If you dig sufficiently deeply at it, you can attribute everything to luck. Just keep asking "why" and eventually you arrive at something you did not have conscious control over.
E.g.
Q. Why do you deserve your money?
A. I work hard.
Q. Why do you work hard?
A. I have a good work ethic.
Q. Why do you have a good work ethic?
A. My parents raised me that way.
Q. Why did you choose for your parents to raise you that way?
A. I didn't.
I'm not suggesting any conclusions here, just stating that if you keeping asking "why", you will always get to ground at something outside your conscious control.
Applying this to my own life, I make good money doing software development. Programming is easy and natural for me. I started programming when I was 12. Why? I thought it was fun. Why did I choose to think it was fun? I didn't consciously choose.
This applies even for things that seem to arise within your own mind. You can't choose which thoughts to have. You might think "sure I can, I'm going to think about elephants right now", and that may be, but when did you choose to choose to think about elephants? When did you choose to choose to choose? You can recurse deep, but eventually you arrive at something outside your conscious control.
With this line of reasoning, no one does or decides anything. We are all simply running out the simulation that was predetermined long before we were born. Even if this is true, it's not exactly useful.
We punish people for doing the wrong things, even though they didn't chose to do them, but the act of punishing them makes them less likely to happen. In the same way, we give rewards to people who worked hard even if they didn't "decide" to work hard. Doesn't matter why they decided to work hard, if we just handed out money evenly to everyone, we wouldn't have these hard workers putting the extra effort in.
I make the point in your last paragraph often. There is a quote I recall reading somewhere, that contrasts with “I think, therefore I am”. Rather: “the thought chooses the thinker”.
This is why Western individualism is stupid. We're constituent parts of families, and operate most effectively in that way, yet all modern taxation, government policy and a lot of culture attempts to break that bond, in favour of an all-powerful state.
Choosing to work means taking action in the world, which is where you can stop looking for a cause outside yourself. How did you choose, you can still ask. But you choose to work because you choose to work. It's because of this that you can say you have a good work ethic. A choice is something that you take responsibility for. Not your parents, or your work ethic, or the way you were raised.
I was raised by a drug dealer/drug addict/gang member single mom. One of the reasons I’ve been financially successful is because I never wanted my life to be like the lives of the people I grew up around. Where’s the luck there?
Attributing everything to luck is:
A) A coping mechanism for people who don’t want to do the work required to succeed.
B) A rationalization technique for people who think they should be entitled to the fruits of other people labor.
Deciding that one's life is all about luck is a miserable way to live. It means one has no agency, no choice, no way to make one's life better. Because it's all luck, that means there is no point in trying. The outcome of this is self-fulfilling - misery.
I don't understand why it's such a popular attitude these days.
A while ago, I noticed something interesting. None of my friends believes their lives are all about luck. They all believe they have agency, and are constantly taking responsibility for their lives and acting accordingly. They're a lot of fun to be around.
The great thing about taking responsibility is one can do something to fix issues in their lives.
The other ones, the ones who say it's all luck, it's always someone else's fault, why me, etc., aren't any fun to be around. No thanks.
> Deciding that one's life is all about luck is a miserable way to live. It means one has no agency, no choice, no way to make one's life better. Because it's all luck, that means there is no point in trying. The outcome of this is self-fulfilling - misery.
It likewise can be a recipe for misery to ignore the role of luck in your own life and the lives of others. It's not only inaccurate (sub luck out for the mechanisms by which the world turns), it attributes an unreasonable level of burden of consequence on the decision maker, one they can never hope to live up to and one no one around them will ever live up to.
Of course as with many things the most reasonable course of action is something in between. To both acknowledge the ways in which we understand the world works and how much of that is outside your control, and then take very real ownership of the things that are in your control (namely your actions), and take special care to note how taking control of the things you can over time ends up compounding in unforeseen ways such that you end up "luckier" (the meeting of hard work and opportunity and all that).
If anything this just seems to once again show that any extreme along nearly any axis is not only inaccurate but detrimental to mental health. Nuance and acknowledgement of opposing ideals, and realizing they're compatible and not actually opposing at all, is where one finds truth and solace.
