentrations to become deadly, leaving a wide time interval when a life-saving phone call could come in. While it's still incalculable in any useful sense, it's also not too amazing. Unlikely, yes, and good too, but not too amazing.

So, after presenting us with positive events that were unlikely to happen, and perhaps misrepresenting them to seem even more unlikely, it concludes that a higher power is in charge of the force of luck. Whatever.

Bad things happen. Good things happen. Even very unlikely, seemingly impossible things happen. There are no conclusions to be drawn from that, except that our ability to predict and/or alter individual random events by any means remains zero, as it has always been, and probably always will be.