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The radical moral implications of luck in human life (2020)

98 points by nigamanth 4y ago

MrPatan 4y ago
Sure, sure, luck. But the difference between getting a great hand and playing it right or wrong is not luck. Some people want to conflate it. Don't let them. Don't let them compare the trust-fund kid who built a business to the non-trust-fund kid who didn't build a business. Compare them to the trust-fund kid who didn't even try to build anything and ended up writing sad opinion pieces against the unfairness of it all.
- BigGreenTurtle 4y ago
  We've established that there are trust-fund kids who try and those who don't, what differentiates these groups? Why does one group try and the other not try? Are trust-fund kids with an IQ of 40 in the same group as the not-triers?
ncdjnbxhn 4y ago
[flagged]
- camdenlock 4y ago
  Indeed, it’s stunning that anyone would fall for this trap after learning the history of socialist totalitarianism our species has been through (several times).
  - serverholic 4y ago
    You know taxes can be viewed as socialist because it's a wealth redistribution system. Same with social security, Medicare, etc. Not everything "socialist" has to be extreme.
- BizarreByte 4y ago
  You can’t discount luck, but it’s not comfortable to look at one’s life and see how it played a part. Two people can work equally hard, be equally smart and have two different outcomes. Luck/random chance did play a part. It’s even more stark when someone can not work hard at all and have better outcomes than someone who did.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    > Two people can work equally hard, be equally smart and have two different outcomes. If we're talking "very different", are we talking about "and one ends up a billionaire and the other penniless"? Or are we saying "and one ends up a millionaire and the other one ends up upper middle class"? Because in general, working hard and being smart pays off, even if you're not exceptionally lucky. Yes, it takes longer than winning the lottery, but it's not like you need lots of luck or it won't pay off at all. It's more like "work hard and get 1-10 coins per year based on your effort, and each year roll 10 dice and if they all show 6, you get 500 coins". Luck plays a role, but in watching people who are exceptionally lucky and saying "look, luck is all that matters", we're missing the millions who aren't exceptionally lucky.
  - cjohnson318 4y ago
    Yeah, debt free loans and family safety nets go a long way. I think if you work hard and you're smart, then upper middle class is the very best you can hope for, and you're unlikely to get that far.
jadbox 4y ago
Related, I'd highly recommend reading Harvard Law School professor Michael Sandel's recent book on Meritocracy. He lays out a comprehensive exploration of the luck factor in the role of justice, democracy, and the shared common good.
- epgui 4y ago
  The problem I have with Sandel’s argument against meritocracy is that the “meritocracy trap” is not meritocracy at all, but the illusion of meritocracy. He has a point, but I just disagree with how he frames it: a true meritocracy doesn’t have the attributes he highlights. I highly recommend his “Justice” lectures from Harvard though.
ne0flex 4y ago
I often perceive luck to be the combination of opportunity + skill/talent (in the sense that you have the skill/talent to take advantage of the opportunity that comes your way). I find that a lot of people like to chock up the success of billionaires or whoever to luck (in the sense of random chance). My older brother does this often and used to tell me about how Bezos was lucky and Bezos' parents gave him $300K to start Amazon, the implication being something to the effect that anybody given $300k can build Amazon. Then my brother had a windfall stock trade where he made $250k, I told him he can try to build the next Amazon, and he ended up squandering everything on bad stock trades and business decisions. I guess his luck ran out?
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  His parents invested $300k in fledgling Amazon, along with other investors for the same terms. And that's why they're billionaires today too. That's different from just giving Jeff $300k.
hprotagonist 4y ago
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
- msp_yc 4y ago
  The consideration, objective; the phrasing, doubleplusungood.
- akomtu 4y ago
  The authors suffer from cluttered speech.
  - hprotagonist 4y ago
    purple prose, generally
rootusrootus 4y ago
The author sure does work pretty hard to absolve individuals of having any control over their destiny. If your parents were wealthy, that's luck. If they loved you and cared for you when you were young, also luck. But after you're an adult, if you have enough grit to go accomplish great things, that's luck too! So don't feel bad if you're not a self-starter, don't feel like you need to keep trying. Accept it as bad luck, and accept your fate. Was this written by someone lucky?
rubicon33 4y ago
> How much credit do we deserve for who, and where, we end up? The answer to this is really simple. You may take credit for how much better you have done relative to those who had a similar upbringing and opportunity. That's it.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Well, the article author did suggest that how much grit you have is also a matter of luck.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    I can raise and lower my grit at will. Can't everyone?
    - jensgk 4y ago
      No
    - triceratops 4y ago
      Why would you lower your grit?
      - fbdab103 4y ago
        So I can raise it again.
    - oh_sigh 4y ago
      Only if you have enough grit to do so.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      You jest, but I suppose there are people like that. Try once, don't succeed, give up, blame the world. See also Reddit. As an inherently lazy person who has enjoyed moderate success in spite of it, I reject that attitude.
- 4y ago
gamegoblin 4y ago
If you dig sufficiently deeply at it, you can attribute everything to luck. Just keep asking "why" and eventually you arrive at something you did not have conscious control over. E.g. Q. Why do you deserve your money? A. I work hard. Q. Why do you work hard? A. I have a good work ethic. Q. Why do you have a good work ethic? A. My parents raised me that way. Q. Why did you choose for your parents to raise you that way? A. I didn't. I'm not suggesting any conclusions here, just stating that if you keeping asking "why", you will always get to ground at something outside your conscious control. Applying this to my own life, I make good money doing software development. Programming is easy and natural for me. I started programming when I was 12. Why? I thought it was fun. Why did I choose to think it was fun? I didn't consciously choose. This applies even for things that seem to arise within your own mind. You can't choose which thoughts to have. You might think "sure I can, I'm going to think about elephants right now", and that may be, but when did you choose to choose to think about elephants? When did you choose to choose to choose? You can recurse deep, but eventually you arrive at something outside your conscious control.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  You make an excellent case for nihilism, but I must say… > Why did you choose for your parents … you gave in to an abridged “why?” discussion very early in this example.
  - gamegoblin 4y ago