>Deciding that one's life is all about luck is a miserable way to live
Yes, it is to externalise your locus of control. This has been shown to result in bad outcomes regarding all kinds of things, including obesity, overall health, psychological well-being, academic, and professional success. Self-victimisation is not a good thing at all, and should not be encouraged.
> Because it's all luck, that means there is no point in trying.
This is fallacious. Doing or not doing X has just the same consequences no matter whether “you” really did them or not. The outcomes of things happening in the world are still the same.
If you change your mindset to this one (all luck) and notice that you “don’t even try”, then that is a reason to revert that mindset. (Who or what really reverts the mindset is a philosophical question.) Cause and effect is still, you know, the same as it ever was.
> The outcome of this is self-fulfilling - misery.
Jumping to a conclusion. Some people seem to do just fine with such an attitude. Some do worse.
> Deciding that one's life is all about luck is a miserable way to live. It means one has no agency, no choice, no way to make one's life better.
No one serious is saying life is all about luck, but there's been a long-held view that bad outcomes are solely due to bad choices and good outcomes solely due to bad choices. It's a good thing to recognize that there's a significant degree of luck involved in both directions, and that you're not a stupid fool for not foreseeing the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, or that you're not a flawless genius for making a few fortuitous business decisions. It can return a sense of control/agency back to people who've had a string of bad luck despite seemingly careful planning, and should humble people who've had a string of good luck so they don't get too big a head.
Why not both? I believe that I have no conscious free will. I do not think I have ever consciously “made a decision” in my life. They all ultimately arise from unconscious processes. My brain, at least, seems to be a complex system mapping certain sensory and biological inputs to outputs. Just because of that, does not mean I don’t have agency. In contrast, that is my agency.
I was lucky enough that my parents instilled senses of responsibility and hard work into my brain. In that way, I suspect, the transformation in my unconscious mind that maps those inputs to outputs considers things such as responsibility. It automatically (from the perspective of my conscious mind) prefers me being accountable, me doubling down in the face of challenges, etc.
I agree with you that I’m sick of seeing “it’s always someone else’s fault”, the “I can’t do it because I don’t have X”, etc. crowd. None of us can control everything, but we all ought to control what we can in an effort to improve our lives. How do we folk who are imbued with responsibility and a strong work ethic transfer that from our brains, and use that to transform the cognitive processes of others’ brains? I assume this is what happens when raising a child, and it’s easier because their brain is more impressionable. But it is certainly possible in adults, too. Emotionally moving books and stories, and ordinary people we meet can change our perspectives on life. Experiences can change our lives. The crowd we keep can influence us in certain directions. I suspect that transfer is the missing link that would allow someone who thinks “it’s all luck” to become someone who recognizes that they have agency in absence of luck.
> Deciding that one's life is all about luck is a miserable way to live. It means one has no agency, no choice, no way to make one's life better. Because it's all luck, that means there is no point in trying. The outcome of this is self-fulfilling - misery.
Regardless of the effects of luck, I should point out how far from scientific observation this is. One can examine the evidence of, as this article says, luck, in society. Or, one can talk about magical thinking, and if one doesn't believe some received hegemony it will lead to misery. It sounds close to Christian fundamentalism - believe in the received divine word of the Bible or suffer eternally.
The evidence based scientific method has less value in observing human society than in observing the orbit of planets and such, for a variety of reasons. The picture gotten from social science is less clear than from natural science. It is better than the alternative though.
If one observed society, and the class structure of society, and the forces of production and relations of production - and the changes to the forces of production and resulting changes to relations of production - one would have an evidence based observation of
society. Including the luck of being born into one class or the other.
We can look at Mark Zuckerberg, who went to the Phillips Exeter high school (current yearly tuition - $47000 a year and up). His company bought Instagram for $1 billion, founded by Kevin Systrom who went to Middlesex high school (current yearly tuition - $55000 a year and up). We can then look at people who did not pay $47000 for their freshman year in high school (or its mid 1990s equivalent).
> None of my friends believes their lives are all about luck. They all believe they have agency, and are constantly taking responsibility for their lives and acting accordingly.
I'm sure Zuckerberg and Systrom believe they have agency - I believe they have agency. I'm sure when Bill Gates and Paul Allen left the Lakeside prep school they had agency.
