
Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/dont-tell-your-friends-theyre-lucky
======
colanderman
The article (and some comments here) seem to conflate _luck_ and what I will
call _lot_. "Luck" I define as random happenstance during one's life. _You can
manage luck._ Doing so is the central theme of many board games. You can
increase your luck "surface area" by taking more chances. Entire industries
(e.g. insurance) exist to manage luck.

Your "lot", on the other hand, I define as what you were born with. How you
were raised, where you grew up, what kind of education you got -- everything
you _can 't_ control that _does_ have a significant impact on your life's
outcomes. You can work to improve your lot, or minimize its impact on your
life, but it's very difficult.

Of course there's some correlation: those with a good lot often learn early
how to manage luck, and those who manage luck well can negate a poor lot.

Hence I begrudge no-one with seemingly good "luck": often (possibly more than
not), their fortune is simply a byproduct of how they managed their luck. Good
for them!

But those born into a good lot? They're the true "lucky" ones.

~~~
Swizec
I would add a third category: _fortune_.

Lot is what you were born with.

Luck is when random things do or don't happen regardless of skill. You can
manage it to an extent. Bad luck through being careful and various types of
insurance, good luck mostly through participating. Buying bitcoin 3 years ago
and selling at great profit now is pure luck. Maybe you influenced the market
to grow, probably it was pure luck.

 _Fortune_ is the result of stochastic processes. You can do a thing, invest
your skill and knowledge, and it can work out or not. Sometimes it works
better, sometimes less. For instance, you launch a product that can do between
$2k/month and $5k/month and it hits $4.5k/month instead of $2k. That's
fortune. Your input affects your chances, but nothing is ever certain.

With time, fortunate events compound and the more often fortune works out for
you, the higher your chance that it will continue to do so.

Or as Peter Dinklage says: "I hate that word—’lucky.’ It cheapens a lot of
hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for
dinner at the bodega with dimes—I don’t think I felt myself lucky back then.
Doing plays for 50 bucks and trying to be true to myself as an artist and
turning down commercials where they wanted a leprechaun. Saying I was lucky
negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass
off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find
or attract very talented people. For some reason I found them, and they found
me."

~~~
stillsut
I'd separate _hard work_ into two components:

A. The rewarding part of your craft, e.g. the flow you get into when deeply
programming all night. B. The sacrifices your craft requires, e.g. the living
in the unheated apartment.

One thing the hard work people forget is that it isn't very impressive to just
do type-A enjoyable work for sustained and or even super human periods. Other
people would _pay_ for that experience.

I think this separation opens up a few interesting ways of viewing those who
are "too lazy" to do the hard work. First, different people flow in different
tasks and so even if you gave Peter Dinklage a chance to work for openAI on
any project he wanted, he might find it tiring and burn out. This is obvious,
but by induction, there's this whole class of school-type activities that many
people seem to mentally resist.

Second, there seem to be different expectations on how much of B-type work one
has to do in order to get the A-type work they crave. I think people perceived
as lazy are those who doubt that almost any amount B-work they contribute will
earn them their goal, only more the same. This is excellent when it
discourages the average thirteen year old from pursuing pro sports as a
career, but I think it also might be the largest reduction to productivity in
our economy we have today, as discouraged people tend to lower output and
cause problems for their company. And that's only the economic side, the
social side of hopelessness and lack of meaning is way worse!

~~~
phil21
This is a very interesting comment, articulated better than I have been able
to explain to others.

I've always been fond of saying showing up to work on time and working your
butt off is the low bar to success. All this does is buy you entrance to the
ride, and opens up doors of opportunity for you which are worthless unless you
take advantage of. Just working hard at some dead-end job 9-5 doesn't get it
done, there are millions of people who can successfully do this and get
nowhere in life.

Finding someone who understands the 'B' work is by far the most important part
of their career is rather rare. I've called the lack of motivation to do this
from the vast majority of people "laziness in thought". It's much harder to
gain discipline and do well in this part of your career than simply showing up
and doing what you're told as well as you can.

It also doesn't help that the school system more or less trains you almost
exclusively for the "A" type work, and actively encourages ignoring the "B"
and letting someone else handle it for you. This is a very hard attitude to
break as taking control of your own path is rather scary.

------
ergothus
My father and I have somewhat productive political conversations: He's
fiscally conservative, I tend towards the liberal side of the scale.

Drilling in to find what we really disagree about, it seems to boil down to
two concepts: (1) I view success as a matter of luck that your effort can make
better or worse. He views effort as the single most important deciding factor
in success in life (2) I'm willing to tolerate an amount of "unfairness" in
people getting help they "don't deserve", while he finds this very offensive.

I honestly feel that if considered luck to be a larger factor and effort to be
a lesser factor, his political stances would change pretty dramatically. (same
applies to me in reverse). I wonder how much the social willingness to accept
luck as a factor impacts popular political positions. (Perhaps not much, as
the author in the article promotes a consumption tax, which is generally seen
as more regressive)

~~~
willholloway
The liberal view of this issue may have the virtue of being correct, but it's
very counterproductive from the individual's standpoint.

