If your game takes more than about 45 minutes, you're playing it wrong.
Free parking doesn't give you a bonus.
Every property must be sold when it is landed on, either to the player who landed on it or in auction.
The supply of houses and hotels is limited.
If you have a situation where no one has a monopoly and all the properties are owned, you have to make trades. If everyone refuses to trade, then you might as well stop because the game will never end, but you should still reach this point within 45 minutes.
The entire game was designed to be bad -- it's trying to show that owning land is evil and that who is rich in life is mostly based on luck.
The winner is supposed to be the person who rolls the luckiest.
Wait, are you saying that in monopoly, the one who rolls the luckiest wins? I think that’s true.
I would like to point out that in real life, that is also the case. The ones who roll the luckiest also win. Think of your birth situation. You didn’t chose it.
Now, is Monopoly teaching anything remarkably useful about real life that could put you ahead? I don’t think so.
It’s a game! Since the strategy is limited, takes a long time, I don’t think it’s a great one.
There absolutely is a takeaway - and it isn’t just that luck is important in winning - it’s that luck is everything.
We like to live under the illusion that we are in control of our lives. We are not. We can set a general course, control this or that small, immediate thing - but so much of what we ascribe to our own success or failure is just sheer dumb luck.
I’ve had some ridiculous, absolutely undeserved successes over the years, I’ve been struck with serious illness out of the blue, I’ve seen friends with so many plans for their lives ahead snuffed out by illness and accident. I’ve seen the class clown rise to high office, and the prodigy work in a chip shop. We make choices, but against a sea of endless variables and influences, they make little difference.
People used to cite the fates, or their god or gods of choice - because they couldn’t explain the absolute randomness of the path of a life. I think you’ll find precious few people who, in their dotage, will say their life went to plan - and that doesn’t mean everyone’s a sad failure, rather that you end up places you never even dreamt of - because we really aren’t in control.
Strange idea. Elon musk started in SA. Surely being born to Harvard professors in America is the ‘luckiest’ play but most of them are not billionaires. The winklevoss twins mismanaging their Facebook idea had a massive impact on their long term success.
The people that are born in first world countries and become radicalised over the internet to the point where they join a foreign fighting force in a third world country are squandering their ‘luckiest’ move of being born. That’s a win??
> Surely being born to Harvard professors in America is the ‘luckiest’ play but most of them are not billionaires.
Most people regardless of their background are not billionaires. Background certainly increases the chances, though.
> Strange idea. Elon musk started in SA.
Strange idea. There are people born into privilege all over the world. '"We were very wealthy," says Errol [Elon's father]. "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe."' 'Errol returned to South Africa with a half-share in a Zambian emerald mine, which would help to fund his family's lavish lifestyle of yachts, skiing holidays, and expensive computers. ... It was that lifestyle, Errol says, that turned Elon into the kind of merchant adventurer who would later break the rules of the motoring business with Tesla, then go on to change spaceflight with SpaceX.'
I'm a little bit disheartened that no one in this thread has linked to actual data... There's a LOT of study on this topic: Social mobility in the US is measurably atrocious.
1) Success is determined by luck. People will complain that one person being more successful than another is grossly unfair.
2) Success is determined by extrinsic deterministic factors or uncontrolled intrinsic factors. People will complain that people aren't doing anything to 'earn' their success - it was in some sense inevitable.
3) Success is determined entirely by intrinsic deterministic factors that are in the control of the individual. More morally palatable, but suggestive that any gradient of accomplishments is actually reflective of a sort of selfish 'technique hoarding' (I'm not quite sure what to call it) by successful people. They should really be forced to share their techniques until everyone is equal.
The underlying issue here in this thread isn't how success is achieved; it is the concept of different outcomes for people. Which is a good philosophical point but not practically useful - nobody can point to a system where equal outcomes have led to anything like the material comforts of a world where a gradient of different outcomes is encouraged. The world simply isn't very fair and we've all got to roll with that.
> being born to Harvard professors in America is the ‘luckiest’ play
Why would that be the luckiest? I would think being born as the child of a billionaire vastly increases your chances of billionairedom than being born the child of Harvard professors. The same goes for being born in South Africa or most any country that is not totally wartorn or sanctioned atm. The son of an African dictator will probably have many more chances at significant wealth than someone born to abusive parents in opioid-ravaged 'flyover country', regardless of the relative economic positions of their home countries.
No, not really. Being able to build and train a talent or skill is all luck. You need time and access and, in general, money to be able to train these things. I'm not sure that a kid that has spotty access to school is lucky enough to build their talent if it doesn't match up with society. Women (and young girls) aren't always even given the opportunity - unless their talents are homemaking and raising children.
