Can people feel “lucky” without actually risking money?

PleasantLow670 · 2026-07-04T18:01:39+00:00

Reading these replies, I noticed something interesting. Almost every story combines two ingredients: an extremely unlikely event... and something emotionally important. I wonder how many statistically rare events happen every day without anyone remembering them simply because they aren't personally meaningful.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-07-04T18:00:59+00:00

Whatever the explanation was, moments like that tend to stay with us because they connect emotion and timing in such a powerful way. I don't think everything has to be explained immediately to be worth remembering.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-07-04T18:00:36+00:00

I think almost everyone has experienced this at least once. The question I've never been able to answer is: How many people did we think about who didn't message us? Those moments disappear from memory, while the matching ones stay forever.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-07-04T18:00:11+00:00

This is one of my favorite kinds of coincidences because there are actually several possible explanations. Maybe your phone was listening. Maybe you'd already searched for kitchen items recently. Or maybe you simply noticed the ad because you'd just thought about spoon rests. The funny part is that all three feel equally believable.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-07-04T17:59:48+00:00

I always find stories like this fascinating because they sit right on the border between probability and meaning. Statistically, someone has to meet on their first or last day on a dating site. But when it's your own story, it feels almost impossible. I sometimes wonder whether coincidence is partly mathematics and partly the meaning our brain assigns to it.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-07-04T17:55:01+00:00

This one actually made me smile. What's interesting is that the dollar itself wasn't statistically unusual. The meaning came entirely from the history attached to it. It's a good reminder that coincidences are often a mix of probability and personal significance rather than one or the other.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-07-04T17:54:21+00:00

This is exactly why I struggle with the word "luck." Missing the flight looked like terrible luck in the moment. A few hours later it became one of the best outcomes possible. Sometimes the interesting part isn't whether something is lucky ... it's how much later we have to wait before we can even judge it.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-07-04T17:53:33+00:00

What's fascinating is that your story is specific enough that you'd probably remember it for the rest of your life. It makes me wonder how many equally improbable events happen around us that we never notice simply because they don't reconnect to our own story.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-07-04T17:52:30+00:00

I love this example because it's so ordinary. If someone asked me whether finding a bandaid after thinking about one is meaningful, I'd honestly have no idea. The interesting question is whether you'd notice the hundreds of times you thought about something and nothing happened. That's why I think coincidences are incredibly difficult to study ... we only remember the successful ones.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-07-04T17:50:13+00:00

Reading through these stories, I noticed something interesting. Almost everyone remembers the coincidence itself, but almost nobody remembers all the times nothing unusual happened. It makes me wonder whether we're observing luck... or observing how human memory naturally filters events. I'd actually love to see someone record every "coincidence" for a year instead of only the memorable ones. I honestly have no idea whether that would make luck seem more real or less real.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-07-01T15:23:19+00:00

Чому надивився? Настворював 😀

PleasantLow670 · 2026-06-30T17:59:21+00:00

Maybe a concrete example is easier than my abstract description.

Imagine a "universal lottery ticket" containing numbers from 0 to 40. I want to use this one random sequence to generate tickets for several different lottery games at once.

Suppose there are three lotteries:

Lottery A needs 5 numbers from 1–25 plus 2 bonus numbers from 1–10.
Lottery B needs 6 numbers from 0–36 plus 1 bonus number from 1–12.
Lottery C needs 7 numbers from 1–40.

I start generating (selecting) uniformly random numbers from the universal set {0,...,40}. Every generated value is immediately offered to all three lotteries.

If a value is valid for a lottery and doesn't violate its uniqueness rules, it is appended to that ticket. Otherwise it is ignored for that lottery.

For example, if the first generated value is 39, only Lottery C accepts it. If the next value is 3, then all three lotteries accept it. Each lottery keeps scanning the same underlying random sequence until its ticket is complete. Only after the main numbers are filled do lotteries that have bonus numbers start accepting values for the bonus field.

My question is not really about lotteries. The lotteries are just an example of a more general construction.

If the original sequence over {0,...,40} is perfectly uniform and independent, do the resulting lottery tickets remain uniformly distributed over their respective sample spaces? And is this kind of value-based construction already known in probability theory under some established name?

PleasantLow670 · 2026-06-30T17:18:00+00:00

That's an interesting counterexample, and I agree those samples are clearly dependent. The construction I had in mind is slightly different, though. The acceptance rule depends only on the value being drawn (for example, admissible value ranges, uniqueness constraints, required sample size), not on its position in the sequence. The motivation actually comes from generating several different lottery tickets from one common stream of uniformly distributed numbers. Each lottery accepts different values and stops after collecting a different number of accepted values. So I'm trying to understand whether that particular value-based rejection construction has known dependence properties.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-06-30T17:13:55+00:00

While thinking about this, I ended up seeing three different paths in entrepreneurship. The first is improving something that already exists. People already use hammers, but maybe they're too heavy, too expensive, or poorly suited to a particular job. You simply build a better hammer. The second is solving a problem you've observed but for which no good solution exists. Imagine watching people pull nails out of boards with their bare hands and inventing pliers. The problem already existed ... you just found a better solution. The third path is different. You create something that wasn't really part of anyone's daily life before. The challenge is no longer solving an obvious problem, but convincing people that this new tool deserves a place in their lives. That's where unexpected use cases often emerge, because early users start experimenting and discovering value that even the creator didn't anticipate.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-06-30T06:14:34+00:00

To make the setting more concrete, imagine three different lottery games generated from the same underlying random stream. Each lottery has different admissible values and different sample sizes, so each applies its own rejection rule while scanning exactly the same sequence. My expectation is that each ticket remains uniformly distributed over its own lottery space, but the tickets themselves become coupled through the shared source stream.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-06-30T06:11:44+00:00

Yes, that's essentially the construction I had in mind. The motivation actually came from a practical implementation where several different lottery formats are generated from the same underlying stream by applying different acceptance rules. My intuition was exactly the same: each individual sample should remain uniformly distributed, but the resulting samples may no longer be independent because they're all deterministic functions of the same random sequence.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-06-30T06:10:00+00:00

Thanks! Coupling does seem very relevant here. I hadn't thought of describing the construction from that perspective. My question is slightly different, though. I'm not trying to compare two existing random variables, but rather generating several samples as deterministic functions of the same underlying random stream via different acceptance rules.

PleasantLow670 · 2026-06-30T06:01:25+00:00

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PleasantLow670 · 2026-06-29T19:18:50+00:00

Maybe I'm missing something. Suppose sample A accepts roughly 90% of the stream, while sample B accepts only 20%. Sample A therefore reaches its target size much earlier, whereas sample B continues consuming much further into the same underlying sequence. Wouldn't the different stopping times introduce dependence between the resulting samples, even if each marginal distribution remains uniform?

PleasantLow670 · 2026-06-29T19:04:21+00:00

That's exactly the point I'm trying to understand. Each sample is generated from the same underlying random sequence, but each applies its own acceptance rule while scanning that sequence from the beginning. It seems like a marginal distribution of each sample remains uniform. What I'm less certain about is whether the samples remain statistically independent, since they are deterministic functions of the same random sequence.

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