I know that the ideology espoused on sites such as dailykos.com were very
detrimental to personal drive and success in my college years of 18-22.

That ideology kept pounding home the idea of the unfairness of the economy, of
the lower share of the pie allocated to labor vs capital and the increasing
inequality of American society.

All of those things were true no doubt, but they were not _useful_ for someone
who had been hacking since 4th grade.

I file it under bad luck that the same people that had a correct analysis and
opposition to the great mistake of that time, the Iraq invasion and
occupation, also had such a neurotic and self-limiting and destructive view
towards work, productivity and the modern economy, and that I was too
inexperienced in the ways of the world at the time to understand this very
important concept.

~~~
emodendroket
So your position is that we should just all believe outright falsehoods if
it's "useful?"

~~~
__derek__
To be ever so slightly pedantic: regardless of whether we should, we do. We're
afflicted with a slew of cognitive biases.

~~~
emodendroket
I don't really see that as relevant to this particular discussion.

------
dv_dt
I think this touches upon one of the biggest weaknesses of the current
economic system. We systematically waste the human capability of millions of
people because the system essentially randomly gives much better opportunity
to some over others. Meritocracy somewhat exists but mostly to the extent that
people can maximize the opportunity they've drawn as their lot in life.

I like the idea of Basic Income, but it's a somewhat limited solution to
capping how far down someone can fall in society - what would really
supercharge a future economy is opening up avenues to truly distributing equal
opportunity. Wealth inequality suppresses this strongly, when people receive
better margin of income over the absolute minimum economic allocation of their
wages, they can then allocate their own wealth from their personal outlook in
multiple ways - including starting businesses which may change the world.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_We systematically waste the human capability of millions of people because
the system essentially randomly gives much better opportunity to some over
others._

We don't do anything. The nature of reality is that there is not equal
distribution of [anything]. The universe is a dynamical system - portions of
the system will through probability always get stuck at local/global minima.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Sure, but the universe is also a place where it rains on your head, and then
the sun burns your skin off, and wolves casually stroll in and eat your
children. That's what the universe does when left to its own devices, and we
don't like that, and we change it.

"It is the way it is because it's natural" is a pretty naive fallacy.

~~~
marknutter
> and we don't like that, and we change it.

And the ones who do the work to change it reap the biggest rewards that come
from those changes.

------
kyleschiller
Debating the actual importance of luck seems a lot less important than
developing the proper attitude towards luck.

Pretending luck doesn't exist can lead to arrogance and a lack of empty for
people who haven't succeeded. On the other hand, believing that luck controls
everything can lead to fatalism.

It might seem best to find a happy medium, but being wishy washy about this
whole thing just gives you opportunities to blame your own failure on
circumstances outside your control, while continuing to take credit for
success. In the general case, looking for balance between opposing ideologies
makes no guarantee that you'll walk away with the best parts of both instead
of the worst.

In practice, it's probably best to drop the determinism/indeterminism
dichotomy completely and just focus directly on the desired end attitudes.

On a side note, the reason American society is obsessed with meritocracy has
nothing to do with a belief about the nature of luck. Denying luck as the path
to success is just a way to make people work harder.

~~~
thebspatrol
Another commenter used the phrase "luck surface area", which I think plays
well into the concept that everything is hinged on an element of luck, where
harder workers and people with better birthright generally have larger
"surface area".

~~~
fnl
While I agree that you can increase you "luck surface area" (e.g., by taking
more chances), that doesn't mean it will help. It implies you also are
increasing you "unlucky surface area", so if you "somehow" attract (?) more
good/bad luck, you might as well just end up being far more miserable than if
you had not. In other words, I don't believe luck to be a variable, it seems
much more of a constant that you've been born with.

~~~
thebspatrol
Yes, but what is "bad luck"? For most people "luck" really means "how wide
have I spread my net" \-- how many people are willing to give me
opportunities? When we say "luck surface area" I don't think we mean
legitimate zero-sum odds, because we're only talking about luck idiomatically.
You don't have much to lose by putting yourself first in line for as many
opportunities as possible.

------
downandout
It's certainly true that you need to be very lucky to become a billionaire -
generating wealth at that level usually involves tremendous numbers of other
people loving whatever business you have decided to create. But if you're
reasonably intelligent, at least in the US, it's quite possible to become a
millionaire without much luck, through decades of hard work and discipline.

Examples: software engineers at large companies that stick around for decades
(usually through options), doctors (at least specialists, such as
cardiologists and anesthesiologists), and lawyers that go to the best schools
and are able to land jobs at top-flight firms. Even tradesmen that stick to
their craft, such as master electricians or plumbers, can quite reasonably
expect to achieve millionaire status over the course of their lifetime
assuming that they manage their money well.

So yes, luck plays a huge role in the creation of enormous sums of wealth. But
if you live in a country with abundant economic opportunity such as the US,
there's no reason to be poor unless you have been extremely unlucky (health
problems, accidents, etc have befallen you), you are unwilling to work, or
you've made extremely poor life/financial decisions.