An ex I knew got into the 5th highest university in the country starting from a completely average high school, with a broken family after five years out side the schooling system. Was that luck? No, it was a descision made and adhered to over a decade. Other people in her class got teen pregnancies.
Human decision exists and luck is a cop out. Burying meaning and choice in statistics and randomness is giving up at life.
So, she was lucky enough to be able to work, perhaps? Was she able to participate in extracurricular activities (not everyone can). "Broken Family" is used for simple divorce cases or death in the family: These are not death sentences. She was lucky enough not to get pregnant too young, which can basically mean that she could get birth control and didn't have mishaps, which might include rape or incest related pregnancies.
A woman I knew... her son got a full scholarship to university because he played baseball. He never got to finish school - because he wound up having a genetic condition that didn't allow him to play. Your friend didn't have these sorts of health concerns.
It isn't that it is all luck, sure. Yes, she had to work hard. But lots of her luck was already there. She probably wasn't Amish, for example, otherwise she wouldn't have school after 8th grade or something. She wasn't sick. She didn't have cancer. She probably wasn't starving. And so on. Even if she had some of these, you've witnessed an exception, not a rule.
Your parents had some say in the matter, both in whether to have children at all, with whom, how many, when (IOW, under what financial circumstances), and what level of pre-birth testing for catastrophic birth defects they were comfortable with.
From an individual person, looking at what they had agency over, it’s 100% luck. From a multi-generational family or societal view, it’s not 100% luck.
(I also hold the view that some of what is often described as innate talent is also malleable depending on early childhood nurturing, nutrition, and education. That’s luck from the child point of view but not purely so from the family/society.)
Why do so many, like many immigrants, start from nothing and end up very successful if it was just a dice roll? I mean, there's always that factor but it's certainly not everything.
This. There are a lot of immigrants: So many simply aren't rich and never will be, really. I mean, how many migrant farm workers are there in the world? How many work in the fishing industry? How many in restaurant kitchens? Am I supposed to believe they will all be successful? Probably not. I'm guessing that the immigrants started off better than others.
Was able to emigrate is a pretty strong filter in a lot of cases. Was able to immigrate is an even stronger filter. Just gathering the resources to leave is one thing, gathering the resources to be allowed in at the destination can be even harder.
Most of the immigrants I know spent a lot of time or money or both either personally or by their parents to get here. At least recebtly even the ones who left everything behind to start here with nothing at least had some talent at getting things done in beuracracy which is pretty useful.
They don't. Very few people start from nothing and end up "very successful" (by which I take it you mean being rich and influential). You're just forgetting to divide their number by the number of people who start from nothing overall, which is Billions.
You are right that most immigrant rags-to-riches stories that immediately come to mind involve them getting off the boat with a handful of dollars to their name. But they seem to forget the value of the college degree that they carry and the lifetime of high-quality education that preceded their arrival in the US. The immigrants you speak of might not be as poor as you make them out to be.
I do not know if many American families can get access to the same resources for early education if they are not already from families that are economically affluent.
I think it's teaching you something about how society should or shouldn't be designed. Whether this could be said to "put you ahead" might be the wrong way to think about it.
The fantastic book[1] The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic points out that the 3 most-important correlated determinants of financial success in life are, in order:
1. Geography (which country you're born in)
2. Parents' finances
3. Your gender
These 3 explain the vast majority of the variance in income between people. Knowing these 3 facts about a person allows you to predict their income with high accuracy (small 90% confidence interval).
> The entire game was designed to be bad -- it's trying to show that owning land is evil and that who is rich in life is mostly based on luck.
First, the current rules aren't how the game was designed.
Second, the game was designed to show that private capitalist rent-seeking was a bad way to live because someone one and everyone else lost. It was half of a two-part game, where the other part was a socialist version where rents were paid to everyone to share, and everybody won when the poorest player doubled their money.
If Monopoly was designed to be bad, then every competitive game is designed to be bad.
> The winner is supposed to be the person who rolls the luckiest.
Not true. The person who makes the most deals probably wins. This is simple to see mathematically, as each deal is a win-win that benefits the dealmaker more than the other players.
Anyway, most popular kids games are wholly or mostly luck (Candyland, Parcheesi, Trouble, LIFE), and kids enjoy them.
I loved monopoly when I was a kid. Not a young child, mind you - past the candyland age, but definitely at the age of Parcheesi, trouble, and life. I more had trouble talking my parents into playing it with me.
Predetermined luck (luck of the card shuffle) versus luck of a dice roll (luck of events during the gameplay). Two types of luck, though yes they are still both luck.
"If your game takes more than about 45 minutes, you're playing it wrong."
Or different. What takes time to infinity (and is key part to us) are the trades and auction parts. Because everyone, also the ones not directly involved, tries to influence other members decision in their favors. Then you have temporary joint ventures and loans with interest, etc. etc.
