Was there a particular reason to post the same link within an hour?
Two discussions posted by the new account:
The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
171–180 of 196 posts
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to see your model. Criticizing a model is relatively easy, coming up with something that describes the reality (in this case, Pareto distribution of wealth) yet better is much harder. > As opposed to what? What kind of distribution might you expect? For one thing, they might have expected the result not to be dominated by luck. > It bears literally no relationship to reality, where random massive doublings o…
I don't think that's how it works. A model doesn't become a good model simply because it's hard to or nobody has bothered to make a better one.
> A model doesn't become a good model simply because
I agree, and
> nobody has bothered to make a better one
So bother! I have made 4 comments here and all of them ask the same question. What would you improve and how do you think it would affect the outcome?
Sometimes the simple model is (almost) as good as any in answering a simple question. For example, some people do not accept climate models (and probably never will), ostensibly for reasons that they are not good. I see the opposite - the models have gotten much better and much more realistic in the past 60 years. Yet, the same basic outcome (Earth will warm roughly 3 degrees by doubling CO2) was foretold by very crude models that even don't have the circulation.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Probably means you don't go to jail in 2018 for mean tweets. Or some other modern Nazi line, amirite?
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - Each agent begins with an identical amount of capital. -- nothing like the real world. Not relevant. Part of the main point was that even in the case of equal opportunity/equal starting points , bad luck readily overcomes talent, good luck rewards even the less talented, and so talent isn't any kind of guarantee, contra many people's claims. > - Every 6 months you have the possibility of doubling or halving your…
In their model the only benefit of talent is it makes you more likely to double your wealth given luck. This means that they assume luck is needed for advancement while talent is not. Hence they assume that luck is more important than talent, and it's unsurprising that they see the result. Likewise the power distribution is built in. Power distributions are created by multiplicative laws and the only ways wealth chan…
> This means that they assume luck is needed for advancement while talent is not.
Which is clearly true. You can be as talented as you like, but talent without a corresponding opportunity to use that talent for monetary gain obviously yields no wealth. There's nothing objectionable here.
It's also widely believed that greater talent makes one more successful at exploiting opportunities, and the paper accepts this premise in order to test it.
Now you can quibble that perhaps the random variable governing opportunities is not independent of talent, in that, those with more talent are simply presented with more opportunities. Perhaps that's true.
But the paper actually shows that our world is also consistent with the hypothesis that opportunities are completely random.
> Power distributions are created by multiplicative laws and the only ways wealth changes in this model are multiplication and division. This means they also assume the power distribution they claim to discover.
I think you're looking at this wrong. The power distribution is not the discovery, the discovery is that what we see in real life is consistent with such a simple formulation based on a small number of factors where wealth disparity is largely dominated by luck.
Perhaps that's not actually the case in reality, but we now know that it's absolutely not impossible, which some previously believed.
> Luck surely plays a huge role in success, but something like longitudinal studies where we measure the abilities of children and then follow their outcomes are likely far more insightful.
These aren't mutually exclusive. Modelling and empirical studies both yield insights.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
#175As an anecdote, my friend's dad was once camping with a friend and lightning hit. His friend died, he did not although he, too, was struck by lightning. Years later he won a $5M home lottery.
I consider him to be the luckiest person I know. He has bad luck and good luck quite often, for no reason.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
#176I wonder if this type of analysis if even worth our time as individual people and as society. Will the information it uncovers lead to a better life for us? We all know success is some combination of luck, skill, and hard work. Luck is probably partially dependent upon the other two components (skill and hard work). But by how much, who cares?
If success and well-being is fully determined by luck, then what should I do today?. If it's not, then I'll continue reaching for the stars. I don't think you will ever prove 100% dependence so anything less means you have to try.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's how it works. A model doesn't become a good model simply because it's hard to or nobody has bothered to make a better one.
> A model doesn't become a good model simply because I agree, and > nobody has bothered to make a better one So bother! I have made 4 comments here and all of them ask the same question. What would you improve and how do you think it would affect the outcome? Sometimes the simple model is (almost) as good as any in answering a simple question. For example, some people do not accept climate models (and probably never…
I find this a really flawed logic, just because someone doesn't have an alternative doesn't mean he just accepts whatever is thrown at it. There are many situations where "I don't know" is acceptable.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I'm not sure what to tell you, people who have built organizations that employee thousands of people have contributed more to society than average. If that needs further justification then I'm not even sure how to respond to that." I hear that often but is it really true? Maybe they just have found a way to funnel money to themselves instead of it going to other businesses. For example has Walmart created anything o…
They sold things more cheaply than other businesses could do. That's almost the purest example of benefiting others you can come up with, it's only one step short of literally putting money in their customer's pockets.
In the end they took money out of the pockets of a lot of small bushiness, put a lot of it into their own pockets and also a lot benefited customers. Maybe it's an overall benefit but I don't think it's that clear. It's not like they developed some new technology that opened totally new markets.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has to do with universal commodification. Check out Michael Walzer and 'Spheres of Justice.' He makes the case for a kind of 'complex equality' where power in one sphere doesn't bleed into another. Thus having a lot of money would allow you to buy fancy paintings and a nice car and typical commodities but when it comes to something like healthcare, we'd be better off if money couldn't be used to buy a better versi…
That's a nice idea, although I suspect it would garner much opposition if it were workable at all. One of the main reasons for accumulating wealth beyond a certain point is, I would assume, to gain power :)
Sure, that's the thing about political philosophy, it's all so radical. Still though we can bring in shades of these ideas to our world, just small reductions in the power of wealth on healthcare or education are nice.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
#180Absolute junk science. A negative contribution to net human insight. >The simulations show that although talent has a Gaussian distribution among agents, the resulting distribution of success/capital after a working life of 40 years, follows a power law which respects the ”80-20” Pareto law for the distribution of wealth found in the real world. As opposed to what? What kind of distribution might you expect? Based on…
The model shows that a mix of luck and merit can lead to highly unequal outcomes in which success is only tenuously linked to merit. There are other models yielding similar results, as for example outlined in Robert Frank's enjoyable book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. I don't find the mechanism entirely implausible, but that's a longer discussion.
These models are an important counterpoint to naive "Economism" [1] models (where income = marginal product, thus just and justified and necessary for efficiency), and thus relevant for an informed policy discussion.
[1] See James Kwak's book of that title.