Absolute junk science. A negative contribution to net human insight.
>The simulations show that although talent has a Gaussian distribution among agents, the resulting
distribution of success/capital after a working life of 40 years, follows a power law which respects
the ”80-20” Pareto law for the distribution of wealth found in the real world.
As opposed to what? What kind of distribution might you expect? Based on the insanely simple model that was presented, what other possible outcome could have been drawn?
>In this paper, starting from very simple assumptions, we have presented an agent-based model
which is able to quantify the role of talent and luck in the success of people’s careers.
No, you have not. You have presented an agent-based model which is able to quantify the role of talent and luck in a 2D roulette game with a completely contrived, non-empirical bias parameter you've named "talent". It bears literally no relationship to reality, where random massive doublings of wealth are the exception, not the rule.
It really bothers me that people write news articles about the impact of this "research".
I still think the focus on wealth/income inequality rather than on absolute poverty is irrational. I've seen people justify it to me on the grounds that people care about relative poverty, which to me reads "people are jealous". But then the result is:
1) A focus on inequality is irrational.
2) People focus on inequality for irrational reasons.
This means that if policy-makers and intellectuals fully give in to the people's wishes, we'll accept decreases in wealth in exchange for more equality indefinitely. If this sounds like a strawman, it's because we have "backstops" to inequality-decreasing wealth-destruction. But why should we tolerate any wealth destruction at all?
And if reducing inequality is possible without wealth destruction, why focus on inequality?
(This is besides the "Oxfam problem" -- there never is a coherent definition of "wealth" and Oxfam never seems to fully value people's homes and work animals and suchlike in poor countries.)
The reason we care so much about inequality has nothing to do with jealousy and everything to do with power[1]. As resources are a major source of power (and often vice-versa), and because power is relative, inequality of resources means inequality of power. And as power means influence (and so the ability to reduce another's freedom), inequality reduces overall freedom.
As freedom can never be total[2], the question is do we prefer to reduce the freedom of the powerful few (whose freedom is already large) in order to increase that of the many, or vice-versa?
So while absolute income is certainly very important, ignoring inequality is simply irrational for someone who values freedom.
[2]: One person can be totally free; two cannot. X would either be free to infringe on Y's freedom or not -- in either case, freedom is no longer total.
America's aversion to the role of luck is based on the Protestant work ethic. There is no chance and everything is predetermined by God's grace. God's grace is demonstrated by hard work, frugality, and discipline. There is a concept of double predetermination where you already need to be saved to be saved. Which means the poor is poor not because of chance, but because they lack God's grace.
Be that as it may, this blog is about a specific paper and the strength of its claims. I don't really think puritanism has anything to do with whether this paper's model or inferences are sound.
The irony is not lost on Catholics, who are the recipient of much criticism from Protestants who view "saved by works" as an insult to God's grace. (The theology is actually a mix of both since faith without actions is inconsistent, but I'm refering to the stereotype from the Protestant side.)
It's funny how old religious ideas are simple observations in a way. By doing something everyday you just accumulate lots of subtle knowledge and roots in any domain. So mathematically you have lots of chances to get it right at one point. More than "luck" to me the main factor is a blend of inner desire and context that allows you just enough time to think and do.
amusing that a comment designed to mock the irrationality and simple-mindedness of "Americans", itself provides a strong example of overgeneralizing entire populations, society and culture into simple, easy-to-understand tropes suitable for simpletons.
> It could be that the results were built into the model’s design.
Every true mathematical proposition is a tautology. I don't find this point particularly convincing. As long as the model's predictions match reality in interesting ways, it can lend possible insights on why reality might have certain characteristics.
> Like getting an improbable series of heads when flipping a coin long enough, improbable clusters of events are bound to occur for at least some agents in a large enough set.
Yes, but what's alarming is how most agents' capital fell from bad luck alone, and how good luck only seemed to benefit a very small subset of the population, and talent was not any kind of guarantee. These characteristics of life are denied by many people, so to see it reflected in such a simple model is, I hope, instructive.
> Why should capital growth only occur on chance events, when most workers are paid wages in exchange for their work?
