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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

#141

Post by thaumaturgy »

coldtea wrote: post #122
thaumaturgy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that inequality is necessarily the thing to be fixed. I suspect that when most people talk about inequality, what they mean is, "a few people are doing really good and a lot of people are doing really bad". If you can lessen or remove the "doing really bad" part, whether through UBI or some other means (progressive taxation to fund other programs, whatever your ideology prefers), then statements of inequ…

> I suspect that when most people talk about inequality, what they mean is, "a few people are doing really good and a lot of people are doing really bad". If you can lessen or remove the "doing really bad" part, whether through UBI or some other means (progressive taxation to fund other programs, whatever your ideology prefers), then statements of inequality start to mean just "a few people are doing really good" and…

There's a scale of ideology here from, "everyone should be guaranteed to get exactly the same as everyone else regardless of luck and effort" to "life should come with no guarantees and everything is down to luck and effort".

It sounds like you're further to the left of that scale than I am, which is fine, except that it's harder to convince people to the right of me on that scale to move that far left.

Sometimes it's better to suggest small changes.

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

#142

Post by iza »

andrewclunn wrote: post #123
andrewclunn wrote: post #58

A lot of this "luck" can be traced back very easily to causes like "had two parents who gave a damn" or "had enough to eat eat growing up." The people pushing this narrative that you're not really responsible for your failure / success want it both ways. They want to make you admit that you benefit from living in a peaceful stable society with infrastructure, while also not wanting to hold parents accountable for hav…

Though this is really just giving people the opportunity to down vote me twice, I feel the need to expand on this: The war on self-determination, and promotion of the notion that you're not really responsible for your lot in life is an ongoing narrative. Basically the introduction are always the sanest arguments: There's a history of racism / sexism that people are still struggling to overcome. The benefits of having…

I recently saw a very enlightening video on the subject of individualism versus collectivism that somewhat echoes your thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNB38U04sNM

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

#143

Post by crusso »

hx87 wrote: post #75
kyleschiller wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Government can certainly mitigate the effects of luck while simultaneously rewarding effort.

Examples?

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

#144

Post by awa »

criddell wrote: post #104
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…

Cory Doctorow pointed to an interest article that described the subsidies that flow to wealthy households: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/03/low-income-us-households-ge... I wonder if your father thinks of his mortgage interest deduction as an example of receiving help he doesn't deserve?

I am not sure why mortgage interest deduction gets such a bad rap. It allows a lot of people to be able to afford homes which they couldn't otherwise. It helps the housing market/industry and banking industry.

Apart from that a lot of other countries has it. If I had to change something I would actually add a rental deduction to help those who can't afford to buy housing instead of removing mortgage interest deduction.

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

#145

Post by emiliobumachar »

supremus_58 wrote: post #40
kyleschiller wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They're definitely not one to one. Poverty has been decreasing worldwide, but inequality has been increasing.

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

#146

Post by mindcrime »

wazoox wrote: post #98
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…

In other words, he believes in a just world, in providence, and you don't (in other words, he's religious and you're not). I think this is the crux of most of these arguments.

Being religious or not has nothing to do with believing that effort is the dominant factor affecting success. I'm an atheist who also believes that effort reigns supreme. That doesn't mean that I don't believe that what we call "bad luck" can't come along and derail you, but I firmly believe - based on my own experience - that you "make your own luck" through effort and the decisions you make.

I grew in dirt-poor in white-trash / redneck-ville rural NC, but I've managed to work my way into a pretty good career in software development, living in a nice neighborhood in Chapel Hill. A lot of my high-school peers are still living in bumfuck, doing drugs, working fast-food, whatever. Was I just "luckier" then them? I don't think so. I think the primary factor is that I was more ambitious, harder working, and made better decisions. And I've had much "luck" along the way... man, it was minor and hard to notice. Because from my subjective perspective, I've busted my balls for everything I managed to achieve.

I still remember working midnight shift waxing floors for a grocery store, leaving work at 6:30am, heading to an 8:00am class (Discrete Math of all things!), suffering through 3 hours of classes, then going and crashing on a couch in the library for an hour or so, then grabbing lunch, hitting my 1:00pm class, then driving the hour home from school, to fall alseep, wake up, and go back to work at 10:00. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Some people will suffer through that shit, some won't. I don't see a whole lot of luck in the equation.

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

#147

Post by Bombthecat »

colanderman wrote: post #103

The article (and some comments here) seem to conflate luck and what I will call lot . "Luck" I define as random happenstance during one's life. You can manage luck. Doing so is the central theme of many board games. You can increase your luck "surface area" by taking more chances. Entire industries (e.g. insurance) exist to manage luck. Your "lot", on the other hand, I define as what you were born with. How you were…

There is an old saying in FPS games: when luck becomes skill.

Basically, you move the luck in your favour. Using the situation at hand for you.

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

#148

Post by mindcrime »

kyleschiller wrote: post #18

Debating the actual importance of luck seems a lot less important than developing the proper attitude towards luck. Pretending luck doesn't exist can lead to arrogance and a lack of empty for people who haven't succeeded. On the other hand, believing that luck controls everything can lead to fatalism. It might seem best to find a happy medium, but being wishy washy about this whole thing just gives you opportunities…

There is no such thing as "luck" really. It's just a word we made up to use in post-hoc analyses in order to justify certain interpretations.

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

#149

Post by Frondo »

kyleschiller wrote: post #42
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 c…

Agreed that the government should reward hard work, but I'm always uncomfortable with the discussion around what is hard work.

Some poor people I know, they work harder than most of us desk monkeys, because they're doing back-breaking labor day after day. Holding down two, three jobs, shuffling around town on the bus to work 60, 80 hours a week for very little money.

This is not even an uncommon story. People working damn hard for not a lot of money.

Is that the hard work we want the government to reward? If not that, then what?

It's just too open-ended, and too easy to overlook a lot of people who work really hard, without really talking about it more.

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

#150

Post by mindcrime »

jartelt wrote: post #126
downandout wrote: post #71

It's certainly true that you need to be very lucky to become a billionaire - generating wealth at that level usually involves tremendous numbers of other people loving whatever business you have decided to create. But if you're reasonably intelligent, at least in the US, it's quite possible to become a millionaire without much luck, through decades of hard work and discipline. Examples: software engineers at large co…

You are ignoring the fact that someone born into a poor family in an inner city like has an underfunded, underachieving public school, overwhelmed and inexperienced teachers, a below average guidance counselor, no role models who have gone to college, parents who do not know anything about applying for scholarships or financial aid, a diet of fast food, and few examples of other people in similar roles who became mil…

an underfunded, underachieving public school, overwhelmed and inexperienced teachers, a below average guidance counselor, no role models who have gone to college, parents who do not know anything about applying for scholarships or financial aid, a diet of fast food, and few examples of other people in similar roles who became millionaires

That sounds like my life except for the inner city part. Substitute "redneck-ville" though, and it's the same basic principle. And I will say that I think the idea that these things mean you need massive amounts of luck to become "successful" (depending on exactly how you define successful) is bullshit. I never had any particular amount of luck that I can identify, relative to my peers who were born in similar circumstances, and while I'm not a millionaire (but I'm still working on it), I've been what most people would call reasonably successful. In my experience, what it takes is mainly insane work ethic, an indomitable attitude, dogged determination, and relentless pursuit of your goals.

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