Well, quite often the game ends dramatically with aborting, because some felt cheated and others could not take the pressure ...
Acquire is a game about acquiring a real estate empire. It has more strategic depth than Monopoly, and arguably captures the spatial aspects better (or at all). And, most importantly, doesn't drag on as long.
Trump: The Game is actually a good game design, but the branding is, uh, a bit tacky. (If you can get the original 80s printing, it's much more subdued.)
Article title is: How to win Monopoly in the shortest possible time
As for being bad, perhaps a reference to "The site boardgamegeek.com, a database which aggregates reviews from players, lists Monopoly at 18,583 out of 18,591 rated games. The game has an average rating of 4.36 out of 10 from over 25,000 reviews. The lowest ranked game, if you are curious, is Tic-Tac-Toe."
Along with the game rule that the bank can not run out of money.
Though I'm not sure that rule is bad, and if they could run out of money, they would have to add a rule that if it does, all players must give the bank money. Which would make it a bit too real in many ways for it to be fun.
Monopoly is there to mirror real life. In real life banks operating in their own denomination cannot run out of money either - not since 1971 when the dollar came off gold.
Nonsense. Just need to use your imagination. Throughout the game the player can purchase pieces that go on a Risk board.
If the bank goes broke, all players switch to the Risk board, and fight each other until the winner becomes the new banker and forcibly takes money from the losers. Kind of like real life.
Essentially, everybody has a role in a banana republic government. President hands out money which everyone tries to get into their swiss bank account. If the players are not pleased they can start a revolution and it turns into a Risk game. After a revolution the roles can be switched.
interesting and had me thinking on a tangent if banks are more balanced today than 40 years ago and my gut feeling is that they are less balanced today than 40 years ago. Though can't nail exactly why I feel that is the case.
I love this idea of bringing realism into board games like this.
I want to design a hippie anarchist postcapitalism gift economy game to transition into from choosing to stop playing Monopoly. Set the whole game up as usual, but add Jubilee (holiday of forgiving all debt and redistributing wealth) to top of community chest & General Strike (everyone stops working and paying bills) to chance below the top card (to give Monopoly a second chance to redeem itself? :P ), and then start playing the gift economy game.
Oh you could just use Monopoly and change the community and chance cards by making your own. For example a chance card that can turn the spot you are on into a nature reserve - whoever owns that location. Then anybody landing on that would have to forfeit one of their locations to also be a nature reserve. Then change the definition of winning by whoever has the least money left after the whole board is a nature reserve.
So can modify existing games by changing the rules and adding a few homemade cards of your own making.
Not sure what the market for mod kits for existing board games is like or even if one exists, but if you come up with something that your friends enjoy, maybe a kickstart opportunity and worst case, you will have some fun.
I'd rather design it so it's something anyone can play without having access to money for it. I love the idea of getting people to give up land, though I'd probably make it voluntary. Are you familiar with nomics?
I recently picked up Monopoly Deal and while I do have a soft spot in my heart for regular old Monopoly, Deal blows it out of the water. More opportunities for hostile actions. Much faster pace making it just more fun.
Yeah Monopoly Deal is still a terrible game by modern standards but it's far better than monopoly and I've had fun playing it.
You should really try some good board games though. Carcassonne, Catan and Ticket to Ride are the classic good modern board games. I'd also suggest Love Letter (great short card game for 3/4 players), Colt Express, Camel Up (light fun for 4-6 players), Cash 'n Guns (good for parties), or if you want to get a bit more cerebral, Azul and Sagrada are great.
For two players the best ones IMO are 7 Wonders Duel, Patchwork (this is the lightest one), and Battle Line (a traditional card game but you can't play with a 52 card deck, and way better than any other 2 player card game I've tried).
All of those are 10x better than Monopoly Deal, and about 1000x better than Monopoly.
I was looking for this comment and I totally agree. My 7 and 8 year olds love Monopoly Deal as well, highly recommended if you want to introduce kids to board/card games. Another bonus is that games only last for 20-30 minutes.
Monopoly Deal is great. Back in school we used to play it so much we ended up extending the rules to make it last longer. I think our record was 8 shuffles of the deck. If you want to extend your game, you can tweak the number of sets required to win. E.g. make it 2 sets of 2 and 3 sets of 3 or 4 - that should last at least 30 minutes.
I've often played Catan by dealing in futures contracts. "I will give you two sheep for one wood now, and also the next three brick you receive from any source". That practice is quickly banished in every house I've played in. No one thinks it's "unfair" per se but everyone, including myself, believe that it horribly breaks the game.
Not trying to be too nit-picky, but that’s not a futures contract (nor a forward). Neither futures nor forwards require payment up front for the exchange in the future. Futures and forwards are for locking in the price for the future trade, not partially completing the trade in the present and finishing it in the future.
