Eh, semantics. The bloke himself said it. "I cannot believe this, I was just shocked. I stopped at the cafe windows for a few seconds before crossing the road — I was lucky.”
And indeed he was. Were it me, I'd feel lucky, as well.
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
I understand the feeling. But it shows how irrational we humans are. Rational humans don't go to casinos or play the lottery. I would say he was unlucky to have almost been killed and I would not like to be as lucky as he was by taking his place. After all, don't we all want to be lucky?
Casinos and lotteries notwithstanding, do rational humans sometimes walk past other kinds of buildings or structures, say, a café, for example? If he was unlucky for not having been killed, would he have been lucky(ier) to have been killed? Was he simply unlucky for getting out of bed that morning? We all know there is no such thing as luck, just series of events and coincident points that become indefinably intertwined that can suddenly diverge at the whim of the involved party. I'll probably not be dropping references to luck from my lexicon any time soon, however, as it's a universally (well, almost) understood off-hand comment.
Well then, can we agree he probably went for a change of shorts soon thereafter?
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
I've never understood the reasoning that because one "lucky" event occurred to someone that they should go buy a lottery ticket or do some other high risk event. Seems to me that if they were already incredibly "lucky" once that they should go home and stay in bed for a week because they've already used up their supply of "luck". Of course, as a rational engineer, I don't believe in luck or any relation between unlinked events. As a non-rational human being I do buy the occasional lottery ticket because it's the only way I'm ever going to get hundreds of millions of dollars. But it's not my retirement plan.
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