A question on luck which an acceptable definition would be ....... success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions. If I strike a golf ball from a tee and it hits a rock and goes straight in for a hole in one is that “luck”?   How is it deemed so if my intention is to strike the ball in an attempt to get it in the hole? If It happened to hit a rock and go in it would be deemed “lucky” , what if I aimed for the rock hoping for that result is it luck? Using this example would all golf shots be luck bad /good dependent  on the bounce of the ball?  What exactly is luck philosophically speaking? Surely luck exists only if a certain interpretation of quantum mechanics is true?

Hey! This is a question about induction and probability to help settle a debate! If more thing As are observed in Group X than Group Y, and we were to take a subset of Group X and Y, is it not the case that it is more likely, by which I mean it is more probable, than Subset X has more As than Subset Y, all other things being equal? It's POSSIBLE that subset X does not have more than subset Y , but based on what we know from the premise, is it not the case that we would say the probability of Group X having more thing As is higher? Thanks!

Hello. A roll of dice is supposed to be the perfect example of randomness, but it's easy to see how you might go about explaining why someone got a 1 instead of 6. The die was this way up when it hit the table at this angle, it had this amount of force, there were certain weight imbalances that caused it to spin this way rather than that, etc. So is there really such a thing as chance, or is that just the word we use for when something is too complex for us to disentangle all the cause and effect that goes into it?

Is there any way to define coincidences so as to make their existence possible in a deterministic world?

If I claim, "Donald Trump has a 99% chance to win the election," and then Hillary Clinton wins, does this show that I was wrong? So long as I don't claim a 100% or 0% chance, isn't any outcome just as consistent with my claim?

JM Keynes wrote on fundamental uncertainty that for some events in the future (such as whether or not there would be another European war or the interest rates 20 years from), we simply do not know what will happen. This is to say that there is no probability distribution at all - just complete uncertainty. Is this a coherent statement? It seems that there is always a probability for any given scenario (even if it the variables are extremely complicated). Chaos theory also seems to tell us that in a deterministic world there are some events that are too complex to predict. Are these not just a result of a lack of data or, perhaps, mathematical technique?

Consider a machine that generates numbers at random. Let's say it generates the number 12. Is there is a reason why 12 was selected rather than another random number?

Quantum mechanics seems to suggest that there really is such a thing as a random number, yet all of philosophy and logic point to a reason or cause for everything, perhaps beyond our understanding. Is this notion of a random number just another demonstration of limited human understanding?

Is there a philosophy of luck or does luck not exist? Is luck deterministic in that some people always are more lucky than others? Can luck be considered inborn?

Here's a probability question I've been wondering. Suppose there's a company that has a million customers. It is known that 55% of these customers are male and 45% of customers are female. Task is to guess the sex of the next 100 (of the existing) customers who are going to visit the company. For every right guess point is awarded. What's the best strategy to get most correct answers? If we consider the customers one by one, it is good plan to always guess the most probable answer and therefore guess that all 100 of the customers are male. However if we take the hundred people as a group, isn't this task analoguous to situation where one litre of seawater in a container has same salinity as seawater in general? Therefore we could guess that there are 55 males and 45 females among the group of 100 customers. Certainly, if instead of 100 people we would take the whole million customers as a group then 55%/45% split would be the true and correct answer. My question is this: what changes the way of thinking...