    I'm not sure if it's a case for nihilism, but it is definitely a case for humility, patience, and non-hatred (is there a word for this?). Any time I am interacting with someone I feel like is ignorant/stupid/foolish/whatever pejorative, I take a deep breath and remind myself that nobody chooses to be stupid. One might say "well they chose to be ignorant, they could learn about XYZ but they choose not to". But that would require them having the thought "I should learn about XYZ". That thought does not come by choice. And, if it did, the thought to make that choice does not come by choice, et cetera. Once you accept that nobody makes themself the way they are, it removes the punch behind the emotion of hatred. You don't hate fire because it sometimes causes destruction. It's just doing what fire does. You might not like it, but you don't hate it. The same can be said of people.
rootusrootus 4y ago
Maybe the lesson is that there is no point to judging other people's relative success (whether more or less successful than yourself), and that you can just try to make your own life better. Don't wish for things you don't have, don't despair over success you haven't achieved, don't shit on people who haven't found success. Make your own life better, in any way you can, and make the lives of your loved ones better. Let the rest work itself out.
- jensgk 4y ago
  > Don't wish for things you don't have But we are bombarded with commercials every day, that want's us to wish for things we don't have. It is a foundation of our society. Also rich people have more power than poor, even in democracies. And if there is too wide a gap between people in a society, they have fewer common goals.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > But we are bombarded with commercials every day, that want's us to wish for things we don't have. Yeah, because the folks making the advertisements aren't wasting energy wishing for things they don't have, they're going out and putting themselves in a position where they can buy those things if they want.
    - jensgk 4y ago
      Exactly. Commercials create demand for stuff we didn’t even imagine.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  A very suicidal lesson. What will happen if following that trajectory is that whenever you get unlucky enough, you're forever locked in to that reduced capacity. And yes, instead you could help and network with people instead of being an asshole. Usually if set up right, both sides benefit. Though it's not easy to do so right at all times.
  - 4y ago
todaysAI 4y ago
I don't know how we can even consider that luck doesn't play the biggest role in life. We are influenced by a trillion of decisions made by people that directly pass through our lives everyday. To your competitors in business to the people that decide they are sober enough to drive at the same time you are driving. Not to mention the physical world which plays no favourites. I look at Bezos/Musk/etc and they are on top of wealth pyramid solely because someone has to. Next year it will be someone else. All we can do is try to make clear rational decisions and then let the universe unfold as it will.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > solely Criminy. Both made choices.
- notinfuriated 4y ago
  > I look at Bezos/Musk/etc and they are on top of wealth pyramid solely because someone has to. By this logic, it could have been anyone. How do you account for the fact that people at the top of this list all started their own businesses (or inherited one)?
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    Both of those people are to some degree con artists. They take both credit and money as middlemen for running companies. In Musk's case, it's even more visible as every venture he directly managed (and was not managed out of by someone smarter) has failed, yet he has billions of dollars for his quality con. And he used a plenty of unearned means to kickstart his con. Bezos is a bit harder. I would have to look in detail on his earlier history.
- callesgg 4y ago
  Luck = All the things that that are too complex for us to understand bunched up in to one. Luck is a narrative concept that is not useful in reasoning. For example in the article: > As many people pointed out, Jenner’s success would have been impossible if she hadn’t been born white, healthy, rich, and famous She could not have been born as anything but those things. Those things are what she is and removing them would not simply make her "unlucky", it would make her in to another person. Luck as used here in the article is just a way to differentiate and classify people, it does not have causal power.
Maursault 4y ago
I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; nor bread to the wise, nor wealth to the brilliant, nor favor to the skilled. But time and chance happen to them all.[1] [1] Ecc. 9:11
- shaftoe444 4y ago
  Was going to post this. Bravo.
stephc_int13 4y ago
I fully agree on the role of luck/randomness on our lives. But I disagree on what the author is suggesting : wealth redistribution. I do think that taxes are necessary (until proven otherwise) but I think that wealth is a second order effect of power. Trying to fix the inequality problem by targeting its derivative is barely helpful. We should really look at the power structure and network instead, obviously this is also more difficult to tackle as power is somewhat ill defined and not fungible. I tend to think that the _less wrong_ solution would be to build power traps and power diffusers, in practice trying both to avoid concentration and to maintain a minimal floor.
- mrtesthah 4y ago
  >...power diffusers... Redistribution of wealth would accomplish that.
braindead_in 4y ago
From a Nondualist perspective, luck is just another thought construct. There is no difference between good and bad luck. Everything is determined by the law of karma. Rather than relying on luck, focusing on actions is a much better strategy.
WalterBright 4y ago
You get to choose to: 1. stay in school, or drop out 2. pay attention in class, or not 3. do drugs, or not 4. commit crimes, or not 5. go to college, or not 6. do something useful, or watch TV These all have a massive downstream effect on your life. And you chose.
- thrixton 4y ago
  Do you choose to have poorly developed impulse control?
  - mantas 4y ago
    You can always choose to improve it.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Yup. People evolved brains for a reason.
    - samplatt 4y ago
      What was the reason you chose to evolve yours for?
      - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
        Chicks.
- verpeteren 4y ago
  At one point in my life I decided to step up when a volunteer was requested; It meant that I need to get out of my comfort zone often and that my workload increased a lot. But that shift in mindset completely changed my life; It created opportunities and lead to making a lot of new friends.
- GrinningFool 4y ago
  I'm more-or-less with you on a lot of those, but this one stands out: > 2. pay attention in class, or not I would usually /choose/ to pay attention in class, but also I seldom paid attention in class. I envy those who have the ability to pay attention to something just because they decide to.
WalterBright 4y ago
Deciding that one's life is all about luck is a miserable way to live. It means one has no agency, no choice, no way to make one's life better. Because it's all luck, that means there is no point in trying. The outcome of this is self-fulfilling - misery. I don't understand why it's such a popular attitude these days. A while ago, I noticed something interesting. None of my friends believes their lives are all about luck. They all believe they have agency, and are constantly taking responsibility for their lives and acting accordingly. They're a lot of fun to be around. The great thing about taking responsibility is one can do something to fix issues in their lives. The other ones, the ones who say it's all luck, it's always someone else's fault, why me, etc., aren't any fun to be around. No thanks.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > Deciding that one's life is all about luck is a miserable way to live People who think their entire lives is the sole result of their hard work and intelligence make my life more miserable