These are in fact people who were upper middle class and actually went out and worked. Plenty of heirs inherit their billions, live as "rich kids of Instagram" as shall their kids.
Or you can take the advice if this poster - forget evidence in the world and engage in magical thinking or face misery.
In fact my experience is the opposite in my cohort. We see luck of birth and class structure as bearing on relations if production. My friends are fun to be around in a manner smarmy, entitled trust fund kids are not fun to be around.
Backgammon is a game of chance: at each move you roll the dice. But while you can't control the dice, you can choose among the several moves allowed by the dice.
Play against a professional backgammon player, and you will win exactly zero matches.
The luck averages out over the long run, but the better play accumulates with each move.
In real life, the better play is sometimes hard work, but many times it can be something else: making friends, doing them favors, and getting favors in return, knowing when to take a calculated risk, and knowing when to call it quits, drinking and having fun at parties, but knowing to keep the alcohol away otherwise, saying no do drugs, reading books instead of watching TikTok.
While it's true that in backgammon, skill largely trumps luck, that's not true for, say, Ludo. Sure, you still have decisions (which piece do I move, do I start a new piece or not), but the ultimate decider of the game will be luck. You might possibly see some value in strategy if you reran the game hundreds of times, but at the individual level, the dice decide the outcome.
Because the real issue here is not whether our lives are predictable or random (they are obviously both), but to what extent. Your analogy demonstrates a case where randomness can be controlled, mine a case where it can't. So which applies best to our actual lives?
Another analogy from the world of board games: one annoying habit of bad board gamers that gets brought up often in forums and hobby discussion boards is the habit of ascribing good outcomes to skill, and bad outcomes to luck. In my experience, that's true in other aspects of our lives as well. It's very difficult to see the luck involved when you do something successfully, even though it's usually there.
I think it's fine to acknowledge that luck plays a role in life, but unless you think there's a way to trade your time and life force in a direct effort to become more lucky, it's not particularly practical as a way to guide your actions.
That is, unless you take something like the view of "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."
My spouse and I work hard to ensure that our family has that kind of luck. That our kids get a safe, stable, secure home, nutritious food, adequate exercise, exposure to a variety of novel (to them) experiences. We copiously support and nurture their educational efforts. We display love and tolerance for each other, but also demonstrate and uphold high standards in areas that we think matter. We spend less than our means and save for our family's future and invest for our retirement and their current and future education.
Given all that, maybe our kids are just plain lucky after all and luck is responsible for everything that they'll ever do. I can't stop you from believing that, but I don't and we don't live our lives as if it were true.
Maybe the lesson is that there is no point to judging other people's relative success (whether more or less successful than yourself), and that you can just try to make your own life better. Don't wish for things you don't have, don't despair over success you haven't achieved, don't shit on people who haven't found success. Make your own life better, in any way you can, and make the lives of your loved ones better. Let the rest work itself out.
This article is written from a top-down perspective, as if morality is about how some higher power should allocate benefits and burdens:
> These episodes illustrate what seems to be one of the enduring themes of our age: socially dominant groups, recipients of myriad unearned advantages, willfully refusing to acknowledge them, despite persistent efforts from socially disadvantaged groups.
A more useful understanding of morality is that it’s a framework for cultivating individually and socially desirable behavior. If you’re a member of one of those “socially disadvantaged groups” you can’t do anything about the unearned advantages held by other people. All you can do is control your own actions.
From that perspective, it’s better for a member of a socially disadvantaged group to discount luck altogether-act is if nothing is holding them back—whether it’s true or not. I probably wouldn’t be here in America if my dad had sat around dwelling on the happenstance of his having been born in a third world village, or thinking about the unearned privileges reaped by British colonization of his homeland.
I don't know how we can even consider that luck doesn't play the biggest role in life. We are influenced by a trillion of decisions made by people that directly pass through our lives everyday. To your competitors in business to the people that decide they are sober enough to drive at the same time you are driving.
Not to mention the physical world which plays no favourites.
I look at Bezos/Musk/etc and they are on top of wealth pyramid solely because someone has to. Next year it will be someone else.
All we can do is try to make clear rational decisions and then let the universe unfold as it will.
