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The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

joshuaballoch.github.io

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Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#181

Post by FabHK »

giardini wrote: post #118

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 acro…

Robert Frank's book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy is another enjoyable book about this (and supports your argument for some form of government redistribution).

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#182

Post by FabHK »

creep wrote: post #175

As 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.

That reminds me of the Japanese fellow who was in Hiroshima when the bomb hit, survived, returned to work in his home town Nagasaki when the second bomb hit, survived, and lived until 2010. Talk about bad luck and good luck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#183

Post by FabHK »

melancholique wrote: post #158

Why authors of article assume that talent is distributed according to Gaussian function? Am i mistaken or authors didn't give any references to researches on this assumption?

They don't assume that real world talent is normally distributed. It's just a property of the agents in their model that makes it more likely that they can take advantage of good luck, "talent" here is just an evocative name.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#184

Post by Rescis »

tinymollusk wrote: post #163
Rescis wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) They haven't I'm a bit confused by this statement. In the vast majority of cases where an individual purchases something, they do it because they want it (food is purchased because the body desires food, phones are purchased because the brain likes communication and connectedness, medical care is purchased because people realize it helps them, etc). Therefore, for someone to have accumulated a large amount of pr…

Your second paragraph is problematic. First, truly free markets are unlikely to be an accurate statement of where someone earned their money (e.g. the US is nowhere near that, so that excludes every wealthy American). Second, the use of earn -- does that exclude people who extract a large amount of money, like Martin Shrekli? Finally, it does not address the elephant in the room, that most people who have lots of mon…

1) I agree that free markets are not where most people earn there money, but to me it seems like that is something we should strive for by reducing and stopping interference in the market by government regulation.

2) Martin Shkreli is an interesting statement (assuming you are referring to his raising of drug prices, not what he was prosecuted for). I strongly believe that the only reason he was able to raise prices so exorbitantly is because of interference in the market place both on the grounds of copyright laws and the stringent drug testing that is required. If something like google were to suddenly start charging five thousand dollars to use the site, people would quickly move to a competitor (or, if there was no competitor, someone would create one). This is not possible in the drug industry due to government regulation, so although what he did was wrong, it is not something I think can be solved with more laws.

3) Sure, most people have inherited there money, but in a free market someone up the line most certainly earned it. Assuming you don't believe that there is something that makes one person more special than another, who is holding money is irrelevant to whether or not it is fairly earned.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#185

Post by giardini »

sdhgaiojfsa wrote: post #100
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.

Be that as it may, this blog is about a specific paper and the strength of its claims. I don't really think puritanism has anything to do with whether this paper's model or inferences are sound.

But puritanism's remains are responsible for many of the opinions critical of the paper's conclusions. Just ask a few wealthy persons about this paper or others like it: they are usually fiercely critical and have bought completely into ideas that support their "blessed" position in society.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#186

Post by eksemplar »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #115
eksemplar wrote: post #52

Earlier 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.

Classic democracy doesn’t include human rights. If you’re not a male citizen you have no right to be heard, and even then, the majority have the right to execute or exile you if they find you annoying.

Modern democracy is build on a core belief that everyone is created equal and that we are each responsible for our own lives. Something which extremely similar to the core thesis of Lutherism which laid the foundation for the renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment that eventually led to modern liberal democracy.

It’s a lot more complicated than that of course, but this is the Internet not a PhD. :)

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#187

Post by jstanley »

maxxxxx wrote: post #178
jstanley wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What, so the other businesses should be allowed to remain profitable while screwing over their customers on price even after a competitor comes along who can do a better job? Please, this is what markets are all about.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#188

Post by KozmoNau7 »

amelius wrote: post #124
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could also mean "I simply enjoy driving cars with a lot of power and/or comfort, because the sensations are inherently pleasurable to me". I love driving cars. Not to show off or because of prestige, I just really like driving, for some reason. I don't care if it's a 300hp grand tourer or a 60hp supermini, it's the act of driving that's enjoyable to me personally. Not everything is a matter of "keeping up with the…

Yes, I stand corrected. It's difficult to predict how people would think/live in a Utopian society. Perhaps cars wouldn't be owned, but borrowed/rented whenever people would want to have an experience like you described.

We could certainly do that today (and we are, on a limited scale), and I think it may happen with electric cars surprisingly soon.

Certainly for those of us living in larger cities, a subscription service would make sense, so you would have to worry a lot less about parking. Especially with self-driving cars that could deliver themselves when needed.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#189

Post by KozmoNau7 »

aje403 wrote: post #106
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #76

Earlier 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. A very large portion of those people have contributed more suffering to the world, and continue to do so through the continued exploitation of the worker class and lower classes.

Should probably bow out after this one; I don't think there is much room for rational discussion for my viewpoints here. I agree that walmart is a piece of crap, but you don't really know what suffering is. Please ask your grandparents what options their grandparents had in life. If you have some notion that corporations that try to profit are a blight on society and that their abolition will lead to some dream world…

Wow, that's one hell of a strawman.

I am absolutely not against people wanting to run a business for profit. In that sense, I am a rather pragmatic socialist libertarian, if you will.

However, I am strongly against businesses that exploit their workers by underpaying and overworking them.

Re: The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood

#190

Post by KozmoNau7 »

aje403 wrote: post #142
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people, who frankly, are jealous of others and want more. That's always what it boils down to, isn't it? The one argument the hardcore libertarians and FYGM people always fall back to is "well, you're just jealous. If you just worked harder , you could afford it too", which has been shown again and again to be blatantly false and a clear example of a just world fallacy. Luck plays an enormous part in how successful…

Frankly, I think it is often jealousy. It is not blatantly false that if you work harder, take a second job, take night classes, save and start a business, that you can rise up in the social ladder and provide more opportunity for your children. I have some personal biases here. There are very different shades of privilege here. The bank director may have been the son of an immigrant, had straight A's in school, got…

It is not purely luck, it is also about being in the right position and circumstance to make use of lucky happenstances, and actually about being in a position in life that makes those lucky happenstances more likely to happen.

Luck doesn't do much if you can't act on it. Conversely, lucky breaks happen more often to people who are able to expose themselves more to the possibility.

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