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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

#241

Post by csomar »

greggman wrote: post #221
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'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…

Interestingly, most of your examples are about exposure rather than luck. These guys weren't picked at random. If he wasn't flying (not everyone gets to fly and layover at O'Hare, and probably the executive lounge), he would not get the chance to make the connection.

I always assumed that Startups at Silicon Valley are neither lucky nor skilled people (or the most skilled/fit people for the job to be correct). They just happen to be in a place with strong exposure to Capital.

If you are smart, have lots of experience, and hard-working; but lack the ability to fly to SV then your odds of getting funded by a VC are slim to none.

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

#242

Post by fnl »

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.

Not necessarily. Just tax things that are not needed for daily life with a VAT that grows progressive in proportion to how far removed from "life support" it is.

For example, tax yacht's and private jets, and fancy cars with some really insane rates, while tax something that is a limited resource but necessary to live with a very low tax rate or none at all. Tax first homes lower, second homes much higher, and third+ homes at insane rates. ASF.

I.e., I really see no need of keeping track of actual spending beyond what we are doing already. Plus, after removing income tax, the IRS only needs to keep track of your capital gains, not your income. So the savings from that in and of itself should bring a boost to the economy.

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

#243

Post by coka »

A few of the commenters here mention meritocracy, and it seems to me that they value it, or think that it is something we should strive for. I would just like to point our that the term "meritocracy" originally carried a negative connotation, with a very elitist endgame[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Early_definitions

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

#244

Post by fnl »

Karlozkiller wrote: post #215

So if I believe in luck I will be more inclined to pay high taxes? I don't think that's how it works. I mean of course people with money who realise not everyone who is poor is poor because they're lazy bums will be more inclined to help a "poor person" than they would if they believed all poor are lazy bums. But does that mean they will accept high taxation? Say I am rich and narcissistic, I believe I'm better than…

If you can't see luck as deciding factor in being extremely rich or poor, your world-view will dictate that hard work and discipline can get you out of poverty. Therefore, there is no need to help other people and the only tax you need to pay is the minimum needed to keep the nation state you depend on afloat. If you see luck as a factor, then you either understand that those with good luck need to give a bit more (=pay more tax) so that those with bad luck are better off, or you are a cruel person and just say "well, unlucky you, go to rot, I don't care." So yes, accepting luck as a factor in life plays a fundamental role, including your (possible) willingness to pay tax. At least, if you posses some kind of empathy.

> Furthermore some people are lucky, some unlucky. This does not mean that no effort but mere luck goes into building an empire. If luck was the only factor then sure, this argument or taxation might hold. But there's a lot more than luck to it, which is much more in the control of the individual.

The point here again is that for the extremes the luck factor becomes dominant over anything else: If you are among the very worst off, you probably didn't just accrue that due to being lazy (or, in fact, anything within your control, assuming you are not somehow mentally handicapped - which is bad luck, again...). And similar for the opposite end: There are a significant number of persons with nearly the exact same abilities and ambitions as the very top performers, so the final "selection" of who gets to be the top performer depends far more on luck than on those skills (as the article outlines, by the way).

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

#245

Post by slitaz »

bostonpete wrote: post #34
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"?

When people talk about "luck", they mean a absolutely random event that cannot be influenced in any way. A chaotic event can become less chaotic by controlling or reducing some of the parameters.

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

#246

Post by mapt »

wyager wrote: post #224
rrrx3 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This definition of "luck" sounds more like "risk mitigation" to me. Luck has a clear and easily understood definition.

It's not just risk mitigation; it's expectimax optimization, which sometimes involves absorbing additional risk rather than just mitigating or minimizing it.

When we examine the path others took to achieve extraordinary success, this isn't even what we're doing.

Instead, we're often looking at companies and people that took outrageous risks that will nearly always fail, and luckily ended up in just the right academic path, met just the right collaborator, entered just the right industry, had nobody else bother to compete with them, had an opponent make a fatal mistake, were noticed by just the right person, avoided the ubiquitous pitfall, et cetera.

Luck has an enormous influence on what actually ends up on top. You can do deliberate optimization, and many of these people/orgs did some, but post-hoc reasoning that everything Amazon or Einstein were doing on their path to greatness must indicate radically greater decisionmaking powers than all others is extremely incorrect, and worse (because we think in narratives) extremely misleading/convincing.

Many times, what got people to the top are high-risk, high-reward options. Buying lottery tickets (or the equivalent).

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

#248

Post by fnl »

charles-salvia wrote: post #101

In the United States, at least, poverty tends to be concentrated geographically in inner-cities and rural areas instead of being evenly spread out. This would seem to indicate fairly conclusively that location and environment affect opportunity and wealth more so than an individual willingness to work hard. In fact, being born into an environment of concentrated poverty like this molds your mental state and perceptio…

May I remind you that luck includes bad luck, too? ;-)

(In other words: the "luck phenomenon" happens at both ends of the spectrum, not just the ones that got or were born rich and wealthy.)

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

#249

Post by FruityCode »

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…

Probably, the difference of opinions from the 1st point is due to different experience. I suppose your father started his career in those great times after the II World War, when the world was developing so much that there was space for almost everyone. So it's that generation of people, who did work hard, but as the circumstances were so favorable, their efforts automatically translated into success. Now, we have to slow down due to increased competition - not only related to the reason indicated in the article, but also to the growth of Asian economies. And this makes people notice that with bad luck your efforts mean so little...

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

#250

Post by saiya-jin »

zouhair wrote: post #233
brutos wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

easy, nothing to write about
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