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    That is unlucky.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    I didn't say hard work and intelligence. I said choice. Where you are in life is the sum of a million choices you made.
    - kashunstva 4y ago
      > Where you are in life is the sum of a million choices you made. Surely one's starting conditions, all of which predate conscious choice, have some impact on where one finds themselves in life. I'm approaching my 60's and have made some good decisions (and some not-so-good ones, too) but where I find myself today is the result of those decisions overlaid on a foundation of where my family of origin positioned me. Not necessarily in financial terms, but in terms of habits of mind that enabled good decisions in the first place. So I'm happy to celebrate my perspicacity and where it has taken me, but how far along I started on the curve, as with all of us? - that's pure luck.
rrgok 4y ago
One thing that made me realize how luck is important, is reading a part of the book "Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us". If we leave out environmental luck (parents, neighborhood...), the very simple fact that you cannot choose which brain you want (einstein brain or some famous artist brain?) or simply a brain/body that is more capable of enduring stress /hard-work, should make people understand that luck play a far bigger role than everything else. You can work with what you have and express the best version of yourself, but that doesn't mean you will be succesfull in the envoirnment you are surrounded with. Some people waste away their life just because they could not find a suitable environment (maybe it doesn't exist) where their best self can overcome the average. And finding the best enviornment where you can thrive and have success is, I guess, another lottery.
nathias 4y ago
you can influence the direction and velocity of where you're going, not where you are, nor where you end up
hyperthesis 4y ago
\tangent on "system-two counteracting system-one": visualization (imagining a desired outcome as having already happened) engages system-one. It brings a far-future gratification into the present, so you can be motivated far beyond your "natural" motivation. All you need is an outcome that engages your system-one.
- adolph 4y ago
  Anticipatory dopamine release is a thing: Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2726 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2726 Dopamine is significant to the brain's "executive functions" (things having to do with planning, short term memory, ability to direct focus on boring task): https://www.additudemag.com/inside-the-add-mind/ https://www.additudemag.com/inside-the-add-mind/
Topolomancer 4y ago
Turning this around somewhat: in some sense, the focus on luck can also hurt people. If it's "just luck" that you did _not_ get the promotion or whatever despite trying and training for it, does it mean that you are "cursed by fate?" I think it's super hard to balance "agency" versus "random factors beyond my control" on a daily basis. I agree that embracing the role of luck is one step forward, but I also wonder whether we'll ever get there.
yogthos 4y ago
The comments in this thread do a great job highlighting point the article makes that acknowledging luck is profoundly threatening to the lucky.
- mypastself 4y ago
  What a great way to shut down disagreeing views. Let’s try using it in the opposite direction. “Acknowledging the importance of hard work and personal responsibility is threatening to the lazy.” “Whoa, look at how many lazy people there are.”
- jstanley 4y ago
  You could just as easily say that acknowledging witchcraft is profoundly threatening to the witches; anyone who tries to say that there is no such thing as witchcraft is just covering up for the fact that they're a witch.
  - yogthos 4y ago
    The difference being is that role of luck has been shown to be a factor in scientific studies [1]. And it is obvious to anybody capable of rational thought that this should be the case. People who are born into wealth have more opportunities in life than those who do not. A person who gets better education, better social connection, and more free time has the opportunity to self actualize. Meanwhile, a person born poor has none of these things. [1]: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I think it's fine to acknowledge that luck plays a role in life, but unless you think there's a way to trade your time and life force in a direct effort to become more lucky, it's not particularly practical as a way to guide your actions. That is, unless you take something like the view of "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." My spouse and I work hard to ensure that our family has that kind of luck. That our kids get a safe, stable, secure home, nutritious food, adequate exercise, exposure to a variety of novel (to them) experiences. We copiously support and nurture their educational efforts. We display love and tolerance for each other, but also demonstrate and uphold high standards in areas that we think matter. We spend less than our means and save for our family's future and invest for our retirement and their current and future education. Given all that, maybe our kids are just plain lucky after all and luck is responsible for everything that they'll ever do. I can't stop you from believing that, but I don't and we don't live our lives as if it were true.
throwaway98797 4y ago
best to withhold judgement until one’s death sometimes you’re ahead sometimes you’re behind
rayiner 4y ago
This article is written from a top-down perspective, as if morality is about how some higher power should allocate benefits and burdens: > These episodes illustrate what seems to be one of the enduring themes of our age: socially dominant groups, recipients of myriad unearned advantages, willfully refusing to acknowledge them, despite persistent efforts from socially disadvantaged groups. A more useful understanding of morality is that it’s a framework for cultivating individually and socially desirable behavior. If you’re a member of one of those “socially disadvantaged groups” you can’t do anything about the unearned advantages held by other people. All you can do is control your own actions. From that perspective, it’s better for a member of a socially disadvantaged group to discount luck altogether-act is if nothing is holding them back—whether it’s true or not. I probably wouldn’t be here in America if my dad had sat around dwelling on the happenstance of his having been born in a third world village, or thinking about the unearned privileges reaped by British colonization of his homeland.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  > If you’re a member of one of those “socially disadvantaged groups” you can’t do anything about the unearned advantages held by other people. All you can do is control your own actions. This is not true. You can organize others in your group, in other disadvantaged groups, and even allies in the socially dominant groups and try to change society to be more just. Atomization and learned helplessness are tools of these unfairly-advantaged groups. Believing this is doing their work for them. This doesn't mean you have to be Rosa Luxembourg, but know that keeping your nose down is not the only option. There are others.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    > You can organize others in your group, in other disadvantaged groups, and even allies in the socially dominant groups and try to change society to be more just. If you look at the disadvantaged subgroups in American society that ultimately overcame those disadvantages (Jews, Cubans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mormons, etc.) they did't achieve that through organizing and solidarity and social change. They assumed that nobody was going to help them and acted accordingly. > Atomization and learned helplessness are tools of these unfairly-advantaged groups. A moral framework that emphasizes the role of personal actions in outcomes is a survival strategy. It's not a creation of "unfairly-advantaged groups." It's something you see over and over in societies confronted with harsh realities, from pioneers to Puritans to third-world villagers. Hoping that "allies in the socially dominant groups" are going to come to your rescue one day--instead of using your support to advance their own interests--is what's "learned helplessness."
