8 ms·

Humans have a problem with complexity and compound causality in general; any person who succeeds does so by some combination of both individual grit, and suppor

by lukifer 12y ago

Humans have a problem with complexity and compound causality in general; any person who succeeds does so by some combination of both individual grit, and support from society and loved ones (even if indirectly), regardless of what the proportions happen to be (if one could even measure such a thing). Thinking that success must derive exclusively from either society or the individual is sheer absurdity, driven by a need to impose an idealized narrative upon messy reality.

300bps 12y ago
Yet there are some people that work 60 hours per week and some that choose to not work at all. The people in the first camp are typically more successful than people in the second camp. Articles like the OP discount their efforts and accomplishments completely.
- jmclean 12y ago
  I think part of the reason this conversation is valuable, though, is that the inverse omission is far more dominant in the cultural conversation right now. It's certainly mostly true that hard work plays an important part in fantastic success. But it's equally true that even in those cases, the majority enjoyed advantages that are often invisible even to them. So to be sure, the opposite extreme is just as ridiculous as suggesting that every person exists in a bubble where their effort correlates exactly with outcome. But when the awareness of systemic advantage is absent (as it certainly is), I see staking out a far extreme opinion like this as a challenge to find a more reasonable center.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    The work ethic narrative is immensely useful to employers, but in too many situations it's almost totally disconnected from real opportunity and reward. Ultimately it's a political problem - but not necessarily in the obvious sense. The most successful and fun cultures reward inventiveness and positive social contributions, and include some element of challenge and competition. But using money and markets to make decisions about the kinds of activities that are rewarded turns out to be an inefficient, short-sighted and often surreal way to manage what does and doesn't get valued.
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      And I'd appreciate it if downvoters justified their downvotes. I'm quite happy with the idea that an economy where it's possible to raise $1 million in funding for an app like Yo! while the many apps that do something with longer term benefits struggle for commercial support has some issues with rational resource allocation. Not to mention the outrageous bubbles and the epic acquisition disasters that litter the Internet ruins. If you believe otherwise I'd like to see you argue why.
- seren 12y ago
  I certainly does not work as hard as the cleaning lady getting up at 5 am to clean my desk. I just sit there typing lightly on my ergonomic keyboard, in my air-conditioned office and in the end, I will probably end better off, even though she might have crossed a deadly desert to come here and won't see her relatives for a long time. I just have the chance of being born around. Hard work == success, is probably a variation of the just world bias [0]. It provides a reassuring and motivating narrative, but in the end, it is quite simplistic. I am not saying that hard work is not a necessary condition, but it is far from being sufficient. Another example : with all the discussions about European debt, it has been reported multiple times that on average Greeks were working much longer that Germans. It does not do them much good. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
  - rayiner 12y ago
    > I certainly does not work as hard as the cleaning lady getting up at 5 am to clean my desk No kidding. I was in the office at 10 pm the other night, and the cleaning guy came around to empty the trash cans. He's like "man, still here at 10?" And I'm thinking "well so are you."
    - newppc 12y ago
      Hopefully he didn't start till 6pm though :)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
spindritf 12y ago
any person who succeeds does so by some combination of both individual grit, and support from society and loved ones And genetics, and the general culture, and luck, which is just a word we use for many factors we can't even name yet mixed with true randomness. And then there's a fair bit of interplay between all the factors. Why do some people work 60 hours a week when others barely crack 10? That "grit" doesn't come from nowhere. And surely there are more fundamental reasons for why some societies at some times are more supportive, or more successful, or richer, or saner, than others.
- rayiner 12y ago
  I work 60 hours a week because I was fortunate enough to be born with aptitudes that cause employers to want to pay me a lot of money for those hours. If my employers were fighting to keep me under 30 hours so they wouldn't have to pay benefits, and to pay $7.50 for each incremental hour, with zero upward mobility, my incentive to work those hours would vanish. Moreover, you shouldn't get credit for genetics. That's not a product of your exercise of free will.
  - spindritf 12y ago
    you shouldn't get credit for genetics Why not? Seems like a completely arbitrary standard. And pretty hard on everyone else. Are you not viscerally impressed by beautiful women, high IQ speakers, and so on? Even if you somehow get people to agree, and at least partially implement it, how can you credit anything then? Is there a human quality we care about not heavily influenced by genetics? How do you disentangle von Neumann's ability from his achievements? How do you discount Brigitte Bardot's beauty or Michael Jordan's height?
    - rayiner 12y ago
      You may not agree with it, but its not arbitrary to say that the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into. Its a distinction based on a well-defined criterion. I'm not really interested in discussing outliers like Michael Jordan, or tiny segments of the economy like sports or entertainment. I'm talking about how we distribute the proceeds of our industrial economy, or at the very least, how we assign moral culpability to people based on things they have little control over. That is to say, it might be inevitable that pretty people or smart people will have advantages. But the only difference between attractiveness and intellect is that on places like HN, its socially acceptable to be smug about the latter.
foolrush 12y ago
“Thinking that success must derive exclusively from either society or the individual is sheer absurdity, driven by a need to impose an idealized narrative upon messy reality.” Very astute postmodern summation. The only thing missing in this is the possibility that the myths of narrative (male hero), constancy (see genetics and scientism), etc. are all driven by ideology. In particular, capitalist ideology; the value of capital is predicated on foundational ideology. “Made man” for example, reinforces individual capital ownership as opposed to cultural byproduct. A counterpoint might be other cultures with an Eastern religion based view chance / fortune as having a greater and more culturally secured role in the lives of an individual.
- imjk 12y ago
  Just out of curiosity, are you a student or recent graduate?
  - foolrush 12y ago
    Old. Very old.
calinet6 12y ago
However, the public discourse and political narrative is decidedly in the individualistic camp, aligning more on the side of what people want to believe, rather than what is true. This allows those with power to take advantage of the situation to a large degree. It is there that the wishy-washy reductionist argument of 'the world is complex' ceases to be useful (not saying you're making that argument, but it often comes up). We need to push the world a little more to one side; a little more toward the balance point of this messy reality, with full recognition and respect for that complexity.
ap22213 12y ago
It's pretty easy to see the effects of this if we compare the number of successful people from rich countries to the number of successful people from the other several billion people in the world. Where one is born and in which family is hugely (if not primarily) important. I'm from the US, and I've seen quite a few highly intelligent and hard-working (but poor) people end up as heroin dealers or working odd jobs, with no steady employment. Conversely, I've seen relatively mediocre people, born to wealthy families, succeed wildly. And, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's seen this. It's something to think about in a world where around 2400 billionaires (~0.000033% of the population) own ~7% of the world's wealth.