Luck = All the things that that are too complex for us to understand bunched up in to one.
Luck is a narrative concept that is not useful in reasoning.
For example in the article:
> As many people pointed out, Jenner’s success would have been impossible if she hadn’t been born white, healthy, rich, and famous
She could not have been born as anything but those things. Those things are what she is and removing them would not simply make her "unlucky", it would make her in to another person. Luck as used here in the article is just a way to differentiate and classify people, it does not have causal power.
> I look at Bezos/Musk/etc and they are on top of wealth pyramid solely because someone has to.
By this logic, it could have been anyone. How do you account for the fact that people at the top of this list all started their own businesses (or inherited one)?
I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; nor bread to the wise, nor wealth to the brilliant, nor favor to the skilled. But time and chance happen to them all.[1]
I often perceive luck to be the combination of opportunity + skill/talent (in the sense that you have the skill/talent to take advantage of the opportunity that comes your way). I find that a lot of people like to chock up the success of billionaires or whoever to luck (in the sense of random chance). My older brother does this often and used to tell me about how Bezos was lucky and Bezos' parents gave him $300K to start Amazon, the implication being something to the effect that anybody given $300k can build Amazon. Then my brother had a windfall stock trade where he made $250k, I told him he can try to build the next Amazon, and he ended up squandering everything on bad stock trades and business decisions. I guess his luck ran out?
His parents invested $300k in fledgling Amazon, along with other investors for the same terms. And that's why they're billionaires today too. That's different from just giving Jeff $300k.
I fully agree on the role of luck/randomness on our lives.
But I disagree on what the author is suggesting : wealth redistribution.
I do think that taxes are necessary (until proven otherwise) but I think that wealth is a second order effect of power. Trying to fix the inequality problem by targeting its derivative is barely helpful.
We should really look at the power structure and network instead, obviously this is also more difficult to tackle as power is somewhat ill defined and not fungible.
I tend to think that the _less wrong_ solution would be to build power traps and power diffusers, in practice trying both to avoid concentration and to maintain a minimal floor.
It is an old subject, with old arguments around old miss-understandings. People here are trying to use new analogies from computer science (a clock work universe), or with miss-understandings around quantum mechanics (somehow randomness give me agency). Or trying to re-define terms to fit a particular answer they ‘feel’ comfortable with.
But it still comes back to, where is the first mover, best summarized by Schopenhauer.
"A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills."
Go watch some Robert Sapolsky lectures. We are just a monkey society, reacting to stimuli based on hormones and what we just ate. If you drill down far enough, sure some electrons twitched one way or the other, and yeah, if you steal something, or do something the group doesn’t like, then all the other monkeys will want to beat you up and call it justice, and dream up some logic to justify it and call it morality.
Related, I'd highly recommend reading Harvard Law School professor Michael Sandel's recent book on Meritocracy. He lays out a comprehensive exploration of the luck factor in the role of justice, democracy, and the shared common good.
The problem I have with Sandel’s argument against meritocracy is that the “meritocracy trap” is not meritocracy at all, but the illusion of meritocracy. He has a point, but I just disagree with how he frames it: a true meritocracy doesn’t have the attributes he highlights.
I highly recommend his “Justice” lectures from Harvard though.
Turning this around somewhat: in some sense, the focus on luck can also hurt people. If it's "just luck" that you did _not_ get the promotion or whatever despite trying and training for it, does it mean that you are "cursed by fate?"
I think it's super hard to balance "agency" versus "random factors beyond my control" on a daily basis. I agree that embracing the role of luck is one step forward, but I also wonder whether we'll ever get there.
> Building a more compassionate society means reminding ourselves of luck, and of the gratitude and obligations it entails, against inevitable resistance.
No, not at all. Moral obligations come from the idea of sharing your success with the rest of society instead of being strictly selfish, because you live in that society and it has the added benefits of indirectly helping you in the long run.
Luck doesn’t change the sharing story and people don’t view luck that way either. When someone wins at a casino they don’t feel any obligation to share because it was lucky.
You share out of moral obligation to support the common good, if there’s zero luck involved it doesn’t give you some moral ground to maximize your selfishness.
> How much credit do we deserve for who, and where, we end up?