While you can't officially do this according to the rules, I've gotten around this by trading "deposits". In other words, for your trade I might trade two sheep for one wood and one ore, and later trade one ore for three brick. That way there are two separate trades and you're not just giving me brick on a later turn to satisfy a previous trade.
The flip side of this, of course, is that there's nothing stopping you from welching on the deal later, aside from the normal game-theoretic reasons you may not want to screw someone over. So I'm incurring significant risk this way.
Idk how Catan can be mentioned as a counter-example. Everytime I play it's exciting for the first half, then a winner becomes clear and it's no longer fun. The article mentions negative feedback loops but...they're not really there. Sure you can refuse to trade, or place the robber but if someone has a bigger "engine" than you, then every turn they're getting more and more ahead.
Maybe something like YINSH (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YINSH) would be a better counter-example. To pull off the win, you have to deliberately weaken yourself in the endgame, at which point others can catch up to you.
When I played it (4 people game), I would win relatively often initially (before other players started copying my strategy). My strategy was just to buy everything I landed on except utilities and rail stations - I would only buy a utility/station if I wanted to stop someone else from getting all of them (which typically happens much later in the game and often doesn't happen at all) but mostly I would use it as a bargaining chip to trade it for a normal property to complete my set and start building houses (utilities and stations are just bait; you let others complete their own utility/station sets and in the process, you get to complete your own regular sets in the process and build houses). I never understood people who said that utilities and stations were the best things to buy...
You can't build houses on them and they earn peanuts unless you get all of them, but even if you do, they still don't yield much compared to lands that have some houses.
Also, through trading, it's difficult to get all the utilities/stations without giving up something even more valuable.
It's foolish to accept a utility company or station in exchange for one of your regular properties because it will allow someone else to get a complete set and they can start building houses - Once they do that it's game over for you and every other player.
If the players involved don't actively trade, then yes. If the players trade often with a reasonable range of decision-making proficiency, the game is very fun.
For example, just by dice rolling, you could get a lot of properties in the Red, Yellow, Green, or Dark Blue zones. But those properties are very overrated compared to Light Blue and Orange, which offer much higher revenue/investment and much higher landing frequency due to the adjacency of Jail and GO. A game with active trading where one player knows this and others don't is almost completely unrelated to dice rolling.
This is why playing against 3 AI opponents is often more fun than playing against humans.
Trading and haggling is exactly what makes the game fun. Too many people think it's a buy and hold game. No, no! If you're not making Cockamamie deals where you're demanding rent immunity from their tiles for 10 turns, you're missing out on the best parts of monopoly imo.
The values of the various properties are well known, hence the optimal strategy. You tend to learn that fairly quickly (even without looking it up), and there's nothing more to do.
> A game with active trading where one player knows this and others don't
Playing against rubes isn't fun, like being an adult playing soccer to win against kids.
Economics games always rig the rules to achieve the outcome favored by the politics of its creator. Their value as a model of reality is about nil.
Much the same applies to Hollywood movies that dabble in politics and economics. When you're the script writer, it's too easy to get the "correct" result.
I disagree - the hand you’re given, parents, status, genetics, etc pretty much decide the outcomes in reality. Similarly as you’ve pointed out the early rolls decide most of the outcome as well.
How does your theory explain The Beatles, Steve Jobs, Bruno Mars, Thomas Edison, Barack Obama, etc.?
Did you know that the overwhelming majority of immigrants came to America with nothing but a suitcase? I know a modern immigrant who came with a suitcase and recently retired with his fu money.
It's never been easier for someone to get a free college-level education, start an internet business, reach a global network of suppliers, and a global marketplace, for FREE.
Blaming your parents might be fun, but is totally unproductive.
Jobs was raised by two people middle class-enough to adopt, in the middle of one of the most progressive parts of the United States during one of its most progressive eras. He also wasn't harassed by the law for doing illegal things that would get someone a CFAA-equivalent punishment today (he was a huge phreaker, for instance, and made cash off of it before Apple).
Beyond that, I might add, he was in 'audience-testing distance' of Hewlett-Packard back when the namesakes weren't only living, but active, and their company was on top of the world. And he managed to get free parts from one of them, a job, and a pretty important deal of networking, solely by sending Bill Hewlitt a personal phone call as a twelve-year-old. Show me a child in that situation who could get personal audience with, say, Zuckerberg, today. Or Gates. Or any of the Netflix guys. Or anyone running Apple. Or, let's lower the bar, any C-level executive at Microsoft.
[Correction without changing the original text, as it's relevant downthread: The first sentence of this was later shown to be false. The rest, to the best of my knowledge, is entirely correct, though.] Edison grew up in walking distance of a college and was able to take classes there. Patents were also significantly cheaper to acquire in his time. Further, the job that effectively launched his career he got via nothing but luck (someone almost died by chance, he played a role in them not dying by chance, that someone's father gave him a job).