The way I see it, chance events that exponentially increase wealth drown out one's piddling wages. Wages don't seem particularly relevant to why Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have billions, and many people live paycheck to paycheck.
>> It could be that the results were built into the model’s design.
>Every true mathematical proposition is a tautology. I don't find this point particularly convincing. As long as the model's predictions match reality in interesting ways, it can lend possible insights on why reality might have certain characteristics.
I think the problem is that nothing about the model lines up with reality. For example:
- Each agent begins with an identical amount of capital. -- nothing like the real world.
- Every 6 months you have the possibility of doubling or halving your capital. -- nothing like the real world.
- Chance of doubling capital is proportional to talent. -- nothing like the real world.
As an argument for such a simple model they provide:
> The previous agents’ rules are intentionally simple and can be considered widely shareable, since they are based on the common sense evidence that success, in everyone life, has the property to both grow or decrease very rapidly.
Sure, success/failure _can_ increase or decrease rapidly, but is it the rule? Arguing the basis of your entire model on "common sense" seems weak. It would be better if they had provided at least some real world data where this pattern emerges. In my experience people seem to move a little bit up or down from their baseline, but I have never personally seen a swing from rags to riches or the other way around.
If they had begun by drawing parallels to the ways in which we see the real world and letting the model simulate it into the future it would be more compelling. As it stands, it seems like a set of arbitrary rules designed to reach their desired conclusion, albeit weakly through "it looks pretty similar".
I completely agree with everything you've said. I think that an interesting way to gauge the accuracy of the model without doing major empirical research is to create models where talent is the decisive factor, and then compare which model's assumptions better capture what we know about the world. My guess is that for a variable to be a decisive factor, it must correspond to excessive control over others, thus not matching our colloquial definition of talent, but rather of power.
> Every true mathematical proposition is a tautology. I don't find this point particularly convincing. As long as the model's predictions match reality in interesting ways, it can lend possible insights on why reality might have certain characteristics.
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here, do you mind clarifying? Are you saying you don’t find the point convincing because it’s vacuous?
I think generally modelling life in 2d grid with simplifications such as talent = 0.0 - 1.0 and events doubling or halving capital with a deterministic number of "good/bad" events isn't going to give you anything real as output. I don't like this sort of science, it stinks of foregone conclusion. Running the model itself is irrelevant as the outcome is pretty obvious by the maths put into it.
How far is it really from just writing console.out("my hunches are correct!");
Maybe in a future world of modelling where we feed real-world data into the model then maybe we can get somewhere?
They introduced talent as a bias in capitalizing on doubling events (the less talent, the less doubling events in proportion). A priori you would consider that this should lead to the talented being overrepresented in the higher percentiles of capital, yet they discover this bias does not dominate over the underlying uniform randomness of merely encountering a doubling event.
So no, I wouldn't say the conclusion is foregone. It shows an example where something that can reasonably be called talent (the ability to capitalize) is not as important as luck (the chance encountering of an event where you can capitalize).
Yes. Therefore, ultimately, in a society without work, wealth should be distributed according to the happiness it delivers. If one person loves reading books and another person loves driving expensive cars, then it's clear how the money should be distributed.
On the other hand, this might take the fun out of driving expensive cars, because in a society with such wealth-distribution, having an expensive car doesn't mean "I'm more successful than you", but rather something like "I have a pathetic need to show off".
There's an old saying that goes something like, whether you will be successful in life or not will largely be determined by the following 3 things in the order of importance.
1. What country you were born.
2. What teacher and friends you end up having.
3. Your parents. ($, gene, personality, parenting)
Of course, I would add just random luck as 4th factor.
None of these, you have any control over.
We're all here mostly through our good luck. Yes, some of us work very hard, but so do most people in impoverished countries.
I tried to explain ( or briefly mention ) something similar that luck plays apart in one's success in job interviews. I thought I was being humble, and in truth I do think luck plays a part in many ways.
After a few times I stopped mentioning it. It is clear the world doesn't buy this idea.
Are you then assuming that two people with the same "talent" (your definition) would in probability then have the same outcomes? And the converse? Neither of these things are obviously true in practice, though measurements are admittedly difficult.