The answer to this is really simple. You may take credit for how much better you have done relative to those who had a similar upbringing and opportunity. That's it.
One thing that made me realize how luck is important, is reading a part of the book "Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us".
If we leave out environmental luck (parents, neighborhood...), the very simple fact that you cannot choose which brain you want (einstein brain or some famous artist brain?) or simply a brain/body that is more capable of enduring stress /hard-work, should make people understand that luck play a far bigger role than everything else.
You can work with what you have and express the best version of yourself, but that doesn't mean you will be succesfull in the envoirnment you are surrounded with. Some people waste away their life just because they could not find a suitable environment (maybe it doesn't exist) where their best self can overcome the average. And finding the best enviornment where you can thrive and have success is, I guess, another lottery.
It might be luck to HAVE good parents but it's the furthest thing from luck BE good parents in the first place. Good parents have the right to pass down that hard work to their kids.
The author sure does work pretty hard to absolve individuals of having any control over their destiny. If your parents were wealthy, that's luck. If they loved you and cared for you when you were young, also luck. But after you're an adult, if you have enough grit to go accomplish great things, that's luck too!
So don't feel bad if you're not a self-starter, don't feel like you need to keep trying. Accept it as bad luck, and accept your fate.
We've established that there are trust-fund kids who try and those who don't, what differentiates these groups? Why does one group try and the other not try?
Are trust-fund kids with an IQ of 40 in the same group as the not-triers?
[+] [-] gamegoblin|3 years ago|reply
E.g.
Q. Why do you deserve your money?
A. I work hard.
Q. Why do you work hard?
A. I have a good work ethic.
Q. Why do you have a good work ethic?
A. My parents raised me that way.
Q. Why did you choose for your parents to raise you that way?
A. I didn't.
I'm not suggesting any conclusions here, just stating that if you keeping asking "why", you will always get to ground at something outside your conscious control.
Applying this to my own life, I make good money doing software development. Programming is easy and natural for me. I started programming when I was 12. Why? I thought it was fun. Why did I choose to think it was fun? I didn't consciously choose.
This applies even for things that seem to arise within your own mind. You can't choose which thoughts to have. You might think "sure I can, I'm going to think about elephants right now", and that may be, but when did you choose to choose to think about elephants? When did you choose to choose to choose? You can recurse deep, but eventually you arrive at something outside your conscious control.
[+] [-] Gigachad|3 years ago|reply
We punish people for doing the wrong things, even though they didn't chose to do them, but the act of punishing them makes them less likely to happen. In the same way, we give rewards to people who worked hard even if they didn't "decide" to work hard. Doesn't matter why they decided to work hard, if we just handed out money evenly to everyone, we wouldn't have these hard workers putting the extra effort in.
[+] [-] lumb63|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eyelidlessness|3 years ago|reply
> Why did you choose for your parents
… you gave in to an abridged “why?” discussion very early in this example.
[+] [-] b800h|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inimino|3 years ago|reply
A. Because you choose to.
Choosing to work means taking action in the world, which is where you can stop looking for a cause outside yourself. How did you choose, you can still ask. But you choose to work because you choose to work. It's because of this that you can say you have a good work ethic. A choice is something that you take responsibility for. Not your parents, or your work ethic, or the way you were raised.
[+] [-] AmericanChopper|3 years ago|reply
Attributing everything to luck is:
A) A coping mechanism for people who don’t want to do the work required to succeed.
B) A rationalization technique for people who think they should be entitled to the fruits of other people labor.
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adammarples|3 years ago|reply
Can you claim?
Not a thing
Not your name.
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
I don't understand why it's such a popular attitude these days.
A while ago, I noticed something interesting. None of my friends believes their lives are all about luck. They all believe they have agency, and are constantly taking responsibility for their lives and acting accordingly. They're a lot of fun to be around.
The great thing about taking responsibility is one can do something to fix issues in their lives.
The other ones, the ones who say it's all luck, it's always someone else's fault, why me, etc., aren't any fun to be around. No thanks.
