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

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

#231

Post by kriro » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:16 AM UTC

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…

A slight nitpick but I think the luck you manage in boardgames is risk and there's also the category of uncertainty which you can't manage (because you don't know the probability distribution or the fact that something is possible/could happen at all).

See "Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit" by Frank Knight for a much better explanation of risk vs. uncertainty than what I can muster. I think it's noteworthy that entrepreneurship theory from economics tends to be build around the idea that it is indeed handling uncertainty (and not risk) that yields entrepreneurial profits.

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

#232

Post by fnl » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:27 AM UTC

kyleschiller wrote: post #69

supremus_58 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wouldn't poverty largely be a product of inequality?

In the current system, yes, properly implemented, UBI would end poverty in America while still allowing for massive inequality. It sets a floor, not a ceiling.

Assuming you implemented UBI, and changed nothing else, what would prevent the market from adjusting overall price levels (upwards) until those living only on an UBI again end up below the (now increased) poverty line?

In other words, I believe that without penalizing the upper end, too, things will just "adapt" to define a new lower end, if only the only change is to give everybody a little bit of money. To some extent, Germany has been doing something close to UBI for quite a while now ("Grundsicherung", "Harz IV", etc.). It certainly helped prevent that a few people fall into some nasty global minimum with zero income, so its probably better than not having it. But I don't think that only clamping the lower income end alone had a society-transforming impact in Germany.

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

#233

Post by zouhair » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:45 AM UTC

brutos wrote: post #230

greggman wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen lots of examples of luck. This is not to suggest that tenacious people wouldn't succeed in some way or another but only that their current positions would be different. Some good examples: Ed Catmull in his own book mentioned all the luck he had becoming Pixar. Pixar was a computer hardware division at ILM. ILM wanted to get rid if them. They almost got sold to a computer company (lucky they didnt). They go…

Bill Gates is a good example for OP's lot and luck point: "In 1980, [Mary Maxwell Gates] discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee member and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for…

I would have liked to see what would Gate would have managed to do if he was born in the slums of India not in Seattle, a lawyer as a father and a person in the board of directors of a bank holding as a mother.

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

#234

Post by fnl » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:52 AM UTC

thebspatrol wrote: post #193

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…

Another commenter used the phrase "luck surface area", which I think plays well into the concept that everything is hinged on an element of luck, where harder workers and people with better birthright generally have larger "surface area".

While I agree that you can increase you "luck surface area" (e.g., by taking more chances), that doesn't mean it will help. It implies you also are increasing you "unlucky surface area", so if you "somehow" attract (?) more good/bad luck, you might as well just end up being far more miserable than if you had not. In other words, I don't believe luck to be a variable, it seems much more of a constant that you've been born with.

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

#235

Post by akvadrako » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 10:03 AM UTC

100k wrote: post #107

snarf21 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the biggest luck factor of all, that being how/when/where you were born. Most of us were born in the US into a family. We did nothing to deserve that but it already makes us in the top 1% richest people globally. What would our path look like if we had been born in rural Nicaragua instead? I'm not "woe is me" but I was raised in a super conservative family, taught to avoid risk and that a steady paychec…

This is a big point that Robert Frank makes in "Success and Luck" (the book this interview is about). Being born in a developed country is one of the luckiest things you can have happen to you. He talks about his time in Nepal for the Peace Corps and a man who worked for him, who was one of the most talented people he's ever worked with. He was also illiterate and living in a developing country, so his prospects were…

This is kinda a weird thing to call "luck" though. "You" could also have been born a duck, a 1000 years ago, in the future or in another universe (maybe). But then "you" would have been somebody else and hence, not "you" at all.

In other words, "you" had 100% chance of being you. No luck involved.

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

#236

Post by fnl » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 10:05 AM UTC

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…

If your assumptions were true, then software engineers, medical doctors, or persons with whatever well-payed jobs there are at a given point in time should always end up on the bright side if they are hard working and disciplined.

To that I can counter that I have met many hard working persons with excellent higher education (IT, medicine, engineering, science, no matter) in my life, but then bad luck struck and destroyed it all. Their kid died and they didn't overcome it. They had to flee a country in war and are now 50+ and unemployable. An extreme example a lawyer told me: An entrepreneurial woman with a great company stopped to help a person in an accident; Along comes a crazy car, crashes into all of them, and the woman looses both arms in the incident - now she's in deep dept and the company in ruins. And so forth...

