7 ms·

Just as bad for you is believing that hard work and intelligence will get you nowhere. The reality is somewhere in between.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago
This is the "what about" fallacy or something like that. The article is about meritocracy, which is often overstated. You very rarely hear people claiming that "hard work and intelligence" is always ineffective in every context.
- happytoexplain 8y ago
  I can't tell which part of this post is getting downvoted, but it rings totally true and relevant to me.
- darawk 8y ago
  The title of this article is literally "meritocracy doesn't exist". Not "meritocracy is overstated" or "we don't live in a perfect meritocracy".
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    That's because meritocracy is not a synonym for the idea that hard work has any value at all. The article isn't saying what you think it's saying if you read it as "hard work doesn't matter at all and luck is all that gets you anywhere in capitalism".
    - darawk 8y ago
      I did read the article. > Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. Yes, he offers a token line at one point that effort and skill can be relevant. However, most of the article makes a bunch of unsubstantiated claims about Gates's success being due purely to luck, and fortuitous circumstances (as though examining the right tail of the distribution is even relevant, of course, he also doesn't even provide any evidence for his claim anyway).
ddingus 8y ago
Right where luck is.
- strictnein 8y ago
  Luck doesn't exist. People take advantage of opportunities, and working hard is one way to be exposed to a greater number of opportunities. What seems like a "lucky break' to the casual observer is very frequently the result of years of work that allowed that person to take advantage of that moment. The moment is also frequently only clear in hindsight, and is often more of a "I heard you know about X, do you have a minute to talk to Y about X?" thing, than a "Here's a crazy promotion!" fairytale.
  - AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
    The post has been heavily downvoted, but I think there is some truth in it: there's no such thing as 100% luck. People who have been born into royal families managed to bring their countries to poverty and their dynasty to an end. People winning the lotteries end up poorer than before. There is 100% "unluck" though: getting an incurable decease cannot be turned around in a positive way
  - ta1234567890 8y ago
    > Luck doesn't exist Tell that to people that were born poor or with a big disability or into an abusive family. Compare their chances and fate with those that were born into a good family with plenty of resources. What do you call the source of that difference? Most people would call it luck.
    - threatofrain 8y ago
      The poster may see something worse than luck there; they may see cause. One cannot reroll in life and be reborn as the heir of the Hilton family. Or do people imagine that there’s a global repository of souls which are randomly drawn from when two people have reproductive sex? The contrasting idea to luck is fate. People don’t have as much of a problem with luck as they do with fate.
Gibbon1 8y ago
You can say there is a reason American's are heavily gaslighted against collective action. Because the C student overlcass that runs the place knows it's not a meritocracy. And they mean to keep it that way.
- prewett 8y ago
  > Because the C student overlcass that runs the place knows it's not a meritocracy. Wow, this attitude manages to have a victim mentality, blame others, spread hopelessness, and be arrogant and disparaging, all in 14 words. I've heard this attitude a lot recently, and even bought into it some myself, but this comment clarifies how toxic this attitude is. There is literally nothing positive in this attitude, and I think that part of the problems with America right now is the feeling of victimization. A victim mentality never has positive long-term outcomes. A victim says "things can't change" which is why there isn't collective action. Be the change you want to see.
  - pteredactyl 8y ago
    I think they perfectly summed up the sadness and terror of modern mainstream leftism. It'll pass
    - dang 8y ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, and especially ideological flamebait, to Hacker News? It leads to acrid and predictable discussions that are off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - pteredactyl 8y ago
        I'll try.
  - olefoo 8y ago
    Yes, because everyone who gets into one of our elite institutions gets there on merit and there is absolutely not a predatory aspect to the way the elite networks have arranged society that steals advantage from everyone else. It's just a victim mentality the cost to call out the structural inequities of society that cause so much pain and stress to the unlucky classes. Now hold still while we raise the costs of everything necessary to life while automating your job away. And don't you dare call out your betters for their bad behavior; that's toxic!
Waterluvian 8y ago
I agree. Be a reasonably intelligent worker. Play the game well enough. Work an adequate amount. Above all else, be consistently reliable, even if that means consistently delivering B+ results.
- dictum 8y ago
  > Play the game well enough. An economic and social system with many games one must play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house. (Edit: substituted "games one must play" for "many games for one to play" — it's about the necessity and lack of choice, not the freedom to play games if one desires to do so)
  - aphextron 8y ago
    >An economic and social system with many games for one to play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house. Humans play games. And business is just lots of humans playing lots of games. You can either accept it, go along, and build a career, or take your shot at doing your own thing. The latter is terrifying and incredibly unlikely to succeed, so most pick the former.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  Playing the game well enough means A- not B+. I used to think about this in University a lot with the grading system. On the face of it nobody really seems to notice the +/- distinction. There is a more primitive grouping of A/B/C. The difference between being an A grade player and a B grade player is 1 point. If you're 79 points you're B+. If you're 80 points you're A-. But it's a world of difference between being perceived as an A player vs. a B player. By that same token, the effort/reward ratio for striving for A+ is crappy.
  - Waterluvian 8y ago
    I just mean be consistent to the full extent of your ability. Don't deliver an unreliable mix of really good and really sloppy work.
pteredactyl 8y ago
Thank you I refuse to click that link. What do they suggest? The government decide what station in life we should have?
PavlikPaja 8y ago
The problem is our obsession with positive results. Let's say there are 57 possible ways of doing something, only two of them work, but there is objectively not enough information to decide which one and testing each of them requires decades of work. Out of 120 people who tried, three stumble upon the correct solution, those are seen as geniuses and heroes, while the others are seen as failures who devoted their lives to misguided ideas, even though the work they did was identical. Similar with experiments. Good experiments are those that produce expected results, but those teach you nothing. A well designed experiment is in fact the one whose results are as unpredictable as possible, as it has the highest chance of providing new information. While an experiment designed to achieve a predicted result can only teach you something new by sheer accident, when the prediction turns out to be wrong.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  We celebrate the winners because it's hard to know how much of winning was chance and how much was skill. There were 57 possible ways of doing something, but the successful person picked the best one. Was their choice fully random, or did they see some specific potential in that option and purposely chose that one to try? What about the choice to try one of the 57 to begin with rather than any of the other infinitely many things they could have done with their time when there was no guarantee any of them would work? There being more ways than one individual can attempt also has a solution. Anyone who wants to can go in with the other scientists, have each one try one of the options but agree to share the spoils if any of them succeeds. Then you succeed if anyone does and the proceeds from winning are reduced but the probability increases. One reason not to do this is if you think one specific option is more likely than the others and you're willing to risk individual failure for individual success. But if you're correct to do that then you're correctly rewarded for doing it. And there are reasons the individual method can produce better results in addition to that -- if you're in a pool with many others and succeed when any of them do, you have a reduced incentive to be meticulous because your personal reward is no longer strongly correlated with your personal success or failure. Anyone can join the pool, slack off and hope to profit if someone else succeeds. Then many people do that and many advances are lost. See also employees of any large bureaucratic organization/government. So we want individuals to take good risks, but the only way to tell if they're good instead of just risks is when they succeed. And the reward has to be in proportion to the risk to get people to do it, which means attempts with a low probability of success require a large reward.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