Bruno Mars's success was pretty much entirely because of his family (not to mention, if you don't see how 'growing up in the safest and richest part of a state known for being safe and rich' might play a big role in things, you've got a very contrarian worldview):
Barack Obama's mother was highly-educated and relatively influential (his father as well to both of those, along with his stepfather as to the former), and he went to private schooling as a child.
The Beatles are the only ones on your list who don't have something heavily-significant going for them prior to success.
I respect you a massive amount, but it's really disappointing to see this line of thought coming from someone as intelligent as you. I'm doing really well, myself, but it's not in line with reality to act like reality's meritocratic. There are significant barriers to success for more people than there aren't, and "blaming your parents" is a particularly strange way of phrasing 'structural barriers to opportunity'.
So Jobs was lower middle class, and led Apple to be the biggest company in the world.
You've made my point beautifully.
> made cash off of it
Yeah, a few bucks. So much money that he started Apple by selling his Beetle. A sorry state that probably 95% of Americans are above.
> Edison grew up in walking distance of a college and was able to take classes there.
And you can take MIT classes FOR FREE on youtube!
The word "college" does not appear in Edison's biography by Josephson until after he invented the light bulb. From page 42:
"The path of self-instruction and self-improvement was, for him, prolonged by many detours; even after years had passed, without money, without friends, it was not easy to enter upon the true vocation he already dreamed of for himself. His "university" was the rough, workaday
world; it was nightwork in shabby telegraph or railroad offices during a turbulent era of war and reconstruction; it was made up also of solitude and study in squalid rooming houses. He might have lost his way or gone
downhill, like so many others, in that long-drawn-out, often unhappy interlude of his youth. Yet when these "arduous years" (as he called them) were gone and he had come to manhood, something of iron had entered into him. What he had seen and learned, how he had learned it all, at so much effort, marked him with sharply individual traits of character and mind, setting him apart from those whose youth had been passed in sheltered ease, under wise and solicitous mentors."
I'm going to need to see a cite for your Edison claim that he was a privileged youth.
> it's really disappointing to see this line of thought coming from someone as intelligent as you
You'd have never heard of me if I'd believed that getting somewhere was not under my control, and if I'd believed the endless stream of people telling me I had zero chance.
So Jobs was lower middle class, and led Apple to be the biggest company in the world.
Middle class is different from someone in the actual lower-class, which more Americans are than in the middle.
Yeah, a few bucks. So much money that he started Apple by selling his Beetle. A sorry state that probably 95% of Americans are above.
You're ignoring the 'punishment' aspect of that sentence. The 'cash' comment was meant to highlight that people (brighter people than Jobs, at that) have been driven to suicide for non-commercial unauthorized access to systems, let alone selling ways of exploiting them.
You're also entirely ignoring that access to the brightest, richest, and most-influential people in an industry isn't something your average youth can get in the modern age. Along with the location aspect.
The word "college" does not appear in Edison's biography by Josephson until after he invented the light bulb. [...] I'm going to need to see a cite for your Edison claim that he was a privileged youth.
I double-checked the last biography I've read of him (Conot's, which is exceptional, although you might dislike it), and I misremembered on the count of it being in his childhood that he attended college. However, it was before he invented the lightbulb (citations [1] [2]), and you didn't try to contest that his career's beginning was based on a single lucky event.
And you can take MIT classes FOR FREE on youtube!
You went to Caltech, and talk about it frequently. Surely you realize the value of being able to have a conversation with professors, peers & (especially) the libraries, resources and networking available in universities? Do you see it as just a strange coincidence that a significant amount of people you shared dorms and classes with went on to be incredibly influential?
Surely your view isn't biased in that Caltech was heading a revolution in computing during your years of attendence (mainly at the end of them, where it saw perhaps the single most revolutionary change in how computing was done since it happened), with some of the absolute brightest people in the field? That you and your peers were in spitting-distance of Carver Mead couldn't have played a role in your view (and your/your peers' successes)?
You'd have never heard of me if I'd believed that getting somewhere was not under my control, and if I'd believed the endless stream of people telling me I had zero chance.
I've heard of a lot of people who've achieved little commercial success, and I've heard of a lot of people who achieved little commercial success while also having some of the most impressive technical achievements across the board. I've also seen the reverse; people who've achieved significant amounts of commercial success while having relatively few people knowing of them.
As a counterexample on the extreme edge of things, similar to your examples, what about Terry Davis? He had more determination than just about anyone could claim. He had technical chops as well. He died impoverished and mentally insane. Kildall died rich yet virtually-unknown and heavily-ridiculed.