Well, sure. You have your luck as determined at conception, your luck of upbringing, and then your luck as an adult. They're all luck-based, but qualitatively different.
Are the rich wealthy because they somehow earned it? Examination reveals that this is not true and that the most extreme cases of wealth accumulation (which show a surprisingly consistent pattern across cultures) are attributable more to luck than to skill. Mark Buchanan examines this in his excellent book "The Social Atom" (pp.172-174):
If extreme wealth is largely due to luck then I see no reason why government should not lop the "lucky" portion off for its purposes. Of course there will always be argument as to precisely where the line is drawn between luck and skill.
Finally we must not forget bad luck, which makes fools of us all. Just as there are those who are super-wealthy due to luck, there are those whose livelihood has been destroyed by luck. I do feel an obligation to help them back onto their feet.
Robert Frank's book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy is another enjoyable book about this (and supports your argument for some form of government redistribution).
From my experience you can increase your luck in life by exposing yourself to more choices. This can be something as simple as having saved up money so you can quit your job whenever you want to. That in turn gives you the "luck" to get a better job if the opportunity presents itself.
I do 100% agree with this, recognizing, of course, that merely being in a position to have choices to begin with is _also_ a factor of luck. (Parents’ socioeconomic status; your own intelligence; if you had someone around to have taught you this, etc)
It is also a matter of having the resources to act on that lucky opportunity.
So it's two-fold, one is that you have the resources to expose yourself to more possibly lucky situations, the second is being able to actually do something about it.
Some time ago there was a post on HN where they had an even simpler model (not based on talent). Everybody was given an equal amount of capital at the start. Then at every tick of the clock, everybody would give 1 dollar to a random person (if they had the money). After many iterations, an exponential wealth distribution resulted.
> There’s a serious risk of this runaway momentum building an ever-growing chain of misguided agreement.
to think we might alter our society to redistribute wealth to those who are most lacking, lifting people out of poverty and improving the world, when we DIDNT EVEN HAVE TO, turns out those losers were talentless and therefore deserve nothing. Horrifying.
In that sentence he's talking about the risk of propagating flawed research. A few paragraphs up he makes it clear that he doesn't hold the view you ascribe to him:
> I care deeply about the issue of growing wealth inequality, and would love for research to be done that finds concrete evidence of how luck and privilege play a role in it.
But aren't the exceptionally talented(2%) people supposed to win way more than 3%, if we assume talent plays a larger role. It is not a bad output, but not good enough either considering they are exceptional. The paper probably indicates that talent stops becoming the limiting factor somewhere pretty close to average talent, and environmental influences/luck take precedence.
We could argue as to what constitutes luck but I think the core of the paper suggests that talent's importance in success is overestimated, which is rather believable (MY ANECDOTAL OPINION).
Haven't read the paper, just assuming from the articles.
Long ago I stumbled upon bound copies of the Journal of Parapsychology in the basement of the university library, when looking for written lectures on Nietzsche.
One of the articles was about finding people who attract more good luck and people who attract more bad luck while ruling all kinds of psychological, behavioural or environmental factors. The relevance the authors argued was that persons with bad luck could be screened for to not work for nuclear facilities. I really wanted to find that article again, but the library has been rebuilt and I don't come there often.
This is not directly related to this article (which I liked), but instead to the topic in general.
I heard of a study a few years ago where researchers divided a bunch of teenagers into a few groups (each of which was quite large), and each teen was allowed to go to a website and hear a collection of songs (same songs for everyone). Each person could then vote on which was their favorite and, importantly, they could see how many votes that song had already gotten just within their group. The researchers wanted to see if the same songs were picked as the favorite across different, isolated groups. The result was that each group had chosen completely different songs as their favorite. These groups were large enough that they were probably all statistically similar. Once people in a group saw that some song already had a lot of votes, they were more likely to pick it as their favorite as well. This suggests that in the world of pop music, success may have more to do with luck and social influence than with talent.
This is all interesting to me. Probably around 40 years ago someone in management decided that certain people were winning the economic game because they were better (meritocracy) and then when we went through a series of technological disruptions we came upon a funny variant which I will attempt to paraphrase "those who are successful are the best at increasing their at-bats and therefore their opportunity to have 'lucky' events." This system seems OK, it selects on people who aren't afraid of failure, and that can't be bad. However, the new problem we have is a situation where there are basically monopolies whose heads still have the 'fail fast' mantra stuck in their heads....