by lukifer 12y ago

300bps 12y ago

Yet there are some people that work 60 hours per week and some that choose to not work at all. The people in the first camp are typically more successful than people in the second camp. Articles like the OP discount their efforts and accomplishments completely.

jmclean 12y ago
I think part of the reason this conversation is valuable, though, is that the inverse omission is far more dominant in the cultural conversation right now. It's certainly mostly true that hard work plays an important part in fantastic success. But it's equally true that even in those cases, the majority enjoyed advantages that are often invisible even to them. So to be sure, the opposite extreme is just as ridiculous as suggesting that every person exists in a bubble where their effort correlates exactly with outcome. But when the awareness of systemic advantage is absent (as it certainly is), I see staking out a far extreme opinion like this as a challenge to find a more reasonable center.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  The work ethic narrative is immensely useful to employers, but in too many situations it's almost totally disconnected from real opportunity and reward. Ultimately it's a political problem - but not necessarily in the obvious sense. The most successful and fun cultures reward inventiveness and positive social contributions, and include some element of challenge and competition. But using money and markets to make decisions about the kinds of activities that are rewarded turns out to be an inefficient, short-sighted and often surreal way to manage what does and doesn't get valued.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    And I'd appreciate it if downvoters justified their downvotes. I'm quite happy with the idea that an economy where it's possible to raise $1 million in funding for an app like Yo! while the many apps that do something with longer term benefits struggle for commercial support has some issues with rational resource allocation. Not to mention the outrageous bubbles and the epic acquisition disasters that litter the Internet ruins. If you believe otherwise I'd like to see you argue why.
seren 12y ago
I certainly does not work as hard as the cleaning lady getting up at 5 am to clean my desk. I just sit there typing lightly on my ergonomic keyboard, in my air-conditioned office and in the end, I will probably end better off, even though she might have crossed a deadly desert to come here and won't see her relatives for a long time. I just have the chance of being born around. Hard work == success, is probably a variation of the just world bias [0]. It provides a reassuring and motivating narrative, but in the end, it is quite simplistic. I am not saying that hard work is not a necessary condition, but it is far from being sufficient. Another example : with all the discussions about European debt, it has been reported multiple times that on average Greeks were working much longer that Germans. It does not do them much good. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
- rayiner 12y ago
  > I certainly does not work as hard as the cleaning lady getting up at 5 am to clean my desk No kidding. I was in the office at 10 pm the other night, and the cleaning guy came around to empty the trash cans. He's like "man, still here at 10?" And I'm thinking "well so are you."
  - newppc 12y ago
    Hopefully he didn't start till 6pm though :)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

