I recently heard a talk that changed how I think about the world.
The talk was by Kevin Slavin, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences at MIT’s Media Lab, who chronicles the history and future of luck and has a message about the role of chance in our lives and society.
“It’s amazing, the idea that anything that seems to be built out of chance, or instinct or luck can yield to a computational assault, and that this is the essential narrative of our time,” says Slavin. “The myth that we live in is that you don’t just get what you get, you get what you deserve.”
“There’s so little luck left in the world,” he adds.
In the talk, Slavin chronicles how we’ve made chance the enemy despite irrationality’s surrounding us.
Chance has been a part of the games we humans play since the earliest times, according to Slavin, who observes that for most of human history we’ve been playing games, which come from dice.
“The impulse to play games is anything but trivial,” he says. “What we’re doing when we hold dice in our hand is something that’s actually unpredictable.”
Yet as Slavin shows, we inhabit a culture of control and live in an age when the prevailing belief is that life is meritocratic, that problems will yield to analysis of so-called big data and that all we have to do to get ahead is, as one best-selling book advises, to lean in.
Slavin asks what might happen if we praised luck instead of burying it. “There’s a pleasure and a value in not knowing what the future will bring,” he concludes, “and a truth in not pretending and to simply face forward and say, ‘Bring it.’”