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Your success isn’t down to free will – luck determines everything
- menacingly 9y agoWe should have taken it more seriously when post-modernism was slowly replacing the building blocks of organized thought, because now points are made not by expressing anything, but by subtly rotating the definitions of the terms.
- Diederich 9y ago> but by subtly rotating the definitions of the terms. Can you expand on that?
- imgabe 9y agoRegardless of whether you can actually affect an outcome, believing you can affect the outcome is crucial. Maybe you're just "lucky" to have that belief, but of course you can choose to believe something or not, can't you? What's the point of this article? Give up and accept whatever comes your way? That any influence you could possibly exert on the world is just pure chance? What a load of crap.
- Nokinside 9y agoYou don't see the point because you are looking it from individual point of view. How individual should change their actions based on this news is not the point. The point of article affect policy level. If the correlation between effort and outcome is probably weaker than what people assume, it has effects to the society.
- ddingus 9y agoBingo. This gets right at "blame yourself" type policy. We all could need help. Thinking of it as such, understanding luck plays a bigger role than we would like will boil down to more humane policy. That will raise standards of living and improve society, all of which will improve your personal luck.
- merpnderp 9y agoYes, all those professional athletes, Nobel Prize winners, CEO's, top lawyers, all of it was pure luck. Not a single individual decision mattered. </sarcasm>
- mantas 9y agoIt's luck that they happened to be hard-working individuals, duh. And purely by luck they decided to spend their time productively instead of party it away.
- felipeko 9y agoAccepting that I don't have free-will does not stop me from understanding I am an agent of change. Even if I can't alter the laws of nature to be an free agent, I can use the laws to my best interest.
- slx26 9y agoI always explain it comparing to watching a movie. Even when you start looking at the screen, the movie is already written and recorded. But that doesn't mean you know what will happen, and you will still feel something watching the movie. And you watch is because it's fun, it makes you think, you simply don't have anything better to do, etc.. As long as you personally feel your life has any meaning, your "actions being already decided" does not constitute any problem. What you feel in your life might be real, and in that case, rationally analyzing your life without taking those emotions into account is actually quite irrational and unfair. As another commenter says, you might be important for other people, make their lives better, and you can still feel and live all that. As long as you don't know where your decisions will lead you, them being "written" or not is irrelevant. If you have a defeatist perspective based on the results of your previous decisions, that's another thing, and it's likely your life will continue that way, but it's also possible you change over time (and the movie actually ends like that). Not due to free will, but still due to thinking, and reading, and caring about what other people —with as much free will as you, none— thinks and says.
- kristianc 9y ago> The philosopher Galen Strawson has a knack for translating big, abstract questions – the kind of things you might assume were of little interest outside philosophy lecture halls – into puzzles so personally troubling I can’t continue with my day until I’ve figured out where I stand on them, or at least been distracted by a sleepless baby or enticing cheeseburger. Must have just got lucky. If luck is an explanation for everything, it explains nothing.
- refurb 9y agoMust have just got lucky. If luck is an explanation for everything, it explains nothing. That's my problem with this explanation as well. It could be reduced down to "you could have been hit by a car this morning, just the fact you're alive means you're lucky". Great, so everyone's lucky. Now what?
- mr_spothawk 9y agoSome of us are clearly more lucky than others. I remember an article on HN a few weeks ago about how to get +1 to Luck.
- wang_li 9y agoIt matters little how much luck you have if you don’t work to improve your lot in life. If I slip on the curb and fall into a puddle I am unlucky. If I remain in the puddle I’m an idiot.
- maym86 9y agoIf the puddle is the sea and no one throws you a line and lets you drown what are you then?
- mr_spothawk 9y agodrowned in pointless metaphor.
- thejudge 9y agoNobody can blame me for disagreeing with the article because, following their own reasoning, if you trace back all the faculties that lead me to develop critical thought then you reach a point in which I am blameless and happened apparently through chance: my birth. Since I'm not responsible for my birth, I am not responsible for anything I do after I was born, no matter how noble or horrendous. So their reasoning goes, and if upheld in the courts nobody could be blamed for anything, but as the popular saying goes, "tell that to the judge."
- felipeko 9y agoYes, you can be blamed as much as an earthquake, would try to stop earthquakes from happening if you could?
