Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky • Hacker News Board

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#31

Post by mac01021 » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 6:01 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #10

Progressive consumption tax is ridiculous. It requires your tax rate at the point of sale to be dependent on all your purchases to that point in time. That's just not practical. Or it may require every purchase you make to be recorded for tax-time when you then pay the taxes. Either way it requires the government to know every purchase you make, or at least the price. This is not something anyone should want.

One way to implement a consumption tax is to measure everyone's income and then subtract out whatever they've saved in the bank or otherwise invested.

That doesn't mean such a tax is not ridiculous for other reasons, though.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#32

Post by _m8fo » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 6:02 PM UTC

kyleschiller wrote: post #22

_m8fo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it does. Physics -> (Chemistry -> Biology -> Physiology -> Psychology) -> Ability -> Success.

Yeah, I don't think the article is trying to make a claim about the existence of physical causality, it's about what attitude we ought to take to take.

Maybe. The article is talking about luck, without talking about what exactly "luck" is. If luck is defined as favorable circumstances, then the article really is talking about initial conditions cascading into good opportunities. I believe talking about the good opportunities without talking about the conditions that gave rise to them is harmful. It creates the illusion that you can just create the good opportunities without the appropriate conditions.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#33

Post by ergothus » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 6:02 PM UTC

My father and I have somewhat productive political conversations: He's fiscally conservative, I tend towards the liberal side of the scale.

Drilling in to find what we really disagree about, it seems to boil down to two concepts: (1) I view success as a matter of luck that your effort can make better or worse. He views effort as the single most important deciding factor in success in life (2) I'm willing to tolerate an amount of "unfairness" in people getting help they "don't deserve", while he finds this very offensive.

I honestly feel that if considered luck to be a larger factor and effort to be a lesser factor, his political stances would change pretty dramatically. (same applies to me in reverse). I wonder how much the social willingness to accept luck as a factor impacts popular political positions. (Perhaps not much, as the author in the article promotes a consumption tax, which is generally seen as more regressive)

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#34

Post by bostonpete » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 6:03 PM UTC

slitaz wrote: post #4

"luck" is not a good choice as a word here. They mean something like a chaotic event that ended up being positive to them. Also, just waiting for such a positive chaotic event to happen to you, is probably not the best strategy. If you make good social interactions that you maintain, then those positive chaotic events are more likely to come your way.

> "luck" is not a good choice as a word here. They mean something like a chaotic event that ended up being positive to them.

Isn't that what most people mean by "luck"?

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#35

Post by kyleschiller » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 6:03 PM UTC

jeffdavis wrote: post #20

Just like when people are trying to sell you something, they call it an "investment"; people trying to implement government spending programs call it "spreading opportunity". Some government programs really do spread opportunity, but that requires close examination and criticism; I don't just buy into it because a politician calls it opportunity. Is college an opportunity? It can be a huge opportunity to get ahead in…

Yeah, probably one of the strongest arguments for both Progressive Tax and Basic Income is that the current system is deeply broken, and despite doing a lot of good, carries a solid amount of waste along the way.

I do think it's important to remember that a lot of mess of social spending programs happened, at some point, for good reason. You can give everyone $12k/year, but it won't take long for people in SF to ask for an extra housing subsidy to counteract real estate prices, followed soon by rallies against eugenics when lower income Americans don't get extra children subsidized.

I'm not at all against social spending, or necessarily against any of it's alternatives, but as a software engineer, I sometimes have difficulty remembering that problems like this don't exist in a closed system and resist top-down design.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#36

Post by kyleschiller » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

aresant wrote: post #12

Ben Franklin has a great line on this topic - "Diligence is the mother of good luck." The author illustrates this major point with an example of the "TOP" cellist in the world: "One [cellist] earns eight or nine figures a year while the cellist who is almost as good is teaching music lessons to third graders in New Jersey somewhere. . . The person who is eventually successful got there by defeating thousands, maybe t…

This just pushes the question back one step. How many people have the opportunity to buy a cello at a young enough age to practice enough hours to become the best?

I'm not saying it always ends in luck, actually I just don't think this is the right line of reasoning. Frank's point is about the importance of luck in the real world, but also about taking the appropriate attitude towards it. As weird as it might sound, those two points aren't necessarily related.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#37

Post by tdaltonc » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 6:06 PM UTC

djyaz1200 wrote: post #14

There is a pretty good book that addresses some of the business aspects of this... "Competing Against Luck" by David Duncan and Clayton Christiansen (the same guy who wrote "The Innovator's Dilemma"). I'm not done with it yet but so far it goes into some interesting detail about how to reframe everything people pay for as jobs... and that building a successful business is about understanding the job to be done and ma…

I've read the book and the title still makes no sense to me. I was expecting a book about how to 'rectify'(in the electrical engineering sense) chaos in business.

It seems like "Jobs That Need Doing" or "Products Have Jobs Too" would have been much better titles for the book.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#38

Post by crdoconnor » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 6:06 PM UTC

kyleschiller wrote: post #29

dv_dt wrote: post #23

I think this touches upon one of the biggest weaknesses of the current economic system. We systematically waste the human capability of millions of people because the system essentially randomly gives much better opportunity to some over others. Meritocracy somewhat exists but mostly to the extent that people can maximize the opportunity they've drawn as their lot in life. I like the idea of Basic Income, but it's a…

At the risk of sounding too Paul Graham, how much of what you're talking about is due to poverty more than inequality?

Poverty and inequality are two sides of the same coin.

Massive inequality is driven not by productivity but by compounding debt and other forms of rent-seeking. This always spirals out of control eventually leading to poverty, default or both.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#39

Post by baldfat » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 6:07 PM UTC

osti wrote: post #13

Raphmedia wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather believe in Existentialism. I come from a very poor background. Much of my childhood friends are either dead, in prison or working minimum wage. If I would have "acknowledged" the truth, like most of them did, I would have ended in the same position. Humans are not animals. We can evolve of our own free will. Statistics do not apply at the individual level.

And what caused you to not acknowledge the so called truth. Determinism implies that even this acknowledgment was beyond your control, even though you feel like it wasn't.

May I quote from Jean-Paul Sartre?

"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be."

I believe I understand the arguments against freewill, but that doesn't answer the question of why people fighting for purpose and meaning.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#40

Post by supremus_58 » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 6:07 PM UTC

kyleschiller wrote: post #29

dv_dt wrote: post #23

I think this touches upon one of the biggest weaknesses of the current economic system. We systematically waste the human capability of millions of people because the system essentially randomly gives much better opportunity to some over others. Meritocracy somewhat exists but mostly to the extent that people can maximize the opportunity they've drawn as their lot in life. I like the idea of Basic Income, but it's a…

At the risk of sounding too Paul Graham, how much of what you're talking about is due to poverty more than inequality?

wouldn't poverty largely be a product of inequality?