From Page 28, Oct 25, 1996
Not a day goes by in which I don't think a bit of who I am. I am trying to stay in touch with this even if I am not as much of a professional person as I once was. Being professional about who I am has always helped in making me the most I can be. It's really the cause. Luck does not sweep one off her feet and place her in front of success. Oh, I am sure it happens once in a while. Some poor souls do win the lottery or the talent contest without intending to. Can they do it again? That is the trick to being professional.
In science, repeating a process of experimentation or discovery is one of the test of the realness of the discovered phenomenon. Repeating the process without exception is a sign of causal relatedness. A professional person is able to repeat what they cause. Not under any circumstance of course, but under similar ones for sure. This is the opposite of luck.
Luck: Buying lottery tickets .. holding superstitions .. wishing something would happen .. wishing it wouldn't .. fantasizing .. excitment .. surprise .. gambling .. wanting something without effort or investment .. analysing other things in terms of happenstance .. These are the causes of bad luck
There is of course no such thing as good luck. What happens that is good and wonderful, fun and exciting is always the result of people doing things and setting things up. We live in a universe which is most comfortable with future entropy. Entropy is that state where everyting is finally out of energy and distributed homogeneously. (Or something like that. Fleiss would have to go an equally long distance in any direction to find a mouse, and then he never would anyway because mice are energy pockets.) Creating pockets of energy happened at the beginning of the universe, big bang, et. al. And although energetic events still happen on their own inthe universe at large, this is more because the energy is sorting itself out into averageness than it is luck. As far as I've heard, only living systems and big bangs put energy into denser clumps. Squirrels store nuts, and nuts are basically energy. Humans build sky scrapers. We air condition our houses - in summer anyway. We horde ourown body heat with due concern. There is no luck in any of this.
Profesional people are able to bring social and psychologicl energy under their control. With this extra energy posketed away, the person, me, can build things. I could build the buying of a ferrari. or I could build a battery for storing the energy longer term. Or.. I could an ddo build a generating station, using the energy investment to create more energy. as a person, I choose to be a generator. and as a generator I choose to build a much larger generator around me, a social one. And with that generator, I am building a societal scale generator, one that acquires, stores, and magnifies the energy acquired.
This is the value of the professional person. Only a professional person will not get burned out or absorbed by the bigger generators. As an energy store / source, a person can be easily absorbed. I don't personally feel this is ethical. I never let myself get so absorbed.
The ethicalness of the use of a person's energy is interesting. The options are again: accumulate as a battery would, lose as an icecube does in summer, maintain the status quo with equal inputs and outputs much like a heated and adequately insulated house, generate, and optionally invest. The last two have energy to share if they choose. Some people do and some don't.
Is it right to use another's energy excess if they don't know about it? If they do? If they agree to it? Is it wrong not to if it would benefit them in ways they would appreciate? I always hated ethics!