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He went to a fancy private boarding school as a boy and his family had connections. > how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa
by david927 4y ago
He went to a fancy private boarding school as a boy and his family had connections.
> how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer
That's faulty, a posteriori reasoning.
- philwelch 4y agoWhat I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis. If being born to rich parents, having connections, and going to boarding schools is the sole reason people get rich, then we would expect that people with richer parents and more connections who went to better boarding schools than Elon Musk would be richer, and people who grew up in similar conditions to Elon Musk would be equally rich. This is not true.
- david927 4y ago> What I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis That is not what you are doing. You are picking a winning lottery number and saying why did this number win and others not? That's faulty logic.
- philwelch 4y agoNo, I’m looking at two “lottery tickets” with the exact same numbers and asking why one of them one the jackpot and the other one didn’t. The only conclusion: it’s not a lottery and what you have picked out as the winning lottery numbers are not that.
- david927 4y agoYou're really bad at logic but you're confident in it; that's not a good combination.
- endisneigh 4y agoTo be fair you'd have to compare people who had the same circumstances and desires, not simply both being rich.
- astrange 4y agoI don't believe Elon had any more undue privilege than any other Stanford graduate. (Which is not none, but it means none of the emerald stuff matters.) There's no need for any such influence anyway, getting rich from PayPal is already pure luck and you should be satisfied complaining about that!