transcoderx 4y ago
Not everybody who is born rich becomes successful in later life. Instead of fretting how rich people have an unfair advantage, we should try to give more people that advantage. And say it takes a rich family to create one Neurosurgeon. Shouldn't we be happy that society is able to produce some Neurosurgeons? Another note: genetics and evolution are not random luck. People struggle to find partners with good genes.
- harimau777 4y ago
  Society producing a neurosurgeon isn't useful to someone who can't afford to be treated by a neurosurgeon. Nor is it useful to someone whose circumstances lead them to die of some more pedestrian cause before they ever need someone as specialized as a neurosurgeon.
  - transcoderx 4y ago
    Someone who can't afford it can still collect money for it, or society can decide to pay. They can also try to earn more money. And more neurosurgeons bring the price down. Your second argument is just nonsensical garbage.
credit_guy 4y ago
Backgammon is a game of chance: at each move you roll the dice. But while you can't control the dice, you can choose among the several moves allowed by the dice. Play against a professional backgammon player, and you will win exactly zero matches. The luck averages out over the long run, but the better play accumulates with each move. In real life, the better play is sometimes hard work, but many times it can be something else: making friends, doing them favors, and getting favors in return, knowing when to take a calculated risk, and knowing when to call it quits, drinking and having fun at parties, but knowing to keep the alcohol away otherwise, saying no do drugs, reading books instead of watching TikTok.
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  That's because backgammon is a reasonably well-balanced game. There's exactly zero guarantee that our society or life in general is similarly well-balanced. It seems to be a lot more like "Candy Land" or "Chutes and Ladders" for many people.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    Another noteworthy difference is that while both backgamnon and The Game of Life have rules, in backgammon all players are generally obligated to follow the rules.
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    > There's exactly zero guarantee that our society or life in general is similarly well-balanced. How come? Take Zuckerberg. He's the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist. Upper-middle class for sure. He will have better dice rolls in life than the son of a window cleaner from Queens, but he'll have about the same rolls as the sons of millions of other dentists and doctors and lawyers and senior software engineers. Still, he became a billionaire by the time he was 30, while most of his peers were lucky if they became millionaires by the same time. But I know a lot of people who claim that Zuckerberg was just a lucky guy.
    - rhino369 4y ago
bojangleslover 4y ago
It might be luck to HAVE good parents but it's the furthest thing from luck BE good parents in the first place. Good parents have the right to pass down that hard work to their kids.
lumb63 4y ago
This article was missing something to me. There are definitely inequities in “luck”: genetics, upbringing, etc., that one has no (or very little) influence over. The author uses this to draw the conclusion that, more or less, if you’re unlucky, that sucks. You had better hold your hand out and wait for someone with better luck to come by and help you. If that fails, you better head to the ballot and fill every bubble with a “D” next to it if you want any chance of a good life. This is the learned helplessness that, IMO, fuels modern socialism here in the US. It’s the “there’s nothing I could have done” sentiment. It’s the “I wasn’t born into wealth” sentiment. Even if there are situations in life that confer one a disadvantage, why not make the best of them? Yes, it takes effort to have self control and make good decisions. That doesn’t mean people should be told that their circumstances in life provide them a “get out of jail free” card to not even attempt to exercise them. That type of thinking is defeatist. I support a meritocracy. In accordance with that, I think we should aim to reduce the inequities that our social structure creates. Drawing attention to those pain points is useful and can be something we can improve upon. Telling entire swaths of people that their upbringing was unlucky and that’s the cause of their lot in life is not a recipe for empowering those people. So long as they are stuck waiting for someone else to fix their problems, IMO, they will never have them fixed.
jrd259 4y ago
This is about class, not luck, except in the narrow sense that being the child of affluence is luck.
drdrek 4y ago
Why use so many words when few words are enough?
- samplatt 4y ago
  I prefer: Why words, when word?
FrustratedMonky 4y ago
It is an old subject, with old arguments around old miss-understandings. People here are trying to use new analogies from computer science (a clock work universe), or with miss-understandings around quantum mechanics (somehow randomness give me agency). Or trying to re-define terms to fit a particular answer they ‘feel’ comfortable with. But it still comes back to, where is the first mover, best summarized by Schopenhauer. "A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills." Go watch some Robert Sapolsky lectures. We are just a monkey society, reacting to stimuli based on hormones and what we just ate. If you drill down far enough, sure some electrons twitched one way or the other, and yeah, if you steal something, or do something the group doesn’t like, then all the other monkeys will want to beat you up and call it justice, and dream up some logic to justify it and call it morality.
bilvar 4y ago
When I get a pile of CVs for an open position, I throw randomly half of them in the bin. I don't want unlucky people in my company.
Isamu 4y ago
> Building a more compassionate society means reminding ourselves of luck, and of the gratitude and obligations it entails, against inevitable resistance. No, not at all. Moral obligations come from the idea of sharing your success with the rest of society instead of being strictly selfish, because you live in that society and it has the added benefits of indirectly helping you in the long run. Luck doesn’t change the sharing story and people don’t view luck that way either. When someone wins at a casino they don’t feel any obligation to share because it was lucky. You share out of moral obligation to support the common good, if there’s zero luck involved it doesn’t give you some moral ground to maximize your selfishness.