[+] [-] lm28469|3 years ago|reply
People who think their entire lives is the sole result of their hard work and intelligence make my life more miserable
[+] [-] chronofar|3 years ago|reply
It likewise can be a recipe for misery to ignore the role of luck in your own life and the lives of others. It's not only inaccurate (sub luck out for the mechanisms by which the world turns), it attributes an unreasonable level of burden of consequence on the decision maker, one they can never hope to live up to and one no one around them will ever live up to.
Of course as with many things the most reasonable course of action is something in between. To both acknowledge the ways in which we understand the world works and how much of that is outside your control, and then take very real ownership of the things that are in your control (namely your actions), and take special care to note how taking control of the things you can over time ends up compounding in unforeseen ways such that you end up "luckier" (the meeting of hard work and opportunity and all that).
If anything this just seems to once again show that any extreme along nearly any axis is not only inaccurate but detrimental to mental health. Nuance and acknowledgement of opposing ideals, and realizing they're compatible and not actually opposing at all, is where one finds truth and solace.
[+] [-] _0ffh|3 years ago|reply
Yes, it is to externalise your locus of control. This has been shown to result in bad outcomes regarding all kinds of things, including obesity, overall health, psychological well-being, academic, and professional success. Self-victimisation is not a good thing at all, and should not be encouraged.
[+] [-] avgcorrection|3 years ago|reply
This is fallacious. Doing or not doing X has just the same consequences no matter whether “you” really did them or not. The outcomes of things happening in the world are still the same.
If you change your mindset to this one (all luck) and notice that you “don’t even try”, then that is a reason to revert that mindset. (Who or what really reverts the mindset is a philosophical question.) Cause and effect is still, you know, the same as it ever was.
> The outcome of this is self-fulfilling - misery.
Jumping to a conclusion. Some people seem to do just fine with such an attitude. Some do worse.
[+] [-] willis936|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naasking|3 years ago|reply
No one serious is saying life is all about luck, but there's been a long-held view that bad outcomes are solely due to bad choices and good outcomes solely due to bad choices. It's a good thing to recognize that there's a significant degree of luck involved in both directions, and that you're not a stupid fool for not foreseeing the 2008 financial crisis, for instance, or that you're not a flawless genius for making a few fortuitous business decisions. It can return a sense of control/agency back to people who've had a string of bad luck despite seemingly careful planning, and should humble people who've had a string of good luck so they don't get too big a head.
[+] [-] lumb63|3 years ago|reply
I was lucky enough that my parents instilled senses of responsibility and hard work into my brain. In that way, I suspect, the transformation in my unconscious mind that maps those inputs to outputs considers things such as responsibility. It automatically (from the perspective of my conscious mind) prefers me being accountable, me doubling down in the face of challenges, etc.
I agree with you that I’m sick of seeing “it’s always someone else’s fault”, the “I can’t do it because I don’t have X”, etc. crowd. None of us can control everything, but we all ought to control what we can in an effort to improve our lives. How do we folk who are imbued with responsibility and a strong work ethic transfer that from our brains, and use that to transform the cognitive processes of others’ brains? I assume this is what happens when raising a child, and it’s easier because their brain is more impressionable. But it is certainly possible in adults, too. Emotionally moving books and stories, and ordinary people we meet can change our perspectives on life. Experiences can change our lives. The crowd we keep can influence us in certain directions. I suspect that transfer is the missing link that would allow someone who thinks “it’s all luck” to become someone who recognizes that they have agency in absence of luck.
[+] [-] GAN_Game|3 years ago|reply
Regardless of the effects of luck, I should point out how far from scientific observation this is. One can examine the evidence of, as this article says, luck, in society. Or, one can talk about magical thinking, and if one doesn't believe some received hegemony it will lead to misery. It sounds close to Christian fundamentalism - believe in the received divine word of the Bible or suffer eternally.
The evidence based scientific method has less value in observing human society than in observing the orbit of planets and such, for a variety of reasons. The picture gotten from social science is less clear than from natural science. It is better than the alternative though.
If one observed society, and the class structure of society, and the forces of production and relations of production - and the changes to the forces of production and resulting changes to relations of production - one would have an evidence based observation of society. Including the luck of being born into one class or the other.
We can look at Mark Zuckerberg, who went to the Phillips Exeter high school (current yearly tuition - $47000 a year and up). His company bought Instagram for $1 billion, founded by Kevin Systrom who went to Middlesex high school (current yearly tuition - $55000 a year and up). We can then look at people who did not pay $47000 for their freshman year in high school (or its mid 1990s equivalent).
