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You can argue about the total number of tickets, and about the amount of extra tickets work/race/gender confers upon you in different contexts, but in essence t

You can argue about the total number of tickets, and about the amount of extra tickets work/race/gender confers upon you in different contexts, but in essence this is the most realistic way to model 'success' and how it happens. The model works for health issues too - eating badly, smoking, being sedentary, being male ... all of these give you extra tickets in the death lottery (I first came across the lottery/tickets analogy in mixerman's posts on prosoundweb years ago, always assumed he had coined it but maybe not)

munificent 9y ago
What's neat about the analogy is that it easily models one of the most fundamental tensions in human society: how much privilege should we be able to pass on to our children? In a perfectly fair world, we would all be born with the same number of lottery tickets, the same equal opportunity. But one of the primary goals of being successful is to be able to ensure better opportunities for our children, in essence giving them lottery tickets.
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
I believe there are studies that show people overestimate how much control they have over getting cancer. It's the old "Just World Fallacy" thing, where the thought of randomly getting cancer no matter how "good" you are, while objectively accurate, is hard to cope with, so blaming the people with cancer for their predicament serves as a way to ward off the bad luck and feel in control of your life.
- lazerpants 9y ago
  Actually, with cancer, you do have a lot of control over whether or not you get it based on lifestyle. Up to 90% of cancers are preventable. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/ Edit: 90% sounded way too high, so I dug up a more recent article on this, which claims it is 50%. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/healthy-lifestyle-could-prevent-half-of-all-cancer-deaths/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/healthy-l...

munificent 9y ago

What's neat about the analogy is that it easily models one of the most fundamental tensions in human society: how much privilege should we be able to pass on to our children? In a perfectly fair world, we would all be born with the same number of lottery tickets, the same equal opportunity. But one of the primary goals of being successful is to be able to ensure better opportunities for our children, in essence giving them lottery tickets.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

I believe there are studies that show people overestimate how much control they have over getting cancer. It's the old "Just World Fallacy" thing, where the thought of randomly getting cancer no matter how "good" you are, while objectively accurate, is hard to cope with, so blaming the people with cancer for their predicament serves as a way to ward off the bad luck and feel in control of your life.

lazerpants 9y ago
Actually, with cancer, you do have a lot of control over whether or not you get it based on lifestyle. Up to 90% of cancers are preventable. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/ Edit: 90% sounded way too high, so I dug up a more recent article on this, which claims it is 50%. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/healthy-lifestyle-could-prevent-half-of-all-cancer-deaths/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/healthy-l...