98 points by nigamanth 4y ago

Sure, sure, luck. But the difference between getting a great hand and playing it right or wrong is not luck. Some people want to conflate it. Don't let them. Don't let them compare the trust-fund kid who built a business to the non-trust-fund kid who didn't build a business. Compare them to the trust-fund kid who didn't even try to build anything and ended up writing sad opinion pieces against the unfairness of it all.

BigGreenTurtle 4y ago
We've established that there are trust-fund kids who try and those who don't, what differentiates these groups? Why does one group try and the other not try? Are trust-fund kids with an IQ of 40 in the same group as the not-triers?

ncdjnbxhn 4y ago

[flagged]

camdenlock 4y ago
Indeed, it’s stunning that anyone would fall for this trap after learning the history of socialist totalitarianism our species has been through (several times).
- serverholic 4y ago
  You know taxes can be viewed as socialist because it's a wealth redistribution system. Same with social security, Medicare, etc. Not everything "socialist" has to be extreme.
BizarreByte 4y ago
You can’t discount luck, but it’s not comfortable to look at one’s life and see how it played a part. Two people can work equally hard, be equally smart and have two different outcomes. Luck/random chance did play a part. It’s even more stark when someone can not work hard at all and have better outcomes than someone who did.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > Two people can work equally hard, be equally smart and have two different outcomes. If we're talking "very different", are we talking about "and one ends up a billionaire and the other penniless"? Or are we saying "and one ends up a millionaire and the other one ends up upper middle class"? Because in general, working hard and being smart pays off, even if you're not exceptionally lucky. Yes, it takes longer than winning the lottery, but it's not like you need lots of luck or it won't pay off at all. It's more like "work hard and get 1-10 coins per year based on your effort, and each year roll 10 dice and if they all show 6, you get 500 coins". Luck plays a role, but in watching people who are exceptionally lucky and saying "look, luck is all that matters", we're missing the millions who aren't exceptionally lucky.
- cjohnson318 4y ago
  Yeah, debt free loans and family safety nets go a long way. I think if you work hard and you're smart, then upper middle class is the very best you can hope for, and you're unlikely to get that far.

jadbox 4y ago

Related, I'd highly recommend reading Harvard Law School professor Michael Sandel's recent book on Meritocracy. He lays out a comprehensive exploration of the luck factor in the role of justice, democracy, and the shared common good.

epgui 4y ago
The problem I have with Sandel’s argument against meritocracy is that the “meritocracy trap” is not meritocracy at all, but the illusion of meritocracy. He has a point, but I just disagree with how he frames it: a true meritocracy doesn’t have the attributes he highlights. I highly recommend his “Justice” lectures from Harvard though.

ne0flex 4y ago

I often perceive luck to be the combination of opportunity + skill/talent (in the sense that you have the skill/talent to take advantage of the opportunity that comes your way). I find that a lot of people like to chock up the success of billionaires or whoever to luck (in the sense of random chance). My older brother does this often and used to tell me about how Bezos was lucky and Bezos' parents gave him $300K to start Amazon, the implication being something to the effect that anybody given $300k can build Amazon. Then my brother had a windfall stock trade where he made $250k, I told him he can try to build the next Amazon, and he ended up squandering everything on bad stock trades and business decisions. I guess his luck ran out?

oh_sigh 4y ago
His parents invested $300k in fledgling Amazon, along with other investors for the same terms. And that's why they're billionaires today too. That's different from just giving Jeff $300k.

hprotagonist 4y ago

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

msp_yc 4y ago
The consideration, objective; the phrasing, doubleplusungood.
akomtu 4y ago
The authors suffer from cluttered speech.
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  purple prose, generally

rootusrootus 4y ago

The author sure does work pretty hard to absolve individuals of having any control over their destiny. If your parents were wealthy, that's luck. If they loved you and cared for you when you were young, also luck. But after you're an adult, if you have enough grit to go accomplish great things, that's luck too! So don't feel bad if you're not a self-starter, don't feel like you need to keep trying. Accept it as bad luck, and accept your fate. Was this written by someone lucky?

rubicon33 4y ago

> How much credit do we deserve for who, and where, we end up? The answer to this is really simple. You may take credit for how much better you have done relative to those who had a similar upbringing and opportunity. That's it.

rootusrootus 4y ago
Well, the article author did suggest that how much grit you have is also a matter of luck.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  I can raise and lower my grit at will. Can't everyone?
  - jensgk 4y ago
    No
  - triceratops 4y ago
    Why would you lower your grit?
    - fbdab103 4y ago
      So I can raise it again.
  - oh_sigh 4y ago
    Only if you have enough grit to do so.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    You jest, but I suppose there are people like that. Try once, don't succeed, give up, blame the world. See also Reddit. As an inherently lazy person who has enjoyed moderate success in spite of it, I reject that attitude.
4y ago

gamegoblin 4y ago

If you dig sufficiently deeply at it, you can attribute everything to luck. Just keep asking "why" and eventually you arrive at something you did not have conscious control over. E.g. Q. Why do you deserve your money? A. I work hard. Q. Why do you work hard? A. I have a good work ethic. Q. Why do you have a good work ethic? A. My parents raised me that way. Q. Why did you choose for your parents to raise you that way? A. I didn't. I'm not suggesting any conclusions here, just stating that if you keeping asking "why", you will always get to ground at something outside your conscious control. Applying this to my own life, I make good money doing software development. Programming is easy and natural for me. I started programming when I was 12. Why? I thought it was fun. Why did I choose to think it was fun? I didn't consciously choose. This applies even for things that seem to arise within your own mind. You can't choose which thoughts to have. You might think "sure I can, I'm going to think about elephants right now", and that may be, but when did you choose to choose to think about elephants? When did you choose to choose to choose? You can recurse deep, but eventually you arrive at something outside your conscious control.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
You make an excellent case for nihilism, but I must say… > Why did you choose for your parents … you gave in to an abridged “why?” discussion very early in this example.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  I'm not sure if it's a case for nihilism, but it is definitely a case for humility, patience, and non-hatred (is there a word for this?). Any time I am interacting with someone I feel like is ignorant/stupid/foolish/whatever pejorative, I take a deep breath and remind myself that nobody chooses to be stupid. One might say "well they chose to be ignorant, they could learn about XYZ but they choose not to". But that would require them having the thought "I should learn about XYZ". That thought does not come by choice. And, if it did, the thought to make that choice does not come by choice, et cetera. Once you accept that nobody makes themself the way they are, it removes the punch behind the emotion of hatred. You don't hate fire because it sometimes causes destruction. It's just doing what fire does. You might not like it, but you don't hate it. The same can be said of people.