> None of my friends believes their lives are all about luck. They all believe they have agency, and are constantly taking responsibility for their lives and acting accordingly.
I'm sure Zuckerberg and Systrom believe they have agency - I believe they have agency. I'm sure when Bill Gates and Paul Allen left the Lakeside prep school they had agency.
These are in fact people who were upper middle class and actually went out and worked. Plenty of heirs inherit their billions, live as "rich kids of Instagram" as shall their kids.
Or you can take the advice if this poster - forget evidence in the world and engage in magical thinking or face misery.
In fact my experience is the opposite in my cohort. We see luck of birth and class structure as bearing on relations if production. My friends are fun to be around in a manner smarmy, entitled trust fund kids are not fun to be around.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] adversaryIdiot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] credit_guy|3 years ago|reply
Play against a professional backgammon player, and you will win exactly zero matches.
The luck averages out over the long run, but the better play accumulates with each move.
In real life, the better play is sometimes hard work, but many times it can be something else: making friends, doing them favors, and getting favors in return, knowing when to take a calculated risk, and knowing when to call it quits, drinking and having fun at parties, but knowing to keep the alcohol away otherwise, saying no do drugs, reading books instead of watching TikTok.
[+] [-] MrJohz|3 years ago|reply
Because the real issue here is not whether our lives are predictable or random (they are obviously both), but to what extent. Your analogy demonstrates a case where randomness can be controlled, mine a case where it can't. So which applies best to our actual lives?
Another analogy from the world of board games: one annoying habit of bad board gamers that gets brought up often in forums and hobby discussion boards is the habit of ascribing good outcomes to skill, and bad outcomes to luck. In my experience, that's true in other aspects of our lives as well. It's very difficult to see the luck involved when you do something successfully, even though it's usually there.
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|3 years ago|reply
There's exactly zero guarantee that our society or life in general is similarly well-balanced.
It seems to be a lot more like "Candy Land" or "Chutes and Ladders" for many people.
[+] [-] yogthos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|3 years ago|reply
That is, unless you take something like the view of "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."
My spouse and I work hard to ensure that our family has that kind of luck. That our kids get a safe, stable, secure home, nutritious food, adequate exercise, exposure to a variety of novel (to them) experiences. We copiously support and nurture their educational efforts. We display love and tolerance for each other, but also demonstrate and uphold high standards in areas that we think matter. We spend less than our means and save for our family's future and invest for our retirement and their current and future education.
Given all that, maybe our kids are just plain lucky after all and luck is responsible for everything that they'll ever do. I can't stop you from believing that, but I don't and we don't live our lives as if it were true.
[+] [-] mypastself|3 years ago|reply
“Acknowledging the importance of hard work and personal responsibility is threatening to the lazy.”
“Whoa, look at how many lazy people there are.”
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|3 years ago|reply
> These episodes illustrate what seems to be one of the enduring themes of our age: socially dominant groups, recipients of myriad unearned advantages, willfully refusing to acknowledge them, despite persistent efforts from socially disadvantaged groups.
A more useful understanding of morality is that it’s a framework for cultivating individually and socially desirable behavior. If you’re a member of one of those “socially disadvantaged groups” you can’t do anything about the unearned advantages held by other people. All you can do is control your own actions.
From that perspective, it’s better for a member of a socially disadvantaged group to discount luck altogether-act is if nothing is holding them back—whether it’s true or not. I probably wouldn’t be here in America if my dad had sat around dwelling on the happenstance of his having been born in a third world village, or thinking about the unearned privileges reaped by British colonization of his homeland.
[+] [-] todaysAI|3 years ago|reply
Not to mention the physical world which plays no favourites.
I look at Bezos/Musk/etc and they are on top of wealth pyramid solely because someone has to. Next year it will be someone else.
All we can do is try to make clear rational decisions and then let the universe unfold as it will.
[+] [-] callesgg|3 years ago|reply
Luck is a narrative concept that is not useful in reasoning.