Buffett himself has raised the same point, saying that he won the "ovarian lottery". He doesn't deny that he's uncommonly talented, but readily acknowledges that his particular talents wouldn't be such an advantage if he hadn't been born into a society where they are highly valued.
I think Warren still would have done pretty well for himself. Maybe not richest in the world, but he was out selling all manner of things like gum, soda, and golf balls even when he was in primary school. He's a natural entrepreneur.
But Warren is an outlier among outliers. Bill Gates has said himself that he doesn't think he would have been able to become a billionaire with Microsoft had he not gone to a swanky private high school that had a computer back when no one had computers.
My tendency is to say "Well, but that didn't happen, so discussing it isn't fruitful."
But counterfactuals seem to be part of our reasoning processes ("If i had turned left at the last light I would be closer to the restaurant.") and they do often capture the imagination (alternative histories, etc.):
I generally agree we are products of the environment/circumstance we are born into but it's left to your free-will and choice as to how to best persevere in that environment. I've always viewed talent as the tool that enables you to make the best of the environment you are placed in. Chance/opportunity is not a equally distributed resource but by working hard/efficiently you prepare yourself to make the best of the opportunities you are presented with in life. No one is immune to sheer bad luck but if you did everything you could to set yourself up for success, you shouldn't be derided for it.
I wonder if this type of analysis if even worth our time as individual people and as society. Will the information it uncovers lead to a better life for us? We all know success is some combination of luck, skill, and hard work. Luck is probably partially dependent upon the other two components (skill and hard work). But by how much, who cares?
If success and well-being is fully determined by luck, then what should I do today?. If it's not, then I'll continue reaching for the stars. I don't think you will ever prove 100% dependence so anything less means you have to try.
Let's face it - how intelligent you are, what if anything you're gifted at, how tenatious you are, where you were born, who your parents are, who you know, what opportunities life presents you, what you enjoy doing, how much you are driven to win... ALL of these things are out of your control. The real falacy is that rich and successful people think they somehow "deserve" their status and that other people just didn't try hard enough. The reality is that life is a random shitshow and the rich / successful have been extremely lucky.
[+] [-] sebastos|8 years ago|reply
>The simulations show that although talent has a Gaussian distribution among agents, the resulting distribution of success/capital after a working life of 40 years, follows a power law which respects the ”80-20” Pareto law for the distribution of wealth found in the real world.
As opposed to what? What kind of distribution might you expect? Based on the insanely simple model that was presented, what other possible outcome could have been drawn?
>In this paper, starting from very simple assumptions, we have presented an agent-based model which is able to quantify the role of talent and luck in the success of people’s careers.
No, you have not. You have presented an agent-based model which is able to quantify the role of talent and luck in a 2D roulette game with a completely contrived, non-empirical bias parameter you've named "talent". It bears literally no relationship to reality, where random massive doublings of wealth are the exception, not the rule.
It really bothers me that people write news articles about the impact of this "research".
[+] [-] thanatropism|8 years ago|reply
1) A focus on inequality is irrational. 2) People focus on inequality for irrational reasons.
This means that if policy-makers and intellectuals fully give in to the people's wishes, we'll accept decreases in wealth in exchange for more equality indefinitely. If this sounds like a strawman, it's because we have "backstops" to inequality-decreasing wealth-destruction. But why should we tolerate any wealth destruction at all?
And if reducing inequality is possible without wealth destruction, why focus on inequality?
(This is besides the "Oxfam problem" -- there never is a coherent definition of "wealth" and Oxfam never seems to fully value people's homes and work animals and suchlike in poor countries.)
[+] [-] pron|8 years ago|reply
As freedom can never be total[2], the question is do we prefer to reduce the freedom of the powerful few (whose freedom is already large) in order to increase that of the many, or vice-versa?
So while absolute income is certainly very important, ignoring inequality is simply irrational for someone who values freedom.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political)
[2]: One person can be totally free; two cannot. X would either be free to infringe on Y's freedom or not -- in either case, freedom is no longer total.