The opposite, good luck, is just as prevalent in middle income strata, too. Take software engineers: There are usually hundreds if not thousands of persons applying for a job. Certainly there are several in most cases that would be a match. But will you be the lucky one who got picked? Etc. The article itself also has some examples, like getting an career boosting promotion earlier than normal. Yet, in the end, all (first and second world inhabitants only, and only if you were not born to some miserable parent(s)!) striving for that job and not being struck by some bad incident might end up just fine. [As I should add: But not doing maximally great either, unless being struck by one or - more likely - quite a few really lucky incidents.]

In other words, luck plays an always present role in all strata of society, not just the extremes. Only, it might not be that obvious right there, "in the middle." But whatever, the whole point of the article is about the extremes, smoothing those cases with exceptional bad or good luck, not about those in the mid ranges doing just fine...

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

#237

Post by fnl » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 10:29 AM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #208

jartelt wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The talk about luck is meant to encourage empathy and understanding. If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful. Some would argue this…

If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful. I'm not saying anything about you specifically, but that sounds a lot like a kind of "anti-…

This thread is very important to the discussion, because it highlights an apparent opposite mindset of the article.

As I posted elsewhere in this thread already, I think the real issue is that the ideas of Robert Frank are not about these "regular" cases in the middle income range at all. (At most, I'd conclude that the interviewer asked questions that would touch persons in that range, too, and who likely form the majority of the site's readers.)

If you are doing OK-ish on the upper end or OK-ish on the lower end of the middle income strata of a Western (!) society, your "lot" should be quite tolerable. And nobody would deny that with extremely hard work and discipline you can move from the lower end of middle income to the upper end of middle income. However, if you are doing really bad and are below the poverty line or really well and are in the top 1% range, that certainly requires a good portion of (possibly: bad) luck. It already starts at conception, with your "birth rights". And the aim of the article (or rather, of Mr. Frank's theories), as I interpret it (them), is pointing that out that we need to find measures how to smooth those extremes, not about figuring out if some middle income person had a bit more or less luck, or if it even mattered.

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

#238

Post by thret » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 10:31 AM UTC

It's hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you've earned. - Frank A. Clark

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

#239

Post by omurphyevans » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 10:33 AM UTC

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…

The Peter Dinklage bit annoys me, as this is precisely the issue - survivorship bias.

I happen to have a few actor friends. All talented, harder working than me, and dedicated to their craft. And no-one is interviewing them because they haven't made it.The talent and hard work pays off because you also get the lucky break.

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

#240

Post by fnl » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 10:54 AM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #102

bryanlarsen wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are three mechanisms for implementing a progressive consumption tax outlined here[1] and none of them involve keeping track of all purchases. I would imagine that Robert Frank also has a sane proposal. 1: https://www.cato.org/publications/cato-online-forum/move-pro...

Those aren't even purely consumption based. Also, the whole thing is an attempt to remove taxes on interest. The author talks a lot about how terrible it is to "tax savings" which we don't do - we tax interest. The problem is if you remove tax on dividends and interest you will split to world in short order into those who have savings and those that don't. Typically people opposed to this will point out that everyone…

I think this part of the discussion is really interesting. After all, this is about discussing an actual solution to the problem of "extreme luck" (good or bad).

I don't see your point, however. The authors explicitly say it should be a progressive tax and that income tax should be removed. That does not include removing tax on capital gains.

So I understand the idea as taxing consumption after it reaches some minimal threshold, and otherwise only tax income from wealth. I don't see how that would affect the lower ranges of income other than that they suddenly would be relived of all tax burdens, and in particular, of their by far highest tax rate: the VAT. I also don't see how that "fucks the middle class" - for them, these changes should be mostly transparent. That is, for them, VAT and income tax will just be called differently, but the overall rate still should be about the same.

The real problem arises with the rich, naturally, because their VAT will suddenly skyrocket. In other words, as the rich and powerful rule the world, this is yet another proposal that can't happen without some pain...