Oh, here's a good one! Iverson died with incredible technical achievements yet little wealth and little influence. Despite what are arguably more impressive achievements than your own, Iverson is probably known by less people than you are, and his goals were never accomplished, despite a lifelong-dedication to them. I'm not sure how you started out, but Iverson started out poor enough to where he never finished high school.
All things considered, if you're right, then why isn't free software running the world? Stallman's probably more determined than anyone else in the industry, was arguably incredibly-competent at his peak, and...lost, failing at most of his goals.
Chuck Moore tried over and over and over again. Came up with things that could undeniably be called best-in-class, both in the hardware realm and in the software one. Normal guy with no strange habits, intense personality-quirks, or foot-gunning idealism. Born poor in Flint, Michigan. Failed every single time due to little more than luck.
I'm not (nor is anyone in this thread, to my knowledge) trying to claim your success was all luck. Surely it's not. However, I do think there's a significant amount of luck involved for all commercial success, and that individual effort isn't the largest factor in whether or not a person finds it.
I think you're drawing the wrong conclusions. I imagine I can't change your mind, but I'm confounded as to why that's the case. Thanks for humoring me with a conversation, though; I do appreciate it!
As for luck, the details of one's life is luck. But success comes from those who develop a plan, learn what they need to, and execute that plan. Nothing good is going to happen to you if you spend your spare time drinking, if you fritter away your money, etc. Luck finds people who are out there ready to recognize it and take advantage.
> Carver Meade
I've never met him, nor took a class from him. In fact, my degree is in Mechanical Engineering, not CS. I did know Dan O'Dowd, but he didn't think much of me, with good reason. I am not in business nor partnered with anyone from Caltech.
Edison enrolling in a class at Cooper was after he was well established. As for his luck, he put himself in a position where luck could find him.
I know nothing about many of your examples. But I do know a bit about Kildall. Luck came looking for him, and he spurned it or simply did not recognize it. That's on him - the stars aligned for him and he blew it. Gates nearly made the same mistake.
Myself, I could have been a billionaire multiple times. The opportunities were there. I missed them. It's 100% my fault - it's not bad luck.
As for Caltech, many very successful people have come from there. A number of sad failures, too. Caltech provides opportunities, not guarantees. It's up to the students to choose what to do about those opportunities.
I've been around a long time, long enough to see patterns in successful people. 100% of the ones I know do not share your opinion that it's luck. 100% believe they are in charge of their future. They make it happen. They have their sail up when the wind blows their way. I know one fellow who made and lost two seven figure fortunes. This doesn't dismay him in the slightest, he's cheerfully working on his third.
I can guarantee you that these people are a lot of fun to be around. They're always off doing something exciting. Sometimes it blows up in their face. Sometimes it's wildly successful. It's always fun, though. They're always on their grind. None of them watch TV.
Ya know what's cool? Taking responsibility for your fate is empowering. It means you can do something about it. A piece of advice - the next time something bad happens to you, instead of blaming fate, take a good hard look at what decisions you made that got you into that pickle. Learn from it, and don't do that again.
For example, I have poor genes for teeth. It's a constant struggle for me, and unfair that other people do nothing and have great teeth. But by the time most people are my age, they've lost a bunch of teeth. I've lost one. It's because I constantly pester my dentist for how I can take better care of my teeth. If I didn't I'd be wearing dentures. It's a choice I make.
(Sorry for the late response; had to sleep and then forgot about it.)
Isn't it?
I don't think so. Windows and Mac rule the desktop, proprietary Android and iOS rule the mobile space. Your average person's computer is running more proprietary software than not, and Stallman's goal was always to get the average user's computer free of proprietary software. Even Web browsers are proprietary for your average user, and it's impossible to have a spec-compliant one with only free software.
As for luck, the details of one's life is luck. But success comes from those who develop a plan, learn what they need to, and execute that plan. Nothing good is going to happen to you if you spend your spare time drinking, if you fritter away your money, etc. Luck finds people who are out there ready to recognize it and take advantage.
Plenty of people don't drink, waste currency, (to cite a later example of yours:) watch television, etc. I don't think this is as common as it used to be, though I'm not sure what modern equivalents are.
Would you find it fair to say that 'success comes from those who develop a plan, learn what they need to, execute that plan, and have luck on their side'?
Caltech provides opportunities, not guarantees.
Certainly. Would you agree that most people do not get the substantial volume of opportunities the average person at Caltech during the late 1970s received?
Ya know what's cool? Taking responsibility for your fate is empowering. It means you can do something about it. A piece of advice - the next time something bad happens to you, instead of blaming fate, take a good hard look at what decisions you made that got you into that pickle. Learn from it, and don't do that again.
I'm doing more than fine myself. I just don't agree that 'none of it's luck' is an accurate way to look on this.