[+] [-] spicymaki|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdhgaiojfsa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] athenot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ythn|8 years ago|reply
Yes, we need to get rid of poor shaming, but that doesn't mean we should also get rid of the culture of hard word, frugality, and discipline.
[+] [-] eksemplar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ranie93|8 years ago|reply
https://biblia.com/bible/nasb95/Rom%209.21-23
[+] [-] agumonkey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingbat|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aerique|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Helmet|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] naasking|8 years ago|reply
Every true mathematical proposition is a tautology. I don't find this point particularly convincing. As long as the model's predictions match reality in interesting ways, it can lend possible insights on why reality might have certain characteristics.
> Like getting an improbable series of heads when flipping a coin long enough, improbable clusters of events are bound to occur for at least some agents in a large enough set.
Yes, but what's alarming is how most agents' capital fell from bad luck alone, and how good luck only seemed to benefit a very small subset of the population, and talent was not any kind of guarantee. These characteristics of life are denied by many people, so to see it reflected in such a simple model is, I hope, instructive.
> Why should capital growth only occur on chance events, when most workers are paid wages in exchange for their work?
The way I see it, chance events that exponentially increase wealth drown out one's piddling wages. Wages don't seem particularly relevant to why Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have billions, and many people live paycheck to paycheck.
[+] [-] guiscreenshots|8 years ago|reply
>Every true mathematical proposition is a tautology. I don't find this point particularly convincing. As long as the model's predictions match reality in interesting ways, it can lend possible insights on why reality might have certain characteristics.
I think the problem is that nothing about the model lines up with reality. For example:
- Each agent begins with an identical amount of capital. -- nothing like the real world.
- Every 6 months you have the possibility of doubling or halving your capital. -- nothing like the real world.
- Chance of doubling capital is proportional to talent. -- nothing like the real world.
As an argument for such a simple model they provide:
> The previous agents’ rules are intentionally simple and can be considered widely shareable, since they are based on the common sense evidence that success, in everyone life, has the property to both grow or decrease very rapidly.
Sure, success/failure _can_ increase or decrease rapidly, but is it the rule? Arguing the basis of your entire model on "common sense" seems weak. It would be better if they had provided at least some real world data where this pattern emerges. In my experience people seem to move a little bit up or down from their baseline, but I have never personally seen a swing from rags to riches or the other way around.
If they had begun by drawing parallels to the ways in which we see the real world and letting the model simulate it into the future it would be more compelling. As it stands, it seems like a set of arbitrary rules designed to reach their desired conclusion, albeit weakly through "it looks pretty similar".
[+] [-] pron|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsacco|8 years ago|reply
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here, do you mind clarifying? Are you saying you don’t find the point convincing because it’s vacuous?
[+] [-] Quarrelsome|8 years ago|reply
How far is it really from just writing console.out("my hunches are correct!");
Maybe in a future world of modelling where we feed real-world data into the model then maybe we can get somewhere?
[+] [-] BlackFly|8 years ago|reply
So no, I wouldn't say the conclusion is foregone. It shows an example where something that can reasonably be called talent (the ability to capitalize) is not as important as luck (the chance encountering of an event where you can capitalize).
[+] [-] mapcars|8 years ago|reply
I see it as the same thing.
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
On the other hand, this might take the fun out of driving expensive cars, because in a society with such wealth-distribution, having an expensive car doesn't mean "I'm more successful than you", but rather something like "I have a pathetic need to show off".
[+] [-] pcurve|8 years ago|reply
1. What country you were born. 2. What teacher and friends you end up having. 3. Your parents. ($, gene, personality, parenting)
Of course, I would add just random luck as 4th factor.
None of these, you have any control over.
We're all here mostly through our good luck. Yes, some of us work very hard, but so do most people in impoverished countries.
Let's take a minute to count our blessings. :)
[+] [-] ksec|8 years ago|reply
After a few times I stopped mentioning it. It is clear the world doesn't buy this idea.
