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No More “Insight Porn”

jakobgreenfeld.com

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Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#261

Post by spoonjim »

MilnerRoute wrote: post #146
danaris wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.

Someone once seriously proposed making the final determining decision for who gets into Harvard be based on...a random drawing. (From an oversized pool of qualified applicants.) The idea was students wouldn't go through the rest of their life thinking they'd prevailed in a meritocracy, and had earned and deserved every bit of their future success. They'd always have to acknowledge: some of it was pure luck.

It essentially already is a random drawing... at those acceptance rates, you're getting admitted or rejected because the orchestra needed a flute player, or because the admissions officer was feeling gassy after lunch. Having admissions winnow down the applications to say 3x the class size and doing the rest by lottery just makes the luck factor explicit.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#262

Post by wizofaus »

cwp wrote: post #258
wizofaus wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re-read what the GP claimed. Given the initial conditions of the universe, the probability it might eventually lead to my own existence may well be infinitessimal, but in the context of the probability of me winning the lottery (for example), my existence is already a given.

No, what he was saying was that the probability of you winning the lottery is quite high compared to the probability of you existing in the first place. His point was that mathematicians sometimes try to contextualize these very low probability scenarios so that lay-people don't collapse them all into a single "basically impossible" bucket. They're not wrong, but it's not a useful way to think about whether buying a…

I'll quote: "the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe". That statement is categorically wrong. If you're going to consider the probability of my ever coming to existence in the first place, you need to count it as part of the probability of winning the lottery too. If it had said "the probability of anybody winning" I would've cut it some slack (though the probability that a universe might develop with sentient beings capable of inventing lotteries is still a prerequisite in both cases).

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#263

Post by Firmwarrior »

spoonjim wrote: post #259
deltree7 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expected value is really a dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets. I can't believe even supposedly good mathematicians use it. The next dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets is to compare it with other long odds (lightning strikes, marrying your favorite actor). If you want to play along, the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe. B…

Buying a single $1 lottery ticket is fine. But I see people in gas stations etc. who look like they are spending a very large fraction of their disposable income on lottery tickets. People asking for "$60 of X" when they look like they make $50K a year or less. That's fucking insane and if they make 10000x worse decisions in their life it must be like putting their fingers in the electrical socket.

Yeah, I'll defend buying one lottery ticket, even a few per week, but more than that and you very quickly cross the line between "Fun Fantasy" and "Math Tax"

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#264

Post by npunt »

googlryas wrote: post #251
thenerdhead wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a new idea. Just a new messenger for the modern era. Marcus Aurelius was talking about this thousands of years ago. > At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets…

I think this point about spiders would be more compelling if we actually saw that some spiders were lazy and some were not, and the lazy ones died and the non lazy ones didn't. The fact is that spiders and birds and whatever animal just generally doesn't have the desire to "lay in bed under the blankets". If nature gave us the desire to do so, doesn't that mean it isn't wrong if we're using nature as a guide?

This is a good point if you take the perspective that we are independent of our environment. Our desires and needs are natural, therefore we should follow them.

However, if you consider that we co-evolved with our environment and all of its challenges and constraints, then our desires and how much we feel them are simply the result of optimizing our survival over hundreds and thousands of generations.

E.g. the 'difficulty' of our environment is a 50. We have to have a desire of 51+ to survive: a will to live. The 'lazy' spiders all had Therefore, if we change environments to something much easier to live in, then our desires are kind of vestigial optimizations that may not provide the kind of guidance on the optimal way to survive in the new environment - they may take hundreds or thousands of generations to unwind. Modern civilization in particular has created such a massive shift in challenges and resource availability that it's not hard to find examples of this.

E.g. we have a strong desire to rest even when we don't need it because we co-evolved in environments where rest was scarce (due to need to survive), so when we had the opportunity we took it. Same with food: food used to be scarce, so we needed a strong desire to get it, but now food is abundant and we still have that desire and wind up eating too much.

In both circumstances, the environment was the pace-setter, but thats now changed, so we need to be our own pace-setter.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#265

Post by sebzim4500 »

soulofmischief wrote: post #185
startupdiscuss wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: you had to be kind and nice enough for the former boss to care enough to: - ask you to email - read it and understand what you do - follow up and spend the company's money edit: simplicity

One of my friends went to space and had her life radically changed last year, and the opportunity entirely arose from the fact that she is one of the kindest and nicest people you will ever meet, and if you were tasked with filling the seat on that rocket, she'd be on the top of your list. She got "lucky" in the sense that narrowly surviving bone cancer as a kid gave her a compelling story, but it's everything she di…

I saw the netflix documentary about that mission and Hayley was basically the main character.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#266

Post by yellowapple »

deltree7 wrote: post #237
nickff wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, one extreme example is buying lottery tickets; it's the best way to expose yourself to the potential upside of winning the lottery, yet the expected value is quite negative. That example is quite bracing, but I think it points out that there are many ways to build this 'luck surface', and the expected values of each are probably very different, and likely situational.