rootusrootus 4y ago

Maybe the lesson is that there is no point to judging other people's relative success (whether more or less successful than yourself), and that you can just try to make your own life better. Don't wish for things you don't have, don't despair over success you haven't achieved, don't shit on people who haven't found success. Make your own life better, in any way you can, and make the lives of your loved ones better. Let the rest work itself out.

jensgk 4y ago
> Don't wish for things you don't have But we are bombarded with commercials every day, that want's us to wish for things we don't have. It is a foundation of our society. Also rich people have more power than poor, even in democracies. And if there is too wide a gap between people in a society, they have fewer common goals.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > But we are bombarded with commercials every day, that want's us to wish for things we don't have. Yeah, because the folks making the advertisements aren't wasting energy wishing for things they don't have, they're going out and putting themselves in a position where they can buy those things if they want.
  - jensgk 4y ago
    Exactly. Commercials create demand for stuff we didn’t even imagine.
AstralStorm 4y ago
A very suicidal lesson. What will happen if following that trajectory is that whenever you get unlucky enough, you're forever locked in to that reduced capacity. And yes, instead you could help and network with people instead of being an asshole. Usually if set up right, both sides benefit. Though it's not easy to do so right at all times.
- 4y ago

todaysAI 4y ago

I don't know how we can even consider that luck doesn't play the biggest role in life. We are influenced by a trillion of decisions made by people that directly pass through our lives everyday. To your competitors in business to the people that decide they are sober enough to drive at the same time you are driving. Not to mention the physical world which plays no favourites. I look at Bezos/Musk/etc and they are on top of wealth pyramid solely because someone has to. Next year it will be someone else. All we can do is try to make clear rational decisions and then let the universe unfold as it will.

WalterBright 4y ago
> solely Criminy. Both made choices.
notinfuriated 4y ago
> I look at Bezos/Musk/etc and they are on top of wealth pyramid solely because someone has to. By this logic, it could have been anyone. How do you account for the fact that people at the top of this list all started their own businesses (or inherited one)?
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  Both of those people are to some degree con artists. They take both credit and money as middlemen for running companies. In Musk's case, it's even more visible as every venture he directly managed (and was not managed out of by someone smarter) has failed, yet he has billions of dollars for his quality con. And he used a plenty of unearned means to kickstart his con. Bezos is a bit harder. I would have to look in detail on his earlier history.
callesgg 4y ago
Luck = All the things that that are too complex for us to understand bunched up in to one. Luck is a narrative concept that is not useful in reasoning. For example in the article: > As many people pointed out, Jenner’s success would have been impossible if she hadn’t been born white, healthy, rich, and famous She could not have been born as anything but those things. Those things are what she is and removing them would not simply make her "unlucky", it would make her in to another person. Luck as used here in the article is just a way to differentiate and classify people, it does not have causal power.

Maursault 4y ago

I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; nor bread to the wise, nor wealth to the brilliant, nor favor to the skilled. But time and chance happen to them all.[1] [1] Ecc. 9:11

shaftoe444 4y ago
Was going to post this. Bravo.

stephc_int13 4y ago

I fully agree on the role of luck/randomness on our lives. But I disagree on what the author is suggesting : wealth redistribution. I do think that taxes are necessary (until proven otherwise) but I think that wealth is a second order effect of power. Trying to fix the inequality problem by targeting its derivative is barely helpful. We should really look at the power structure and network instead, obviously this is also more difficult to tackle as power is somewhat ill defined and not fungible. I tend to think that the _less wrong_ solution would be to build power traps and power diffusers, in practice trying both to avoid concentration and to maintain a minimal floor.

mrtesthah 4y ago
>...power diffusers... Redistribution of wealth would accomplish that.

braindead_in 4y ago

From a Nondualist perspective, luck is just another thought construct. There is no difference between good and bad luck. Everything is determined by the law of karma. Rather than relying on luck, focusing on actions is a much better strategy.

WalterBright 4y ago

You get to choose to: 1. stay in school, or drop out 2. pay attention in class, or not 3. do drugs, or not 4. commit crimes, or not 5. go to college, or not 6. do something useful, or watch TV These all have a massive downstream effect on your life. And you chose.

thrixton 4y ago
Do you choose to have poorly developed impulse control?
- mantas 4y ago
  You can always choose to improve it.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Yup. People evolved brains for a reason.
  - samplatt 4y ago
    What was the reason you chose to evolve yours for?
    - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
      Chicks.
verpeteren 4y ago
At one point in my life I decided to step up when a volunteer was requested; It meant that I need to get out of my comfort zone often and that my workload increased a lot. But that shift in mindset completely changed my life; It created opportunities and lead to making a lot of new friends.
GrinningFool 4y ago
I'm more-or-less with you on a lot of those, but this one stands out: > 2. pay attention in class, or not I would usually /choose/ to pay attention in class, but also I seldom paid attention in class. I envy those who have the ability to pay attention to something just because they decide to.