For example in the article:
> As many people pointed out, Jenner’s success would have been impossible if she hadn’t been born white, healthy, rich, and famous
She could not have been born as anything but those things. Those things are what she is and removing them would not simply make her "unlucky", it would make her in to another person. Luck as used here in the article is just a way to differentiate and classify people, it does not have causal power.
[+] [-] notinfuriated|3 years ago|reply
By this logic, it could have been anyone. How do you account for the fact that people at the top of this list all started their own businesses (or inherited one)?
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
Criminy. Both made choices.
[+] [-] Maursault|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaftoe444|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ne0flex|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] transcoderx|3 years ago|reply
Instead of fretting how rich people have an unfair advantage, we should try to give more people that advantage.
And say it takes a rich family to create one Neurosurgeon. Shouldn't we be happy that society is able to produce some Neurosurgeons?
Another note: genetics and evolution are not random luck. People struggle to find partners with good genes.
[+] [-] stephc_int13|3 years ago|reply
But I disagree on what the author is suggesting : wealth redistribution.
I do think that taxes are necessary (until proven otherwise) but I think that wealth is a second order effect of power. Trying to fix the inequality problem by targeting its derivative is barely helpful.
We should really look at the power structure and network instead, obviously this is also more difficult to tackle as power is somewhat ill defined and not fungible.
I tend to think that the _less wrong_ solution would be to build power traps and power diffusers, in practice trying both to avoid concentration and to maintain a minimal floor.
[+] [-] mrtesthah|3 years ago|reply
Redistribution of wealth would accomplish that.
[+] [-] FrustratedMonky|3 years ago|reply
But it still comes back to, where is the first mover, best summarized by Schopenhauer.
"A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills."
Go watch some Robert Sapolsky lectures. We are just a monkey society, reacting to stimuli based on hormones and what we just ate. If you drill down far enough, sure some electrons twitched one way or the other, and yeah, if you steal something, or do something the group doesn’t like, then all the other monkeys will want to beat you up and call it justice, and dream up some logic to justify it and call it morality.
[+] [-] jadbox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epgui|3 years ago|reply
I highly recommend his “Justice” lectures from Harvard though.
[+] [-] Topolomancer|3 years ago|reply
I think it's super hard to balance "agency" versus "random factors beyond my control" on a daily basis. I agree that embracing the role of luck is one step forward, but I also wonder whether we'll ever get there.
[+] [-] Isamu|3 years ago|reply
No, not at all. Moral obligations come from the idea of sharing your success with the rest of society instead of being strictly selfish, because you live in that society and it has the added benefits of indirectly helping you in the long run.
Luck doesn’t change the sharing story and people don’t view luck that way either. When someone wins at a casino they don’t feel any obligation to share because it was lucky.
You share out of moral obligation to support the common good, if there’s zero luck involved it doesn’t give you some moral ground to maximize your selfishness.
[+] [-] rubicon33|3 years ago|reply
The answer to this is really simple. You may take credit for how much better you have done relative to those who had a similar upbringing and opportunity. That's it.
[+] [-] rrgok|3 years ago|reply
If we leave out environmental luck (parents, neighborhood...), the very simple fact that you cannot choose which brain you want (einstein brain or some famous artist brain?) or simply a brain/body that is more capable of enduring stress /hard-work, should make people understand that luck play a far bigger role than everything else.
You can work with what you have and express the best version of yourself, but that doesn't mean you will be succesfull in the envoirnment you are surrounded with. Some people waste away their life just because they could not find a suitable environment (maybe it doesn't exist) where their best self can overcome the average. And finding the best enviornment where you can thrive and have success is, I guess, another lottery.
[+] [-] bojangleslover|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
So don't feel bad if you're not a self-starter, don't feel like you need to keep trying. Accept it as bad luck, and accept your fate.
Was this written by someone lucky?
[+] [-] MrPatan|3 years ago|reply
Some people want to conflate it. Don't let them.
Don't let them compare the trust-fund kid who built a business to the non-trust-fund kid who didn't build a business.
Compare them to the trust-fund kid who didn't even try to build anything and ended up writing sad opinion pieces against the unfairness of it all.
[+] [-] BigGreenTurtle|3 years ago|reply
Are trust-fund kids with an IQ of 40 in the same group as the not-triers?