- anvandare 9y agoI wouldn't consider a bear that attacked my village and killed some of my friends "guilty". It's just biology, which is just chemistry, which is just physics.[1] As are we all. In the same way I don't assign blame to viruses, or hold the river responsible for flooding. I'm still gonna kill the bear, though. [1] https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
- AstralStorm 9y agoGuilt is a psychological and social human concept. Imagined result of a potential action. Few sociopaths feel it at all... It is probably adaptive as in helps survival die to fostering group cohesion when present in enough individuals.
- amriksohata 9y agohinduism explains this with karma...and dharma. you have a rope you are tied to against a tree, the length of the rope and the land around it is chosen by your karma, but you can change your karma with your dharma.
- riantogo 9y ago
- throwawayaway12 9y agoI recall that the first episode of very bad wizards addressed this aspect of free will well.[0] 0 -https://verybadwizards.fireside.fm/1 https://verybadwizards.fireside.fm/1
- frockington 9y agoIf you haven't read the article yet don't bother. Summary: All choices and motivations are luck (i.e. Michael Jordan was lucky that he had the motivation and desire to become the best basketball player)
- toblender 9y agoLuck is important, but luck doesn't come to those that sit on their ass.
- vpmpaul 9y agoNot true at all. The main reason that people get off their ass is to improve their life. People that have everything are constantly offered amazing opportunities just for existing. You may not have ever seen this because you don't fall in the category but it happens all the time.
- mantas 9y agoWho "has everything"? Today's poor would "have everything" by 100-year-ago standards.
- diminoten 9y agoThis is an important point that I still struggle to find the right words for. To benefit from luck, one must roll the dice in the first place. The more times you "roll the dice", the more shots you have at getting lucky, if nothing else.
- dreamfactored 9y agoWe can leverage the element of luck and improve our odds against others by playing a smart numbers game. It's a fundamental of sales.
- Talyen42 9y agoyeah, man, and because the universe is deterministic, like, nothing really matters, dude (struggles in handcuffs as police arrest him)
- maym86 9y agoThe point is to have some awareness of the luck involved in getting to where you are and to provide empathy and support to the people who haven't been so lucky. You can share that luck.
- newyankee 9y agoWell put.
- wang_li 9y agoJust because a person was dealt a crap hand doesn’t mean they can’t make good choices. And their decisions can legitimately be judged and used as the factor in choosing to help them or not. There is no moral or ethical failing in refusing to give to those who will waste what is given.
- ddingus 9y agoWaste from whose point of view? Yours? Mine? When they get help, that buys time. May not buy it as efficiently as it could, but that's a nit. Given time, their luck can change. Help can get them there.
- wang_li 9y agoSociety wide utility. Every time resources are diverted to someone who uses them unproductively we lose the opportunity to use them productively.
- ddingus 9y agoNo. That assumes perfect information and perfect availability. We do not, nor cannot actualize those things. We don't even need to. People, society are not machines. There are costs, risks, balances to be made. And of course, productive from whose point of view? I value helping people far more than I do actualizing peak efficiency, and I do that because the human costs are generally undesirable.
- squozzer 9y agoFree will may well be an illusion. I prefer to think of the Universe as deterministic but unpredictable. Because we can't see everything behind the events that happen around us. People with more comprehensive knowledge of quantum mechanics, feel free to chime in. In the end, though, even the most entitled and pampered aristo-plutocrat has to get out of bed or at least eat food and drink liquids to stay alive.
- wang_li 9y ago>I prefer to think of the Universe as deterministic but unpredictable. If the universe is deterministic you can’t have a preference.
- csallen 9y agoPeople seem to be wondering what the takeaways can be from this point of view. Even if every decision we make can ultimately be traced back to some quirk of our genes or environment that we didn't choose… so what? We still have to live, don't we? We still have to assign blame and responsibility, punish criminals, reward the successful, etc. Sure, but we can do more than that. We can increase our compassion for our fellow humans. I met someone recently who had a very tough childhood. Her mother didn't want her. She was physically and psychologically abused. Her parents discouraged everything she ever tried. She was neglected and abandoned and had to raise her younger siblings by herself. This is stuff you don't just "get over," and yet she's doing very well for herself. All I could think was gosh, what a different upbringing than mine. The adults in my life kept me safe, made me feel loved, supported me, and inspired my confidence in myself. And while I can still be proud of many of the things I've done in life, it's grounding to put them in perspective and accept that the playing field is not level. It never will be. Having more compassion for others and more skepticism toward (and thus gratitude for) our own accomplishments is, in my opinion, a healthier and more fulfilling way to live.