WalterBright 4y ago

Deciding that one's life is all about luck is a miserable way to live. It means one has no agency, no choice, no way to make one's life better. Because it's all luck, that means there is no point in trying. The outcome of this is self-fulfilling - misery. I don't understand why it's such a popular attitude these days. A while ago, I noticed something interesting. None of my friends believes their lives are all about luck. They all believe they have agency, and are constantly taking responsibility for their lives and acting accordingly. They're a lot of fun to be around. The great thing about taking responsibility is one can do something to fix issues in their lives. The other ones, the ones who say it's all luck, it's always someone else's fault, why me, etc., aren't any fun to be around. No thanks.

lm28469 4y ago
> Deciding that one's life is all about luck is a miserable way to live People who think their entire lives is the sole result of their hard work and intelligence make my life more miserable
- sokoloff 4y ago
  That is unlucky.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  I didn't say hard work and intelligence. I said choice. Where you are in life is the sum of a million choices you made.
  - kashunstva 4y ago
    > Where you are in life is the sum of a million choices you made. Surely one's starting conditions, all of which predate conscious choice, have some impact on where one finds themselves in life. I'm approaching my 60's and have made some good decisions (and some not-so-good ones, too) but where I find myself today is the result of those decisions overlaid on a foundation of where my family of origin positioned me. Not necessarily in financial terms, but in terms of habits of mind that enabled good decisions in the first place. So I'm happy to celebrate my perspicacity and where it has taken me, but how far along I started on the curve, as with all of us? - that's pure luck.

rrgok 4y ago

One thing that made me realize how luck is important, is reading a part of the book "Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us". If we leave out environmental luck (parents, neighborhood...), the very simple fact that you cannot choose which brain you want (einstein brain or some famous artist brain?) or simply a brain/body that is more capable of enduring stress /hard-work, should make people understand that luck play a far bigger role than everything else. You can work with what you have and express the best version of yourself, but that doesn't mean you will be succesfull in the envoirnment you are surrounded with. Some people waste away their life just because they could not find a suitable environment (maybe it doesn't exist) where their best self can overcome the average. And finding the best enviornment where you can thrive and have success is, I guess, another lottery.

nathias 4y ago

you can influence the direction and velocity of where you're going, not where you are, nor where you end up

hyperthesis 4y ago

\tangent on "system-two counteracting system-one": visualization (imagining a desired outcome as having already happened) engages system-one. It brings a far-future gratification into the present, so you can be motivated far beyond your "natural" motivation. All you need is an outcome that engages your system-one.

adolph 4y ago
Anticipatory dopamine release is a thing: Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2726 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2726 Dopamine is significant to the brain's "executive functions" (things having to do with planning, short term memory, ability to direct focus on boring task): https://www.additudemag.com/inside-the-add-mind/ https://www.additudemag.com/inside-the-add-mind/

Topolomancer 4y ago

Turning this around somewhat: in some sense, the focus on luck can also hurt people. If it's "just luck" that you did _not_ get the promotion or whatever despite trying and training for it, does it mean that you are "cursed by fate?" I think it's super hard to balance "agency" versus "random factors beyond my control" on a daily basis. I agree that embracing the role of luck is one step forward, but I also wonder whether we'll ever get there.

yogthos 4y ago

The comments in this thread do a great job highlighting point the article makes that acknowledging luck is profoundly threatening to the lucky.

mypastself 4y ago
What a great way to shut down disagreeing views. Let’s try using it in the opposite direction. “Acknowledging the importance of hard work and personal responsibility is threatening to the lazy.” “Whoa, look at how many lazy people there are.”
jstanley 4y ago
You could just as easily say that acknowledging witchcraft is profoundly threatening to the witches; anyone who tries to say that there is no such thing as witchcraft is just covering up for the fact that they're a witch.
- yogthos 4y ago
  The difference being is that role of luck has been shown to be a factor in scientific studies [1]. And it is obvious to anybody capable of rational thought that this should be the case. People who are born into wealth have more opportunities in life than those who do not. A person who gets better education, better social connection, and more free time has the opportunity to self actualize. Meanwhile, a person born poor has none of these things. [1]: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...
sokoloff 4y ago
I think it's fine to acknowledge that luck plays a role in life, but unless you think there's a way to trade your time and life force in a direct effort to become more lucky, it's not particularly practical as a way to guide your actions. That is, unless you take something like the view of "I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." My spouse and I work hard to ensure that our family has that kind of luck. That our kids get a safe, stable, secure home, nutritious food, adequate exercise, exposure to a variety of novel (to them) experiences. We copiously support and nurture their educational efforts. We display love and tolerance for each other, but also demonstrate and uphold high standards in areas that we think matter. We spend less than our means and save for our family's future and invest for our retirement and their current and future education. Given all that, maybe our kids are just plain lucky after all and luck is responsible for everything that they'll ever do. I can't stop you from believing that, but I don't and we don't live our lives as if it were true.

throwaway98797 4y ago

best to withhold judgement until one’s death sometimes you’re ahead sometimes you’re behind

rayiner 4y ago

This article is written from a top-down perspective, as if morality is about how some higher power should allocate benefits and burdens: > These episodes illustrate what seems to be one of the enduring themes of our age: socially dominant groups, recipients of myriad unearned advantages, willfully refusing to acknowledge them, despite persistent efforts from socially disadvantaged groups. A more useful understanding of morality is that it’s a framework for cultivating individually and socially desirable behavior. If you’re a member of one of those “socially disadvantaged groups” you can’t do anything about the unearned advantages held by other people. All you can do is control your own actions. From that perspective, it’s better for a member of a socially disadvantaged group to discount luck altogether-act is if nothing is holding them back—whether it’s true or not. I probably wouldn’t be here in America if my dad had sat around dwelling on the happenstance of his having been born in a third world village, or thinking about the unearned privileges reaped by British colonization of his homeland.

