5 ms·

The best single comment I've read about luck was written right here on HN. I've detailed it here: http://techneur.com/post/1321568428/luck-ii http://techneur.co

by jonpaul 16y ago

The best single comment I've read about luck was written right here on HN. I've detailed it here: http://techneur.com/post/1321568428/luck-ii http://techneur.com/post/1321568428/luck-ii In summary, I made a comment about Zuckerberg and the value of Facebook. Someone responded that he was lucky. To which someone else responded with this: (Can't find original HN comment) "This attitude bugs me a lot. There is probably a path for every single person in this country to make a million dollars in the next year if they were just “savvy enough” to take advantage of it. It seems everyone wants to diminish Zuck’s success by ascribing luck to it, but let me tell you something. Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook. Did the community and mindshare just come out of thin air? There’s no good reason to believe that Zuckerberg is lucky at all. Saying he was in the right place at the right time has this tacit assumption that if he were somewhere else at the wrong time he would have tried the same thing and fell flat on his face. It seems because Facebook is an outlier, people feel safe talking about the luck factor, but that’s meaningless because we all exist with individual circumstances, and by that measure everything every one of us does is based on luck. Instead, I prefer to ascribe luck to things that the individual actually had no control over, such as winning the lottery."

zck 16y ago
The comment is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791800 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791800 Searchyc.com is your friend: http://searchyc.com/This+attitude+bugs+me+a+lot.+There+ http://searchyc.com/This+attitude+bugs+me+a+lot.+There+
- Charuru 16y ago
  You can also just google it with quotation marks.
jacques_chester 16y ago
Zuckerberg is not particularly unique in terms of his intelligence, ambition or connections. Men and women like Zuckerberg have come into and passed out (or dropped out) of the USA's elite universities for centuries. Yes. Luck played a big role.
- rick888 16y ago
  "Zuckerberg is not particularly unique in terms of his intelligence, ambition or connections. Men and women like Zuckerberg have come into and passed out (or dropped out) of the USA's elite universities for centuries. Yes. Luck played a big role." The reason I say luck didn't play a big role, is because not anyone could do what he did. Can anybody from a 5 year old to a grandmother build Facebook? If not, there must be skill required to accomplish the task. To build the application behind Facebook alone takes skill (taking out a large percentage of the population). To build the company up to what it is (and make the right decisions) takes another set of skills. I think the luck factor is around 10%. Of course there is a certain amount of luck with anything that we do. I have always felt that there are lucky situations all around us. Without the proper skills to recognize it, most people will just let it pass by.
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    I am reminded of an anecdote of a famous physicist talking to Army personnel during WW2. Unfortunately I cannot find a reference with various keywords on Google, so take it as you will. Somehow conversation turns to the great generals -- the 4 and 5 star generals. "How many great generals are there?" asks the physicist. "No more than about 1 in 20 is a truly great general", they answer. "How do you decide who is a 4- or 5- star general?" the physicist asks. The army men decide that you need to have won 5 battles to be a great general. The physicist then explains how it can easily be luck. Suppose that battle success is randomly determined. A general has a 0.5^5 chance of winning 5/5 battles out of sheer luck -- 3.125% in fact. Therefore the majority of "Great Generals" are just lucky.
    - jonpaul 16y ago
      That makes about as much sense as saying: pick two sports teams to play each other, the odds of one of the team winning is 50%. The point is, that probability doesn't hold, and thus nullifies the anecdote.
      - jacques_chester 16y ago
vannevar 16y ago
Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook. In comparison to what? For all we know, there were dozens, maybe hundreds of other similar sites being built at the same time. Without being able to compare them, we really can't say how well he executed Facebook. Having used both Friendster and MySpace, I'd say he did better than either of them. But by the time Facebook was big enough to be mentioned in the same breath as those two, success to some large degree was already assured. Instead, I prefer to ascribe luck to things that the individual actually had no control over, such as winning the lottery. This is precisely the point: there may very well have been key moments in Facebook's history, over which Zuckerberg had not control whatsoever, yet which ultimately determined the company's fate. We know the economy is a nonlinear dynamical system, and in such systems small perturbations in the input can lead to large changes in the output. There's no reason to suppose that similar effects don't play a role in the life cycle of individuals or businesses.
- rick888 16y ago
  "In comparison to what? For all we know, there were dozens, maybe hundreds of other similar sites being built at the same time. Without being able to compare them, we really can't say how well he executed Facebook." Yes we can. If there were tons of social networking sites out there at the time, and Facebook came out on top, there must be a reason.
  - YooLi 16y ago
    Luck? :)
ssebro 16y ago
I don't want to be a dick, but you do have some amount of control over the probability of you winning the lottery. If you don't play, it becomes significantly more difficult to win.