- minor3rd 9y agoYou have precisely the same attitude as I do. Try to think about the circumstances other people were put in before you judge them. I had to exercise this thinking on the pickleball court last weekend.
- imgabe 9y agoCan we increase compassion? Maybe a few people are lucky enough to be compassionate. The rest of us are doomed to be misanthropic jerks.
- csallen 9y agoCertainly! There is a biological element to compassion, but there's a knowledge component as well. Simply knowing that someone may actually be worthy of your compassion is half the battle.
- minor3rd 9y agoI stopped believing in free will since diving into physics in high school/college. Everything we've ever observed appears to follow laws of universe over which we have no control. Feeling like you have free will does not mean you have it, and many studies have found your "decisions" happen before you are even conscious of them.
- mr_spothawk 9y agoThis is an existential dilemma that has always bugged me, but I found a work through that's satisfactory for now: there seems to be a distinction between Free Will (the ability to act in the moment, I don't believe it exists) and Self Awareness (the ability to consider your-self & your actions in the past or future, which apparently does exist for me). To me, it seems we have no choice about what to do in the moment. But the moment afterward, we begin to reflect on our experience, replay those sensory signals & imagine our different responses or outcomes, and rewire our brain for the next opportunity to automatically respond in a "free-will" scenario.
- analreceiver 9y agoWhat and how you reflect is conditioned by all your life experiences which are in turn caused by "luck".
- mr_spothawk 9y agooh, please. if luck causes everything, we might as well call it circumstance. as luck would have it, I thought the article was total garbage... it raises no questions and offers no valuable insights beyond: historic circumstances exist.
- ambrosite 9y agoVery interesting way of looking at it. I've always wondered what is the evolutionary advantage of consciousness -- if we don't have free will, then why have self awareness at all if we would function just as well without it? Your idea provides one possible answer to that question.
- jacquesm 9y agoLuck favors the prepared. When luck and preparation intersect good stuff happens, but if you're 'just' lucky and are not in a position to capitalize on that luck then you will appear unlucky. Obviously the writer and the person referenced have taken the 'luck' angle to an extreme, there is an element of truth in there: you need a good sized dose of luck to get anywhere in life, whether it is an accident of birth or genetics. Where free will enters the picture is that not everybody that was lucky at some point in their life ends up making it: you can easily annihilate your luck by working against yourself or by having other factors that negate your luck. So it's an interesting viewpoint but a bit of a cop-out.
- minor3rd 9y ago> Where free will enters the picture is that not everybody that was lucky at some point in their life ends up making it: you can easily annihilate your luck by working against yourself. What do you think determines this? At what point can you say this magical thing called free will pops into existence? I don't understand how the laws of physics determine how the universe behaves but then those laws decide to step aside while someone is making decisions about their life.
- ams6110 9y agoThey aren't laws. Free will, persistence, a determination to make one's life better, are things some people have more of than others, and things that one's parents might have encouraged more than others. Why? Who knows? Why are some people taller than others, or more athletic, etc. People are not all the same.
- jacquesm 9y ago> Why are some people taller than others, or more athletic, etc. People are not all the same. Genetics and environment.
- AstralStorm 9y agoToo glib and trite. These things can change, and are affected by us. Three key here is that collectively we have the power to fix things yet we do not collectively exercise it enough and build systems that make it harder.
- toss1 9y agoThis is just one silly tautology. TFA simply redefines everything such that the root cause must always be some kind of random allocation of resources/capabilities, or "luck". Then essentially concludes that there is effectively no free will. Sophistry. With zero useful explanatory value or application in the real world. I want my 2min back
- vpmpaul 9y agoMost people on HN are very quick to dismiss the role luck plays in their life. I realize many are very accomplished so they don't want to devalue/dismiss their own efforts.
- deadmetheny 9y agoIn that same vein though, many people are willing to insist that hard work plays zero role and everything is completely luck. Success is the intersection of luck, and being prepared to embrace the opportunities that arise as a result of that luck. If you aren't prepared to take advantage of a good opportunity, nothing happens. There's not a lot of cases where people find success without expending any effort at all.
- hyperpallium 9y agoI'm a great believer in luck, the harder I work, the luckier I am.