spindritf 12y ago

any person who succeeds does so by some combination of both individual grit, and support from society and loved ones And genetics, and the general culture, and luck, which is just a word we use for many factors we can't even name yet mixed with true randomness. And then there's a fair bit of interplay between all the factors. Why do some people work 60 hours a week when others barely crack 10? That "grit" doesn't come from nowhere. And surely there are more fundamental reasons for why some societies at some times are more supportive, or more successful, or richer, or saner, than others.

rayiner 12y ago
I work 60 hours a week because I was fortunate enough to be born with aptitudes that cause employers to want to pay me a lot of money for those hours. If my employers were fighting to keep me under 30 hours so they wouldn't have to pay benefits, and to pay $7.50 for each incremental hour, with zero upward mobility, my incentive to work those hours would vanish. Moreover, you shouldn't get credit for genetics. That's not a product of your exercise of free will.
- spindritf 12y ago
  you shouldn't get credit for genetics Why not? Seems like a completely arbitrary standard. And pretty hard on everyone else. Are you not viscerally impressed by beautiful women, high IQ speakers, and so on? Even if you somehow get people to agree, and at least partially implement it, how can you credit anything then? Is there a human quality we care about not heavily influenced by genetics? How do you disentangle von Neumann's ability from his achievements? How do you discount Brigitte Bardot's beauty or Michael Jordan's height?
  - rayiner 12y ago
    You may not agree with it, but its not arbitrary to say that the economy should strive to give people credit for what they choose to do, rather than what you luck into. Its a distinction based on a well-defined criterion. I'm not really interested in discussing outliers like Michael Jordan, or tiny segments of the economy like sports or entertainment. I'm talking about how we distribute the proceeds of our industrial economy, or at the very least, how we assign moral culpability to people based on things they have little control over. That is to say, it might be inevitable that pretty people or smart people will have advantages. But the only difference between attractiveness and intellect is that on places like HN, its socially acceptable to be smug about the latter.

foolrush 12y ago

“Thinking that success must derive exclusively from either society or the individual is sheer absurdity, driven by a need to impose an idealized narrative upon messy reality.” Very astute postmodern summation. The only thing missing in this is the possibility that the myths of narrative (male hero), constancy (see genetics and scientism), etc. are all driven by ideology. In particular, capitalist ideology; the value of capital is predicated on foundational ideology. “Made man” for example, reinforces individual capital ownership as opposed to cultural byproduct. A counterpoint might be other cultures with an Eastern religion based view chance / fortune as having a greater and more culturally secured role in the lives of an individual.

imjk 12y ago
Just out of curiosity, are you a student or recent graduate?
- foolrush 12y ago
  Old. Very old.

calinet6 12y ago

However, the public discourse and political narrative is decidedly in the individualistic camp, aligning more on the side of what people want to believe, rather than what is true. This allows those with power to take advantage of the situation to a large degree. It is there that the wishy-washy reductionist argument of 'the world is complex' ceases to be useful (not saying you're making that argument, but it often comes up). We need to push the world a little more to one side; a little more toward the balance point of this messy reality, with full recognition and respect for that complexity.

ap22213 12y ago

It's pretty easy to see the effects of this if we compare the number of successful people from rich countries to the number of successful people from the other several billion people in the world. Where one is born and in which family is hugely (if not primarily) important. I'm from the US, and I've seen quite a few highly intelligent and hard-working (but poor) people end up as heroin dealers or working odd jobs, with no steady employment. Conversely, I've seen relatively mediocre people, born to wealthy families, succeed wildly. And, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's seen this. It's something to think about in a world where around 2400 billionaires (~0.000033% of the population) own ~7% of the world's wealth.