Destiny & Probability

This afternoon I was talking to one of my friends and we were discussing an achievement when he said that it was just plain luck. As usual.. my mind immediately picked up a thread of reasoning that I had started some time ago. It centers on luck. Destiny. And believe it or not.... Probability.

I had read this book by Scott Adams called God's Debris a couple of years ago. The book broached the same point. What we call luck/destiny... is it not just probability playing it's part. One of my favorite arguments in the book happens something like this:

A delivery guy Y delivers a box to the person X. X starts the argument saying that the box has delivered the person. Y believes that it's the opposite. He's the delivery guy so he delivered the box. And it's revealed that the box was posted by X himself to his own address. The purpose of the box was to make the delivery guy come to his home. So the question hangs.... Who delivered whom?

Anyways coming back to the intertwining of probability and destiny. A Hindu holy scripture says "Karm kar. Phal ki iccha mat kar" Meaning that the duty of a person is to do the work assigned to him in the best way possible. But the person should not expect the outcome. The outcome may or may not be in the person's favor. Doesn't the second part sounds like probability. But then you ask.. why even work if the outcome is not in our hands. Well.. Probability is strange. But being a part of mathematics. Still follows some rules. Whatever work a person puts in goes towards improving the odds of the result being in the person's favor. But probability being probability sometimes it's the less probable thing that happens.

I wanted to talk a lot in this blog. About how probability has worked for me. But well.. maybe later.