This is the "what about" fallacy or something like that. The article is about meritocracy, which is often overstated. You very rarely hear people claiming that "hard work and intelligence" is always ineffective in every context.

happytoexplain 8y ago
I can't tell which part of this post is getting downvoted, but it rings totally true and relevant to me.
darawk 8y ago
The title of this article is literally "meritocracy doesn't exist". Not "meritocracy is overstated" or "we don't live in a perfect meritocracy".
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  That's because meritocracy is not a synonym for the idea that hard work has any value at all. The article isn't saying what you think it's saying if you read it as "hard work doesn't matter at all and luck is all that gets you anywhere in capitalism".
  - darawk 8y ago
    I did read the article. > Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. Yes, he offers a token line at one point that effort and skill can be relevant. However, most of the article makes a bunch of unsubstantiated claims about Gates's success being due purely to luck, and fortuitous circumstances (as though examining the right tail of the distribution is even relevant, of course, he also doesn't even provide any evidence for his claim anyway).

ddingus 8y ago

Right where luck is.

strictnein 8y ago
Luck doesn't exist. People take advantage of opportunities, and working hard is one way to be exposed to a greater number of opportunities. What seems like a "lucky break' to the casual observer is very frequently the result of years of work that allowed that person to take advantage of that moment. The moment is also frequently only clear in hindsight, and is often more of a "I heard you know about X, do you have a minute to talk to Y about X?" thing, than a "Here's a crazy promotion!" fairytale.
- AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
  The post has been heavily downvoted, but I think there is some truth in it: there's no such thing as 100% luck. People who have been born into royal families managed to bring their countries to poverty and their dynasty to an end. People winning the lotteries end up poorer than before. There is 100% "unluck" though: getting an incurable decease cannot be turned around in a positive way
- ta1234567890 8y ago
  > Luck doesn't exist Tell that to people that were born poor or with a big disability or into an abusive family. Compare their chances and fate with those that were born into a good family with plenty of resources. What do you call the source of that difference? Most people would call it luck.
  - threatofrain 8y ago
    The poster may see something worse than luck there; they may see cause. One cannot reroll in life and be reborn as the heir of the Hilton family. Or do people imagine that there’s a global repository of souls which are randomly drawn from when two people have reproductive sex? The contrasting idea to luck is fate. People don’t have as much of a problem with luck as they do with fate.