Expected value is really a dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets. I can't believe even supposedly good mathematicians use it. The next dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets is to compare it with other long odds (lightning strikes, marrying your favorite actor). If you want to play along, the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe. B…

> the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe.

Is it, though? This claim ultimately hinges on the probability of life occurring in the universe, and that's pretty hard to assess given our lack of encounters with extraterrestrial life.

Once life is established and subject to evolutionary processes, I hypothesize that intelligent life is - barring some mass extinction event preventing it - just about inevitable; evolution will select for greater and greater intelligence until the local lifeforms achieve sapience (and possibly beyond even that, i.e. levels of intelligence we mere apes are incapable of comprehending).

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#267

Post by groby_b »

bombcar wrote: post #50
OrangeMonkey wrote: post #5

I read a story where the main protagonist ran a business who did nothing but provide solutions to people. They would come in, pay a fee, and he would dispense a solution to their problem that would make things better if only the advice was followed. I thought it delightful. A problem I have that I can simply ask for a solution and get it? That would be great. The reason these bad actors exist is that they recognize t…

Another part is nobody wants the real advice, because it's often hard. See how many diet books are sold, and see how few people actually successfully lose weight, even though the advice boils down to "stop eating so much".

It... really doesn't.

Maybe that's what makes real advice so hard - too many people making glib blanket statements on the Internet. Actual advice always targets individuals, and it's never a single thing that it boils down to.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#268

Post by LouisSayers »

TuringTest wrote: post #229
draugadrotten wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class. That's some good insight porn right there!

> That's some good insight porn right there! ...and yet, all poor people know it by heart (unless they were born into a rich family that has just fallen from grace), , because it's totally true. For more good insight: wealthy families know a lot more about how to make money when you have some money. Poor families know a lot more about avoiding the risk of being totally broke from an unlucky event, because they know t…

Somewhat true except for the fact that education isn't fixed. It's a variable that changes.

You might start with little wealth and accumulate education on your journey. Therefore in the early years when you lose wealth it's difficult to accumulate more, but over time it can become easier as you are more educated and experienced.

Having little wealth when young also allows you to live on very little - when combined with an education you can use this very nicely to say bootstrap a product.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#269

Post by LouisSayers »

MilnerRoute wrote: post #146
danaris wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.

Someone once seriously proposed making the final determining decision for who gets into Harvard be based on...a random drawing. (From an oversized pool of qualified applicants.) The idea was students wouldn't go through the rest of their life thinking they'd prevailed in a meritocracy, and had earned and deserved every bit of their future success. They'd always have to acknowledge: some of it was pure luck.

I imagined something totally different when you mentioned "a random drawing".

Perhaps they could submit 3 drawings, one of which would be randomly chosen.

All drawings would be displayed in a gallery, with a critic deciding which they like and which they dislike. A scribe would trail the critic with a notepad, writing down their critiques and informing the applicants why their drawing was declined or accepted.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#270

Post by theonething »

thenerdhead wrote: post #103
rjtavares wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop pretending theses things aren't luck? Sure, there's merit involved - but that's a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. There's a million competent people having basically the same drive and capability. The thing that makes a difference is luck. Period. Please note: this doesn't mean that succesful people don't deserve the success - most times they do. It's just that there are many more people, equal…

The word fortunate includes an aspect of luck. Successful people are successful because they put themselves out into the world to expand their fortune. They seize common opportunities and make them great. Those opportunities come back around like the original comment. The whole idea of "building one's fortune" or having a "fortune be told" instills in the idea that your actions are what influences your chance of bein…

What if your actions are also a byproduct of luck?

E.g. if one is born retarded or with another mental disability, that prevents them from the actions that increase the chances of luck occurrence. A less extreme example is a person born with dysthymia who possesses less of the mental energy required to put themselves out there to expand their fortune and become successful.

Conversely, if one is lucky enough to be born with high innate intelligence and drive, coupled with a good upbringing and role models, they will more likely engage in actions that bring about luck and success.

One might argue that in many cases, people are not beholden to their genetics/circumstances and can rise above them. A dysthymic person can put forth the effort to get the help they need. I might argue that even this is a byproduct of luck in that the person was lucky enough to not have an incurable form of depression and also was lucky to have access to the resources to overcome it.

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