[+] [-] ska|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BerislavLopac|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rptv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] giardini|8 years ago|reply
"Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure" by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, A. Rapisarda
https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068
Are the rich wealthy because they somehow earned it? Examination reveals that this is not true and that the most extreme cases of wealth accumulation (which show a surprisingly consistent pattern across cultures) are attributable more to luck than to skill. Mark Buchanan examines this in his excellent book "The Social Atom" (pp.172-174):
https://www.amazon.com/Social-Atom-Cheaters-Neighbor-Usually...
A reference from that book:
Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Mezard, "Wealth Condensation in a simple model of economy":
https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0002374
See also Christopher Jencks, Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 1972) which focuses more on the effect (or non-effect) of education on income:
https://www.amazon.com/Inequality-Reassessment-Effect-School...
If extreme wealth is largely due to luck then I see no reason why government should not lop the "lucky" portion off for its purposes. Of course there will always be argument as to precisely where the line is drawn between luck and skill.
Finally we must not forget bad luck, which makes fools of us all. Just as there are those who are super-wealthy due to luck, there are those whose livelihood has been destroyed by luck. I do feel an obligation to help them back onto their feet.
[+] [-] FabHK|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dclowd9901|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projektir|8 years ago|reply
You need a huge amount of luck before you can even start doing this.
[+] [-] KozmoNau7|8 years ago|reply
So it's two-fold, one is that you have the resources to expose yourself to more possibly lucky situations, the second is being able to actually do something about it.
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzzeek|8 years ago|reply
to think we might alter our society to redistribute wealth to those who are most lacking, lifting people out of poverty and improving the world, when we DIDNT EVEN HAVE TO, turns out those losers were talentless and therefore deserve nothing. Horrifying.
[+] [-] monktastic1|8 years ago|reply
> I care deeply about the issue of growing wealth inequality, and would love for research to be done that finds concrete evidence of how luck and privilege play a role in it.
[+] [-] Bodhisattya|8 years ago|reply
We could argue as to what constitutes luck but I think the core of the paper suggests that talent's importance in success is overestimated, which is rather believable (MY ANECDOTAL OPINION).
Haven't read the paper, just assuming from the articles.
[+] [-] fsiefken|8 years ago|reply
One of the articles was about finding people who attract more good luck and people who attract more bad luck while ruling all kinds of psychological, behavioural or environmental factors. The relevance the authors argued was that persons with bad luck could be screened for to not work for nuclear facilities. I really wanted to find that article again, but the library has been rebuilt and I don't come there often.
[+] [-] wmsiler|8 years ago|reply
I heard of a study a few years ago where researchers divided a bunch of teenagers into a few groups (each of which was quite large), and each teen was allowed to go to a website and hear a collection of songs (same songs for everyone). Each person could then vote on which was their favorite and, importantly, they could see how many votes that song had already gotten just within their group. The researchers wanted to see if the same songs were picked as the favorite across different, isolated groups. The result was that each group had chosen completely different songs as their favorite. These groups were large enough that they were probably all statistically similar. Once people in a group saw that some song already had a lot of votes, they were more likely to pick it as their favorite as well. This suggests that in the world of pop music, success may have more to do with luck and social influence than with talent.
Ah, I found a link to a description of the study: https://www.npr.org/2014/02/27/282939233/good-art-is-popular...
[+] [-] tokai|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
[+] [-] jonbarker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drieddust|8 years ago|reply
I have thought about this question a lot recently without any satisfaction.
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mi100hael|8 years ago|reply
But Warren is an outlier among outliers. Bill Gates has said himself that he doesn't think he would have been able to become a billionaire with Microsoft had he not gone to a swanky private high school that had a computer back when no one had computers.
[+] [-] giardini|8 years ago|reply
But counterfactuals seem to be part of our reasoning processes ("If i had turned left at the last light I would be closer to the restaurant.") and they do often capture the imagination (alternative histories, etc.):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional
[+] [-] beersigns|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryeguy_24|8 years ago|reply
If success and well-being is fully determined by luck, then what should I do today?. If it's not, then I'll continue reaching for the stars. I don't think you will ever prove 100% dependence so anything less means you have to try.
[+] [-] AndrewSChapman|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captainbland|8 years ago|reply
You could say much the same about modern market economies.
[+] [-] jrs235|8 years ago|reply