luck

Colby Cosh on how the shootout has changed the NHL’s regular season — for the crazier

I’ve been thinking about luck recently, especially that species of chance that philosophers call “moral luck”. This is the idea that praise or blame, success or failure, are due to circumstances over which the agent does not have complete control. In the most influential essay on the subject, Thomas Nagel identified three main types of moral luck: resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive (there’s a fourth, but it just causes problems so I’ll ignore it). Resultant luck is the one we’re most familiar with — I run a red light and nothing happens, you run one and take out a family of four. Circumstantial luck refers to the way our moral outcomes are shaped by the broader events and situations in which we find ourselves embedded — that’s what I’ve been getting at with my little pieces on Sidney Crosby recently.

One of the most difficult cognitive biases to resist is the tendency to see a deterministic pattern, or narrative, in what is largely a series of probablistic and chancy events. And so the same impulse that gave us animistic religion gives us sports journalism: Today’s case in point is Steve Simmons’ column in the Sun, arguing that the narrative of this year in hockey is the emergence of Sidney Crosby as a mature, successful Leader of Men, while his rival Ovechkin  “the older of the two, appears less mature than Crosby, less grounded, more individualistic.”

This Saturday is my physics midterm. There are going to be 12 questions.