Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

joshuaballoch.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 196 posts

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#111

Post by Helmet »

spicymaki wrote: post #44

America's aversion to the role of luck is based on the Protestant work ethic. There is no chance and everything is predetermined by God's grace. God's grace is demonstrated by hard work, frugality, and discipline. There is a concept of double predetermination where you already need to be saved to be saved. Which means the poor is poor not because of chance, but because they lack God's grace.

Well, you know, the Protestant notion of predestination is something quite interesting. I think that it's very pure in a sense, in that it strips away the sort of material or "transactional" nature of faith.

Good acts don't guarantee you a place in the afterlife - they stand alone, whole in and of themselves, giving them a moral dimension outside the bounds of faith. It's not that your fate is predetermined, which it is, but more importantly, you don't KNOW what the predetermination is.

I won't digress since I don't know if HN is a good place for a discussion of the metaphysics of predestination, but it's something very interesting to think about.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#112

Post by sgift »

MadSudaca wrote: post #103
aerique wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convenient.

Excessive belief in luck seems more convenient to me. At least by trying to work hard you're taking responsibility for yourself.

"Excessive" - maybe. On the other hand 'taking responsibility for yourself' leads very fast to the just-world fallacy when applied to others: People don't deserve help, if they worked harder they would have reached their goals.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#113

Post by beersigns »

I generally agree we are products of the environment/circumstance we are born into but it's left to your free-will and choice as to how to best persevere in that environment. I've always viewed talent as the tool that enables you to make the best of the environment you are placed in. Chance/opportunity is not a equally distributed resource but by working hard/efficiently you prepare yourself to make the best of the opportunities you are presented with in life. No one is immune to sheer bad luck but if you did everything you could to set yourself up for success, you shouldn't be derided for it.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#114

Post by noelwelsh »

enoch_r wrote: post #86
noelwelsh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research suggests that intelligence (which is difficult to define) is not better than being born into wealth. Exhibit 1: "intelligence is a powerful predictor of success but, on the whole, not an overwhelmingly better predictor than parental SES or grades." https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2007-strenze.pdf Exhibit 2: You can also look at measures of class mobility, which suggest that the rich are staying rich, and the p…

Er, the quote for exhibit 1 actually suggests that intelligence is a better (but not "overwhelmingly" better) predictor than parental SES ("being born into wealth")--and reading the paper, that's in fact the correct interpretation: > Meta-analysis demonstrated that parental SES and academic performance are indeed positively related to career success but the predictive power of these variables is not stronger than tha…

If you've read it in depth, did the paper look at causality at all?

There is evidence that poverty causes a drop in intelligence (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/poverty-intelligen...) If this is the case then a correlation between intelligence and wealth is not necessarily indicating that intelligence causes wealth.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#115

Post by fjsolwmv »

eksemplar wrote: post #52
spicymaki wrote: post #44

America's aversion to the role of luck is based on the Protestant work ethic. There is no chance and everything is predetermined by God's grace. God's grace is demonstrated by hard work, frugality, and discipline. There is a concept of double predetermination where you already need to be saved to be saved. Which means the poor is poor not because of chance, but because they lack God's grace.

This is true, but the root of modern democracy has its birth in the same line of hard working and responsible way of living humbly.

What is modern vs not-modern democracy?

Romans and USAmericans both owned slaves.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#116

Post by projektir »

pcurve wrote: post #87
mapcars wrote: post #2

I'm not quite getting how can you put talent vs luck, when talent is based on luck you got from your genes, parents, environment etc. I see it as the same thing.

There's an old saying that goes something like, whether you will be successful in life or not will largely be determined by the following 3 things in the order of importance. 1. What country you were born. 2. What teacher and friends you end up having. 3. Your parents. ($, gene, personality, parenting) Of course, I would add just random luck as 4th factor. None of these, you have any control over. We're all here most…

0. What species you're born as.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#117

Post by fjsolwmv »

pron wrote: post #17
naasking wrote: post #10

> It could be that the results were built into the model’s design. Every true mathematical proposition is a tautology. I don't find this point particularly convincing. As long as the model's predictions match reality in interesting ways, it can lend possible insights on why reality might have certain characteristics. > Like getting an improbable series of heads when flipping a coin long enough, improbable clusters of…

I completely agree with everything you've said. I think that an interesting way to gauge the accuracy of the model without doing major empirical research is to create models where talent is the decisive factor, and then compare which model's assumptions better capture what we know about the world. My guess is that for a variable to be a decisive factor, it must correspond to excessive control over others, thus not ma…

"empirical research" would be sociology, which a contrarian would reject out of hand.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#118

Post by giardini »

Instead of wasting time on a (rather biased) critique, read the original paper:

"Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure" by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, A. Rapisarda

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068

Are the rich wealthy because they somehow earned it? Examination reveals that this is not true and that the most extreme cases of wealth accumulation (which show a surprisingly consistent pattern across cultures) are attributable more to luck than to skill. Mark Buchanan examines this in his excellent book "The Social Atom" (pp.172-174):

https://www.amazon.com/Social-Atom-Cheaters-Neighbor-Usually...

A reference from that book:

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Mezard, "Wealth Condensation in a simple model of economy":

https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0002374

See also Christopher Jencks, Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 1972) which focuses more on the effect (or non-effect) of education on income:

https://www.amazon.com/Inequality-Reassessment-Effect-School...

If extreme wealth is largely due to luck then I see no reason why government should not lop the "lucky" portion off for its purposes. Of course there will always be argument as to precisely where the line is drawn between luck and skill.

Finally we must not forget bad luck, which makes fools of us all. Just as there are those who are super-wealthy due to luck, there are those whose livelihood has been destroyed by luck. I do feel an obligation to help them back onto their feet.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#119

Post by projektir »

xer wrote: post #42

From my experience you can increase your luck in life by exposing yourself to more choices. This can be something as simple as having saved up money so you can quit your job whenever you want to. That in turn gives you the "luck" to get a better job if the opportunity presents itself.

> This can be something as simple as having saved up money

You need a huge amount of luck before you can even start doing this.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#120

Post by ythn »

spicymaki wrote: post #44

America's aversion to the role of luck is based on the Protestant work ethic. There is no chance and everything is predetermined by God's grace. God's grace is demonstrated by hard work, frugality, and discipline. There is a concept of double predetermination where you already need to be saved to be saved. Which means the poor is poor not because of chance, but because they lack God's grace.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater...

Yes, we need to get rid of poor shaming, but that doesn't mean we should also get rid of the culture of hard word, frugality, and discipline.

Post reply on HN