ElevenLathe 4y ago
> If you’re a member of one of those “socially disadvantaged groups” you can’t do anything about the unearned advantages held by other people. All you can do is control your own actions. This is not true. You can organize others in your group, in other disadvantaged groups, and even allies in the socially dominant groups and try to change society to be more just. Atomization and learned helplessness are tools of these unfairly-advantaged groups. Believing this is doing their work for them. This doesn't mean you have to be Rosa Luxembourg, but know that keeping your nose down is not the only option. There are others.
- rayiner 4y ago
  > You can organize others in your group, in other disadvantaged groups, and even allies in the socially dominant groups and try to change society to be more just. If you look at the disadvantaged subgroups in American society that ultimately overcame those disadvantages (Jews, Cubans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mormons, etc.) they did't achieve that through organizing and solidarity and social change. They assumed that nobody was going to help them and acted accordingly. > Atomization and learned helplessness are tools of these unfairly-advantaged groups. A moral framework that emphasizes the role of personal actions in outcomes is a survival strategy. It's not a creation of "unfairly-advantaged groups." It's something you see over and over in societies confronted with harsh realities, from pioneers to Puritans to third-world villagers. Hoping that "allies in the socially dominant groups" are going to come to your rescue one day--instead of using your support to advance their own interests--is what's "learned helplessness."

transcoderx 4y ago

Not everybody who is born rich becomes successful in later life. Instead of fretting how rich people have an unfair advantage, we should try to give more people that advantage. And say it takes a rich family to create one Neurosurgeon. Shouldn't we be happy that society is able to produce some Neurosurgeons? Another note: genetics and evolution are not random luck. People struggle to find partners with good genes.

harimau777 4y ago
Society producing a neurosurgeon isn't useful to someone who can't afford to be treated by a neurosurgeon. Nor is it useful to someone whose circumstances lead them to die of some more pedestrian cause before they ever need someone as specialized as a neurosurgeon.
- transcoderx 4y ago
  Someone who can't afford it can still collect money for it, or society can decide to pay. They can also try to earn more money. And more neurosurgeons bring the price down. Your second argument is just nonsensical garbage.

credit_guy 4y ago

Backgammon is a game of chance: at each move you roll the dice. But while you can't control the dice, you can choose among the several moves allowed by the dice. Play against a professional backgammon player, and you will win exactly zero matches. The luck averages out over the long run, but the better play accumulates with each move. In real life, the better play is sometimes hard work, but many times it can be something else: making friends, doing them favors, and getting favors in return, knowing when to take a calculated risk, and knowing when to call it quits, drinking and having fun at parties, but knowing to keep the alcohol away otherwise, saying no do drugs, reading books instead of watching TikTok.

LeifCarrotson 4y ago
That's because backgammon is a reasonably well-balanced game. There's exactly zero guarantee that our society or life in general is similarly well-balanced. It seems to be a lot more like "Candy Land" or "Chutes and Ladders" for many people.
- mistermann 4y ago
  Another noteworthy difference is that while both backgamnon and The Game of Life have rules, in backgammon all players are generally obligated to follow the rules.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  > There's exactly zero guarantee that our society or life in general is similarly well-balanced. How come? Take Zuckerberg. He's the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist. Upper-middle class for sure. He will have better dice rolls in life than the son of a window cleaner from Queens, but he'll have about the same rolls as the sons of millions of other dentists and doctors and lawyers and senior software engineers. Still, he became a billionaire by the time he was 30, while most of his peers were lucky if they became millionaires by the same time. But I know a lot of people who claim that Zuckerberg was just a lucky guy.
  - rhino369 4y ago

bojangleslover 4y ago

It might be luck to HAVE good parents but it's the furthest thing from luck BE good parents in the first place. Good parents have the right to pass down that hard work to their kids.

lumb63 4y ago

This article was missing something to me. There are definitely inequities in “luck”: genetics, upbringing, etc., that one has no (or very little) influence over. The author uses this to draw the conclusion that, more or less, if you’re unlucky, that sucks. You had better hold your hand out and wait for someone with better luck to come by and help you. If that fails, you better head to the ballot and fill every bubble with a “D” next to it if you want any chance of a good life. This is the learned helplessness that, IMO, fuels modern socialism here in the US. It’s the “there’s nothing I could have done” sentiment. It’s the “I wasn’t born into wealth” sentiment. Even if there are situations in life that confer one a disadvantage, why not make the best of them? Yes, it takes effort to have self control and make good decisions. That doesn’t mean people should be told that their circumstances in life provide them a “get out of jail free” card to not even attempt to exercise them. That type of thinking is defeatist. I support a meritocracy. In accordance with that, I think we should aim to reduce the inequities that our social structure creates. Drawing attention to those pain points is useful and can be something we can improve upon. Telling entire swaths of people that their upbringing was unlucky and that’s the cause of their lot in life is not a recipe for empowering those people. So long as they are stuck waiting for someone else to fix their problems, IMO, they will never have them fixed.

jrd259 4y ago

This is about class, not luck, except in the narrow sense that being the child of affluence is luck.

drdrek 4y ago

Why use so many words when few words are enough?

samplatt 4y ago
I prefer: Why words, when word?

FrustratedMonky 4y ago

It is an old subject, with old arguments around old miss-understandings. People here are trying to use new analogies from computer science (a clock work universe), or with miss-understandings around quantum mechanics (somehow randomness give me agency). Or trying to re-define terms to fit a particular answer they ‘feel’ comfortable with. But it still comes back to, where is the first mover, best summarized by Schopenhauer. "A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills." Go watch some Robert Sapolsky lectures. We are just a monkey society, reacting to stimuli based on hormones and what we just ate. If you drill down far enough, sure some electrons twitched one way or the other, and yeah, if you steal something, or do something the group doesn’t like, then all the other monkeys will want to beat you up and call it justice, and dream up some logic to justify it and call it morality.

bilvar 4y ago

When I get a pile of CVs for an open position, I throw randomly half of them in the bin. I don't want unlucky people in my company.

Isamu 4y ago

> Building a more compassionate society means reminding ourselves of luck, and of the gratitude and obligations it entails, against inevitable resistance. No, not at all. Moral obligations come from the idea of sharing your success with the rest of society instead of being strictly selfish, because you live in that society and it has the added benefits of indirectly helping you in the long run. Luck doesn’t change the sharing story and people don’t view luck that way either. When someone wins at a casino they don’t feel any obligation to share because it was lucky. You share out of moral obligation to support the common good, if there’s zero luck involved it doesn’t give you some moral ground to maximize your selfishness.