You either have luck or decide. You have no influence about luck, thus the only only way to improve anything is by decision [1]. You can use decisions so that there is less luck and more decisions in the future and if you don’t decide, you change decisions to luck.

One essential part of deciding is predicting the future. To do this well you need a whole range of skills. One is either implicit or explicit model building, then using this model to predict the future. The quality of the model is the ratio of correct predictions. There are multiple methods of building a model, like religion, just reading about a topic, or the scientific method. Thus science is just an efficient tool for a society to build useful models to predict the future to make better decisions.

Luck and bad luck cancel each other out over the long run, deliberate decisions not.

• 1. This idea comes from the book “How to decide”
• Superforecasters, the book and the concept, explicitly try to predict/forecast the future