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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

#161

Post by kajecounterhack »

Swizec wrote: post #117
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…

I would add a third category: fortune . Lot is what you were born with. Luck is when random things do or don't happen regardless of skill. You can manage it to an extent. Bad luck through being careful and various types of insurance, good luck mostly through participating. Buying bitcoin 3 years ago and selling at great profit now is pure luck. Maybe you influenced the market to grow, probably it was pure luck. Fortu…

nit: seems like OP's definition of luck is roughly your definition of fortune. s/fortune/luck/rg in your post and I think you say the same thing.

Creating a new bucket to qualify things that happen regardless of skill seems redundant with the definition of lot. "Lot" in the context of OP's post happens despite skill.

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

#162

Post by emodendroket »

willholloway wrote: post #53
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…

The liberal view of this issue may have the virtue of being correct, but it's very counterproductive from the individual's standpoint. I know that the ideology espoused on sites such as dailykos.com were very detrimental to personal drive and success in my college years of 18-22. That ideology kept pounding home the idea of the unfairness of the economy, of the lower share of the pie allocated to labor vs capital and…

So your position is that we should just all believe outright falsehoods if it's "useful?"

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

#163

Post by groby_b »

user5994461 wrote: post #155
Bombthecat wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I usually say for FPS: when you've got a lot of luck, that's called skill.

And when anybody else has got a lot of luck, that's called an aimbot ;)

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

#164

Post by matthewmacleod »

phkahler wrote: post #106
matthewmacleod wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now you're talking about UBI - universal basic income, in the form of that rebate. That model doesn't work either.

Sure, UBI is fairly equivalent. Why doesn't that model work?

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

#165

Post by niftich »

nisse72 wrote: post #156

Tangentally related, I find it interesting that we often call people lucky when something very bad happened to them, but they somehow managed to survive the situation or land on their feet. We aren't as keen to describe people as lucky who avoided danger entirely. Lone survivor in a plane crash? Lucky. Took a cruise instead? Meh. Personally I think it's preferable to not be in the crash, than to have survived it.

This isn't much of a leap -- it's the difference between an independent and a dependent variable, of which in these situations, most people have a good intuitive notion of.

Given a disruptive event that happened to the person and they were able to avoid a worse fate that befell others in the same event (e.g. others died in the same plane crash) is more strongly perceived by people as an instance of "overcoming the odds" than when someone did not experience that event at all. By the time the disaster is past the event horizon (e.g. the plane is, say, in an unrecoverable stall and plummeting toward the ground), the odds of avoiding lethal shock, injuries, or dismemberment seems fairly low.

It's perhaps a perversely named 'survivorship bias', where all victims -- survivors or not -- got into that situation as a cumulative result of all of their (and others') choices leading up to that moment, and that altering their plans ahead of time (by deliberately changing travel plans) would have invalidated the conditions required for their participation in that particular event. Interestingly, though, merely "missing the flight" is often considered to be very lucky, despite often not guaranteeing that the outcome would've been identical.

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

#166

Post by wazoox »

mindcrime wrote: post #146
wazoox wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're an atheist, but you somehow believe that the good guys mostly win in the end. I call this religious, no insult intended, I'm speaking of a turn of spirit, not of actual religion. I think that the fundamental philosophical and political dissent lies there, that the irreconcilable point is that: either you think that the world is totally unjust, may crush you even if you're hard working, nice, polite, and let Pol Pot die peacefully in his bed, or you don't.

You want to believe, I dare say, maybe because of all the hard shit you had to go through. But there is somewhere in Aleppo or elsewhere someone who went through all the same hardship as you, and worked hard, and was nice and all, but who died miserably after having being tortured by jihadists or whatever and having seen his whole family beheaded. In fact, there are millions upon millions of people that did everything right but were unlucky to be born in Uganda or Syria or Libya or Bangladesh, and got fucked in the end, like most of the thousands who were drowned in the Mediterranean last year. Luck trumps merit. That's the whole point of the original article.

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

#167

Post by [deleted] »

hx87 wrote: post #116
AstralStorm wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tracking purchases requires time and skill, both of which are often lacking in the poorest. Rich would hire a person to do it. (and also to game the system)

It requires saving and organizing receipts and doing basic arithmetic. Surely even the poorest can do at least that?

[deleted]

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

#168

Post by hueving »

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?

If you're willing to criticize the mortgage interest deduction, are you also willing to criticize property taxes? Both are unfair advantages/disadvantages given to homeowners.

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

#169

Post by wyager »

_m8fo wrote: post #17
wyager wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "determinist" do you mean in the physical sense or some abstract social sense? Because if you mean in the physical sense, that has no bearing whatsoever on the role of hard work.

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

Yeah, that's completely irrelevant. Even if the universe is deterministic, having a particular brain configuration (which we call "work ethic") correlates with being successful later. Determinism or stochasticism has no effective bearing at this high of a level of abstraction.

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

#170

Post by SilasX »

awa wrote: post #144
criddell wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deductio…

>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.

No, it doesn't. The prospect of getting the deduction drives up demand for home purchases and therefore the price (relative to income). If we got rid of it, the same mortgage would take more money out of your income, but you would need a smaller mortgage to get any home.

(The effects don't exactly cancel, of course, but it's not some big dealbreaker like you suggest.)

In addition, it's not unreasonable to make this kind of distinction, between:

1) Free money for failing/misfortune/doing nothing (welfare policies)

vs

2) "Free" money that you have to earn through positive work somehow. (production subsidies, government jobs, innovation awards)

Food stamps and the interest deduction are the same, in being intended as subsidies, but for the the second you at least have to be productive, earning an income, approved for a house, make all the necessary commitments, etc, and then you get some of it defrayed.

That's not to say the distinction is justified, but it shouldn't be hard to at least understand why people would put them in a different bucket.

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