Gibbon1 8y ago

You can say there is a reason American's are heavily gaslighted against collective action. Because the C student overlcass that runs the place knows it's not a meritocracy. And they mean to keep it that way.

prewett 8y ago
> Because the C student overlcass that runs the place knows it's not a meritocracy. Wow, this attitude manages to have a victim mentality, blame others, spread hopelessness, and be arrogant and disparaging, all in 14 words. I've heard this attitude a lot recently, and even bought into it some myself, but this comment clarifies how toxic this attitude is. There is literally nothing positive in this attitude, and I think that part of the problems with America right now is the feeling of victimization. A victim mentality never has positive long-term outcomes. A victim says "things can't change" which is why there isn't collective action. Be the change you want to see.
- pteredactyl 8y ago
  I think they perfectly summed up the sadness and terror of modern mainstream leftism. It'll pass
  - dang 8y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, and especially ideological flamebait, to Hacker News? It leads to acrid and predictable discussions that are off topic here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - pteredactyl 8y ago
      I'll try.
- olefoo 8y ago
  Yes, because everyone who gets into one of our elite institutions gets there on merit and there is absolutely not a predatory aspect to the way the elite networks have arranged society that steals advantage from everyone else. It's just a victim mentality the cost to call out the structural inequities of society that cause so much pain and stress to the unlucky classes. Now hold still while we raise the costs of everything necessary to life while automating your job away. And don't you dare call out your betters for their bad behavior; that's toxic!

Waterluvian 8y ago

I agree. Be a reasonably intelligent worker. Play the game well enough. Work an adequate amount. Above all else, be consistently reliable, even if that means consistently delivering B+ results.

dictum 8y ago
> Play the game well enough. An economic and social system with many games one must play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house. (Edit: substituted "games one must play" for "many games for one to play" — it's about the necessity and lack of choice, not the freedom to play games if one desires to do so)
- aphextron 8y ago
  >An economic and social system with many games for one to play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house. Humans play games. And business is just lots of humans playing lots of games. You can either accept it, go along, and build a career, or take your shot at doing your own thing. The latter is terrifying and incredibly unlikely to succeed, so most pick the former.
james_s_tayler 8y ago
Playing the game well enough means A- not B+. I used to think about this in University a lot with the grading system. On the face of it nobody really seems to notice the +/- distinction. There is a more primitive grouping of A/B/C. The difference between being an A grade player and a B grade player is 1 point. If you're 79 points you're B+. If you're 80 points you're A-. But it's a world of difference between being perceived as an A player vs. a B player. By that same token, the effort/reward ratio for striving for A+ is crappy.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I just mean be consistent to the full extent of your ability. Don't deliver an unreliable mix of really good and really sloppy work.

pteredactyl 8y ago

Thank you I refuse to click that link. What do they suggest? The government decide what station in life we should have?

PavlikPaja 8y ago

The problem is our obsession with positive results. Let's say there are 57 possible ways of doing something, only two of them work, but there is objectively not enough information to decide which one and testing each of them requires decades of work. Out of 120 people who tried, three stumble upon the correct solution, those are seen as geniuses and heroes, while the others are seen as failures who devoted their lives to misguided ideas, even though the work they did was identical. Similar with experiments. Good experiments are those that produce expected results, but those teach you nothing. A well designed experiment is in fact the one whose results are as unpredictable as possible, as it has the highest chance of providing new information. While an experiment designed to achieve a predicted result can only teach you something new by sheer accident, when the prediction turns out to be wrong.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
We celebrate the winners because it's hard to know how much of winning was chance and how much was skill. There were 57 possible ways of doing something, but the successful person picked the best one. Was their choice fully random, or did they see some specific potential in that option and purposely chose that one to try? What about the choice to try one of the 57 to begin with rather than any of the other infinitely many things they could have done with their time when there was no guarantee any of them would work? There being more ways than one individual can attempt also has a solution. Anyone who wants to can go in with the other scientists, have each one try one of the options but agree to share the spoils if any of them succeeds. Then you succeed if anyone does and the proceeds from winning are reduced but the probability increases. One reason not to do this is if you think one specific option is more likely than the others and you're willing to risk individual failure for individual success. But if you're correct to do that then you're correctly rewarded for doing it. And there are reasons the individual method can produce better results in addition to that -- if you're in a pool with many others and succeed when any of them do, you have a reduced incentive to be meticulous because your personal reward is no longer strongly correlated with your personal success or failure. Anyone can join the pool, slack off and hope to profit if someone else succeeds. Then many people do that and many advances are lost. See also employees of any large bureaucratic organization/government. So we want individuals to take good risks, but the only way to tell if they're good instead of just risks is when they succeed. And the reward has to be in proportion to the risk to get people to do it, which means attempts with a low probability of success require a large reward.