I've been around a long time, long enough to see patterns in successful people. 100% of the ones I know do not share your opinion that it's luck. 100% believe they are in charge of their future. They make it happen. They have their sail up when the wind blows their way. I know one fellow who made and lost two seven figure fortunes. This doesn't dismay him in the slightest, he's cheerfully working on his third.
I've seen my share of unsuccessful people. On average, they don't seem substantially different from the examples you cite as successful in terms of mindset or determination.
> Iverson died with incredible technical achievements yet little wealth and little influence.
Technical achievement by itself is not good enough. One must also be good at business and marketing. I know nothing about Iverson, but I know many people who are technical geniuses but refuse to deal with the necessary business and marketing aspects. They often wind up angry and bitter. Is that bad luck? No. It's refusal to deal with how things work. It's a choice. Nobody gets lucky in business without learning how to do business and marketing.
Learning business and marketing skills improves your odds, it offers no guarantee. But avoiding learning and applying those skills makes your odds very remote.
The genetic argument doesn't really hold much water. You've got a lot of great ground to argue on, using something that's as contested as an argument in genetics isn't worth it when your argument can stand on its own merits.
I’m not sure what your examples have to do with anything. Do you think people can will themselves to success independent of their circumstances? It’s obvious factors outside of your control determine 99.99% of your outcomes.
Literally all the data agrees with me here. Don’t know what you’re arguing for exactly. That some people get lucky and some of those lucky people worked hard?
I just quoted several data points that did not agree with "all the data".
If they can succeed, why can't you?
I also know a Microsoft executive who didn't attend college, and I'm not sure even graduated from high school. His father owned a hole-in-the-wall store. Fortunately for him, he didn't listen to "it's all luck".
Most of the people I know don't fit into your "it's all luck" data.
For all the people who think it's all luck being a CEO, how many have even read a book on how to run a business?
We can disagree what respective weights ought to be assigned but its pretty clear that it circumstances favor you sufficiently your trajectory is high regardless of merit. If your Merit is high enough your trajectory may be high regardless of merit.
I don't think anyone disagrees much even though passionate arguments are passed by all.
The thing is that only a minority are gifted by circumstances and most people are neither worthless nor extremely worthy. The merely average are bound for average lives at best in most cases and often for lesser lives depending on how other circumstances of their lives play out.
When people say that life is unfair, which it is, and you say but look here is a list of a minority of worthy who made good despite middling or worse circumstances as if this itself were a refutation you are aren't even addressing the same argument, let alone refuting it.
For the record. The average small business owners salary is 66-73k in the US. By contrast the median individual income is 40k. A middle class individual whose father owned a "hole in the wall" had a family that probably had more to start with than 70% of their fellows. This example is itself a demonstration of your lack of perspective.
You literally think someone who started off better than average started out with substantial disadvantages.
It's not worth arguing with a frequentist mindset to success. It is clear that better starting positions in life lead to better outcomes. It's even unfair and getting worse. This isn't genius level analysis.
The issue is that using averages, making blanket statements, and dismissing exceptions to the averages as pure luck and statistical happenstance is a pretty common form of frequentist bias and leads to even worse policy, if used as justification for a remedy.
Exceptions are routinely waved away as statistical noise or survivorship bias, rather than taking a more nuanced and Bayesian look at the exceptions.
For all the libertarian bias Hacker News is accused of, this particular issue is exceptionally neoliberal/socialist in nature and persists on the site for some odd reason.
Better starting positions lead to better outcomes on average, sure-absolutely. Some of those better starting positions are conferred by the sacrifices of those who came before.
None of that matters much in terms of what the individual should do in response. I wrote a shitty attitude college financial aid application essay saying how I intended to use my college education to “get rich enough that my kids wouldn’t have to write college financial aid essays.” That was 32 years ago and I still remember the fight it caused with my parents who were doing everything they could to help generation N+1 do better than generation N while I was spitting in their face in essay form.
Just like it’s hard to deny the benefit of coming from means, it’s equally hard to deny the benefit of dedicated, concerted, well-directed effort in raising your individual and family outcome. Coming from means is no guarantee of success either, but since you have a lot more control over your choices of life than of birth, why not take advantage of them?
Life is not fair, and you can't fix it. Play the cards you're dealt. The good news is every hand can be a winner in life (as in poker), it's all how you play. You get to choose.
Me, I will never be tall or handsome or muscular or have depth perception or have hand-eye coordination. I'm only good at one thing, and I take advantage.
No, I don't expect to change your mind. But I'm happy to try.
I don't think the fatalistic attitude towards changing the system is any more (or, as much as I hate to admit it, less) reasonable than the "you could be Steve jobs too." Odds for both are pretty bleak, albeit non zero.
