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Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

nautil.us

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

#41

Post by Shivetya »

ergothus wrote: post #33

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…

I would tend to favor your father's position; I'm a libertarian. I put in the context of some are our industries brightest and best have had some remarkable ideas and luck but how many times did it take them to get there? Like an old Ted Turner story about his smart quotes and the remarks of just how many bad ones it took to get there.

the issue with this in society is the ability of people to have enough bad outcomes to arrive at the good one. can we level that playing field or do we first need to find out why so many don't have the drive to try? Do we discourage people too early in life, do we give some the excuse they need to not try?

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

#42

Post by kyleschiller »

ergothus wrote: post #33

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…

I think the disagreement is even more fundamental than that. Even if you consider luck to be a major factor in determining success, there's still the question of what the government should reward.

I'm socially and fiscally liberal, but I don't think it's absurd to think that the government should reward hard work even though luck is more important. It just so happens that you can motivate people to work harder, and can't motive people to be luckier.

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

#43

Post by Raphmedia »

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.

I do accept that there is some "determinism" in life. You do not choose the game, you do not choose the board and you do not choose the pieces.

However, you are playing the game. To say that you have no control and that the game is playing itself is to have "mauvaise foi".

Life might limit your options but only you can make choices.

To wait until life cuts out all options but one is not letting life make choices for you. It's deceiving yourself. No choices are made, options are simply slowly getting removed from you. That's not having no freedom, that's not acting on your own freedom.

Hardcore existentialists will even say that the act of not acting on your own freedom is an act of freedom itself. You are free to let life take all options from you.

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

#45

Post by hx87 »

phkahler wrote: post #21
matthewmacleod wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other approaches though – you could charge a sales tax for all purchases and institute a universal rebate, which would have the same effect with the addition that people underneath the spending threshold would have an effective negative sales tax rate.

That still requires keeping track of all purchases.

Only the consumer needs to do so in this case, not the government, and if you don't keep track of your own purchases, no problem, you just don't get the rebate.

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

#46

Post by jeffdavis »

dragonwriter wrote: post #28
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…

> It's hard to tell the difference between spreading opportunity and spreading results. That's because having an opportunity at time t +1 is a result at time t . You can't spread opportunity without spreading results.

It's a dynamic system and everything depends on everything else. Of course.

But some people have the opportunity at time t-10, another at t-9, ..., t, and then still have no results at time t+1.

Or, labelling a huge category like "college" as an opportunity ignores the details about how good of an opportunity it is versus other things that could be done eith those resources.

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

#47

Post by acchow »

minikites wrote: post #9

I think a lot of people are emotionally unable to deal with a world that is as dramatically unfair as ours is, so they fall back to the childish notion that people who have fallen on hard times deserve it and successful people controlled their own destiny to get there, because the alternative is too uncomfortable to think about.

A lot of people? I doubt it, otherwise we wouldn't have such widespread use of "you're so lucky!".

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

#48

Post by matthewmacleod »

phkahler wrote: post #21
matthewmacleod wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other approaches though – you could charge a sales tax for all purchases and institute a universal rebate, which would have the same effect with the addition that people underneath the spending threshold would have an effective negative sales tax rate.

That still requires keeping track of all purchases.

Maybe I wasn't clear – rebate doesn't need to be connected to purchase amount. A flat, fixed-value rebate serves a similar purpose if it is appropriately set, and individuals who don't meet a particular threshold will receive more money through rebate than they pay in sales tax.

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

phkahler wrote: post #21
matthewmacleod wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other approaches though – you could charge a sales tax for all purchases and institute a universal rebate, which would have the same effect with the addition that people underneath the spending threshold would have an effective negative sales tax rate.

That still requires keeping track of all purchases.

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by _m8fo »

fmihaila wrote: post #30
_m8fo wrote: post #2

I'm a strong determinist. Effort, hard work and skill is irrelevant (any relevance comes from the fact that you're already in your statistical band for expected success and are trying to maximize within that). I believe most of your success is determined before you even take one step on this planet. Step one is acknowledging the truth: your initial circumstances dictate your future. Once this is acknowledged, we as a…

> Step one is acknowledging the truth: your initial circumstances dictate your future. Once this is acknowledged, we as a species can begin focusing on making the initial conditions ideal for everyone. The "we as a species can begin focusing on..." part seems to be framed like a choice. But if the choices of the species as a whole are the weighted sum of the choices of the individuals comprising it, and if the indivi…

There's no way to know what the outcome is until the end. Perhaps all of our suffering is necessary for us to realize something akin to what I said, and then we'll all be elevated.

Also, yes, I do believe our species future is determined. Since no one knows the future, all we can do is hope. Some people think determinism gives rise to fatalism, but I think the opposite -- determinism means everything matters but you (I do see that there's a contradiction here).

There's little downside. I guess we could improve the initial conditions of everyone for nothing :/ [1]

[1] http://www.gocomics.com/joelpett/2009/12/13/

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