by jonpaul 16y ago

zck 16y ago

The comment is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791800 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1791800 Searchyc.com is your friend: http://searchyc.com/This+attitude+bugs+me+a+lot.+There+ http://searchyc.com/This+attitude+bugs+me+a+lot.+There+

Charuru 16y ago
You can also just google it with quotation marks.

jacques_chester 16y ago

Zuckerberg is not particularly unique in terms of his intelligence, ambition or connections. Men and women like Zuckerberg have come into and passed out (or dropped out) of the USA's elite universities for centuries. Yes. Luck played a big role.

rick888 16y ago
"Zuckerberg is not particularly unique in terms of his intelligence, ambition or connections. Men and women like Zuckerberg have come into and passed out (or dropped out) of the USA's elite universities for centuries. Yes. Luck played a big role." The reason I say luck didn't play a big role, is because not anyone could do what he did. Can anybody from a 5 year old to a grandmother build Facebook? If not, there must be skill required to accomplish the task. To build the application behind Facebook alone takes skill (taking out a large percentage of the population). To build the company up to what it is (and make the right decisions) takes another set of skills. I think the luck factor is around 10%. Of course there is a certain amount of luck with anything that we do. I have always felt that there are lucky situations all around us. Without the proper skills to recognize it, most people will just let it pass by.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  I am reminded of an anecdote of a famous physicist talking to Army personnel during WW2. Unfortunately I cannot find a reference with various keywords on Google, so take it as you will. Somehow conversation turns to the great generals -- the 4 and 5 star generals. "How many great generals are there?" asks the physicist. "No more than about 1 in 20 is a truly great general", they answer. "How do you decide who is a 4- or 5- star general?" the physicist asks. The army men decide that you need to have won 5 battles to be a great general. The physicist then explains how it can easily be luck. Suppose that battle success is randomly determined. A general has a 0.5^5 chance of winning 5/5 battles out of sheer luck -- 3.125% in fact. Therefore the majority of "Great Generals" are just lucky.
  - jonpaul 16y ago
    That makes about as much sense as saying: pick two sports teams to play each other, the odds of one of the team winning is 50%. The point is, that probability doesn't hold, and thus nullifies the anecdote.
    - jacques_chester 16y ago

vannevar 16y ago

Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook. In comparison to what? For all we know, there were dozens, maybe hundreds of other similar sites being built at the same time. Without being able to compare them, we really can't say how well he executed Facebook. Having used both Friendster and MySpace, I'd say he did better than either of them. But by the time Facebook was big enough to be mentioned in the same breath as those two, success to some large degree was already assured. Instead, I prefer to ascribe luck to things that the individual actually had no control over, such as winning the lottery. This is precisely the point: there may very well have been key moments in Facebook's history, over which Zuckerberg had not control whatsoever, yet which ultimately determined the company's fate. We know the economy is a nonlinear dynamical system, and in such systems small perturbations in the input can lead to large changes in the output. There's no reason to suppose that similar effects don't play a role in the life cycle of individuals or businesses.

rick888 16y ago
"In comparison to what? For all we know, there were dozens, maybe hundreds of other similar sites being built at the same time. Without being able to compare them, we really can't say how well he executed Facebook." Yes we can. If there were tons of social networking sites out there at the time, and Facebook came out on top, there must be a reason.
- YooLi 16y ago
  Luck? :)

ssebro 16y ago

I don't want to be a dick, but you do have some amount of control over the probability of you winning the lottery. If you don't play, it becomes significantly more difficult to win.