As advice to an individual in a rotten system, "make the most of what you've got" is fair enough. But when folks talk about politics they're not usually fishing for personal career advice. So when you bring this up in that context, either you've missed the point, or you're trying to distract folks from the issue at hand.
I use the Steve Jobs example because everybody knows about him, and his life is well documented.
You don't have to build a trillion dollar company to be nicely successful, but using a nicely successful person as an anecdote is impractical because they are not public figures. But they are still all over the place, in plain sight. It's well within an ordinary person's ability to become one.
Even worse when people use averages as a method of policymaking for everyone, rather than realize that history is made by the exceptions. Not the averages.
Mega Monopoly is the best official variant I've ever played. There's an extra dice with a symbol on two faces that forces you to move to the next unowned property after you complete your first turn. When all properties are owned, the same roll sends you to the next space where you have to pay rent after you complete your turn. This speeds up the property distribution and the end game considerably.
Mega Monopoly has other fun changes, including one more property on each colour group, an extra level of building above hotels (skyscrapers), "depots" on railroads that double the rent, and "bus tickets" that permit you to move forward to any space on your side of the board instead of rolling the dice.
Playing Monopoly as an adult was a totally different experience. The game can finish fast if we all played aggressively and willing to trade, but we did not as we wanted to kill time during a lockdown. The key is to be enterprising in the trades you offer. Get the two brown ones first anyhow and with any kind of trade, and then for anything, if you are feeling stuck, offer to slash the rent, or even rent free. Then comes the installments or things like giving rent for next three rounds and stuff like that. As a kid, never thought about those, but now, with these new rules, it became more interesting and exciting to play. I tipped this to my nine year old nephew yesterday, and I guess I will get a call from his mom in a few days about ruining the game for them.
Fair, but ftr, parent meant "installment" to mean financing not "improvement", and my 1980s edition has the lowest value properties colored purple. And if anyone can parse "Get the two brown ones first anyhow and with any kind of trade, and then for anything, if you are feeling stuck, offer to slash the rent," then color me a buffoon indeed.
The brown ones are the cheapest properties just next to the go square. Installments in the sense that if you cant pay x amount in 1 go, you can pay after 3-4 rounds, or take it out of rent. Just some offline modification we made to play the game.
I want to design a game where the setup involves starting off playing Monopoly and then everyone choosing to switch into playing a game for practicing living in a gift economy. Anyone want to help with the concept?
“People overestimate the probability of things happening,” says Myers. “In social psychology literature it is fairly well established that people are poor at assessing risk."
Please tell me who are these people who believe there is a good chance of buying Park and Boardwalk on the first loop?
...Most Americans who play Monopoly think it was invented by an unemployed Pennsylvania man who sold his game to Parker Brothers in 1935 and lived happily ever after on royalties. That story, however, is not exactly true. Ralph Anspach, an economist and refugee of Hitler’s Danzig, unearthed the real story and it traces back to Abraham Lincoln, the Quakers, and to a forgotten feminist named Lizzie Magie. The Monopolists is in part Anspach’s David-versus-Goliath tale of his 1970s battle against Parker Brothers, one of the most beloved companies of all time. Anspach was a professor fighting to sell his Anti-Monopoly board game, which hailed those who busted up trusts and monopolies instead of those who took control of all the properties. While he and his lawyers researched previous Parker Brothers lawsuits, he accidentally discovered the true history of the game, which began with Magie’s Landlord’s Game. That game was invented more than thirty years before Parker Brothers sold their version of Monopoly and she waged her own war with Parker Brothers to be credited as the real originator of the game. Ironically, the Landlord’s Game, like Anti-Monopoly, was underpinned by morals that were the exact opposite of what Monopoly represents today. It isn't surprising that Magie's game was embraced by a constellation of left-wingers from the Progressive Era through the Great Depression, including members of Franklin Roosevelt’s famed Brain Trust....
This sort of confuses me. How can a game with the opposite principles of Monopoly be the true originator? It seems totally debatable which is why they had to go through a law suit twice over this.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game); according to the article, she created two sets of rules for the game: the classic monopoly game to show how unfair monopolies are, and another one to demonstrate how she thought it should be fairly done.
May I point out that "fortnite monopoly" is actually a delight to play -- it's not just a surface redesign, but actually a far better game than monopoly.
Free parking doesn't give you a bonus.
Every property must be sold when it is landed on, either to the player who landed on it or in auction.
The supply of houses and hotels is limited.
If you have a situation where no one has a monopoly and all the properties are owned, you have to make trades. If everyone refuses to trade, then you might as well stop because the game will never end, but you should still reach this point within 45 minutes.
The entire game was designed to be bad -- it's trying to show that owning land is evil and that who is rich in life is mostly based on luck.
The winner is supposed to be the person who rolls the luckiest.