- dabbledash 9y agoI think “free will” might just not be a useful concept. If free will means “the choices people make are not determined by causes” then free will would just look like people acting entirely at random. ETA: The more interesting question (to me) is how this changes how we judge people, if at all. If a person is an asshole, obviously that’s because of genetic and environmental influences. Do we excuse it either way? (In which case you literally can’t ever hold anyone morally accountable for anything). Do you excuse people only when the causes are environmental? Only when the environment is extreme or the genetic difference is considered a “disease”? But what justifies the difference?
- ThrowAway1453 9y agoI have been working well over 40 hours per week on startups for several years with nothing to show for it at all. But 5 years ago, I also bought a bit of fake Internet money, and it somehow became 10x more valuable last December with zero effort involved whatsoever.
- ap3 9y agoBut you still bought it, it didn’t magically appear I on the other hand read about it and didn’t even pick up a single bit Lucky bastard
- ThrowAway1453 9y agoWas it free will or was it luck then?
- quantumofmalice 9y agoI expected an account of how luck is a necessary condition in unusual success. I had a faint hope that the author would be intelligent enough to recognize that it was not a sufficient condition. However, the article doesn't even rise to my low expectations: it boils down to a freshman-year philosophy major's denial of free will, smeared across various aspects of life. Fine, whatever. But we have NO OPTION but to treat people as if they have free will, since we have no free will in the matter. And, furthermore, talking and writing is pointless, since we have NO ABILITY to control what we think. Unfortunately, the author can't choose not to write. I must say, I have no option but to wish sincerely that he could.
- johngalt 9y agoIn the southwest we have a species of cactus known as jumping cactus. The common belief is that if you get close enough, it will reach out and stab you with its needles. Scienfically we know this doesn't happen. Cacti do not jump. Yet if you asked me 'who is less likely to be injured?' I would bet on the person who is staying 10ft away from the 'jumping' cactus because of their erroneous beliefs about the cactus. Luck certainly plays an outsized role in life. That said, it may not be a productive belief even if it is true.
- gadders 9y agoI think the thing with this article is not "Is it true?" bit "Is it helpful?" i.e. if you believed your situation in life was down to luck or your own efforts, which would be likely to make you feel happier or be more successful? Some research has been done on this in terms of whether people have an internal or external locus of control - i.e. do they have control over their life, or is it random chance? There is an article that explains the differences here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moments-matter/201708/locus-control https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moments-matter/20170...
- firmgently 9y agoSo many comments pointing out the difference between luck and hard work, or saying it's all about taking opportunities when they arise etc. I can't compute. The entire point of the article was to say if you work harder, your propensity for hard work is the result of luck (or 'the sum of external circumstance and genetics that led to your being a hard worker'). If you are good at taking opportunities when they arise, the thing that makes you be that kind of person can be described as 'luck' (because if not, what is it? Where does it come from? Intuitively people put it down to some kind of magical inner 'you-ness' but that's ill-defined and wishy-washy). If you're using the idea that your success in life is due to your personal flavour of 'free will' being 'better', you're arguing for something supernatural, causeless and which originated somewhere other than The Big Bang. I'm not saying you're wrong but you've got quite a lot of arguing to do as philosophers have been trying to prove free will exists for centuries. The best argument for it that I've read is from Daniel Dennett in 'Freedom Evolves' where he suggests free will is a kind of emergent behaviour which while not being real is 'real enough'. Obviously I'm nowhere near doing it justice as it's an entire book by a proper philosopher but it's a great read if you're interested in this stuff. I'm not saying I like the idea that free will doesn't exist (I don't!) but I can't come up with an argument for it being non-deterministic (and if it's pre-determined then it's not free will). It's essential to our sense of self. It seems like an obvious thing when you think about it in floppy ways but as soon as you start trying to define it properly as anything other than a 'ghost in the machine', emergent behaviour of a deterministic system, it moves further and further away from you. Hence the long-standing philosophical musings!
- bassman9000 9y agoThis article is absolute bullshit. Read Sowell on economic mobility. When focusing on individuals, there's still migration from the poorest classes to mid/high. Luck determines everything, but the author still writes a paid article, just in case the check doesn't magically fall from the sky.
- ap3 9y agoHave we been, uh, fooled by randomness?
- solarkraft 9y agoI have intensely followed this idea before and while I still agree that it's theoretically true, thinking of it too much can be depressing (even more if you believe the universe to be deterministic). Whether you go do a thing is still your choice (within universal limits, of course). Your success in it will partly be luck - but if you don't go do the thing you will definitely not succeed. And if you prepared for it your odds will be better.