~~~
jartelt
You are ignoring the fact that someone born into a poor family in an inner
city like has an underfunded, underachieving public school, overwhelmed and
inexperienced teachers, a below average guidance counselor, no role models who
have gone to college, parents who do not know anything about applying for
scholarships or financial aid, a diet of fast food, and few examples of other
people in similar roles who became millionaires. In a lot of cases, the best
chance of success for people in these situations is to be LUCKY and win a
lottery to get into a charter school. Or, to be LUCKY and have the physical
tools needed to get a sports scholarship.

~~~
mindcrime
_an underfunded, underachieving public school, overwhelmed and inexperienced
teachers, a below average guidance counselor, no role models who have gone to
college, parents who do not know anything about applying for scholarships or
financial aid, a diet of fast food, and few examples of other people in
similar roles who became millionaires_

That sounds like my life except for the inner city part. Substitute "redneck-
ville" though, and it's the same basic principle. And I will say that I think
the idea that these things mean you need massive amounts of luck to become
"successful" (depending on exactly how you define successful) is bullshit. I
never had any particular amount of luck that I can identify, relative to my
peers who were born in similar circumstances, and while I'm not a millionaire
(but I'm still working on it), I've been what most people would call
reasonably successful. In my experience, what it takes is mainly insane work
ethic, an indomitable attitude, dogged determination, and relentless pursuit
of your goals.

~~~
jartelt
First off, congrats on getting to where you are today. It sounds like your
hard work is really paying off. I would just note that one of the points of
the article is that it is difficult for a successful person to recognize the
lucky events in their life. Perhaps in one of your job interviews you hit it
off with the interviewer because you went to the same college or were both
from "redneck-ville." Another person with equal skill and work ethic could
have not gotten that job because they weren't form the same background and
didn't have the rapport with the interviewer. I think you can say in that
scenario one person got lucky and the other was unlucky. No one is saying it
is bad to be lucky. It just helps with empathy when you take the world view
that not every outcome is completely fair and logical.

~~~
mindcrime
I don't see anybody really saying that "every outcome is fair and logical"
though. My issue is just all this luck talk is counter-productive. I mean, if
you convince a group of people that life is nothing but luck, how have you
helped them? Why bother working hard at all, if you don't believe it can
possibly pay off?

~~~
jartelt
The talk about luck is meant to encourage empathy and understanding. If your
world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will
assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that
logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or
support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were
not successful. Some would argue this is the wrong world view and that we
should acknowledge that many unsuccessful people work really hard and just got
dealt a bad deck of cards. These different world views lead to different
priorities in public policy among other things.

~~~
mindcrime
_If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then
you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With
that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or
support unsuccessful people because it 's solely their own fault that they
were not successful._

I'm not saying anything about you specifically, but that sounds a lot like a
kind of "anti-libertarian" straw-man argument I hear a lot. Certain people
like to claim exactly that libertarians believe "that all people who are not
successful did not work hard", which is far from true.

I think everybody understands that some people work very hard and still fail
to achieve "success" (depending on how you define success). But what I think
should be taken into account is that:

 _Some_ people who fail to achieve "success" do so because they didn't work
hard enough.

Hard work, good decisions, etc., _do_ play an important role in the amount of
success you attain.

Obviously reality falls somewhere in between "luck is everything" and "hard
work is everything", but I get the sense that some people promoting the "it's
all luck" mindset have an agenda in terms of denigrating the fundamental idea
that effort and initiative count at all. Again, not saying that's you, and I'm
probably just over-sensitive on this subject.

~~~
fnl
This thread is very important to the discussion, because it highlights an
apparent opposite mindset of the article.

As I posted elsewhere in this thread already, I think the real issue is that
the ideas of Robert Frank are not about these "regular" cases in the middle
income range at all. (At most, I'd conclude that the interviewer asked
questions that would touch persons in that range, too, and who likely form the
majority of the site's readers.)

If you are doing OK-ish on the upper end or OK-ish on the lower end of the
middle income strata of a Western (!) society, your "lot" should be quite
tolerable. And nobody would deny that with extremely hard work and discipline
you can move from the lower end of middle income to the upper end of middle
income. However, if you are doing really bad and are below the poverty line or
really well and are in the top 1% range, that certainly requires a good
portion of (possibly: bad) luck. It already starts at conception, with your
"birth rights". And the aim of the article (or rather, of Mr. Frank's
theories), as I interpret it (them), is pointing that out that we need to find
measures how to smooth those extremes, not about figuring out if some middle
income person had a bit more or less luck, or if it even mattered.

------
phkahler
Progressive consumption tax is ridiculous. It requires your tax rate at the
point of sale to be dependent on all your purchases to that point in time.
That's just not practical. Or it may require every purchase you make to be
recorded for tax-time when you then pay the taxes. Either way it requires the
government to know every purchase you make, or at least the price. This is not
something anyone should want.

~~~
mac01021
One way to implement a consumption tax is to measure everyone's income and
then subtract out whatever they've saved in the bank or otherwise invested.

That doesn't mean such a tax is not ridiculous for other reasons, though.

~~~
jcoffland
There are plenty of ways to scam such a system. For example, you could create
a phony investment fund which always collapsed at the end of the year creating
a loss which hid your expenditures.

~~~
mac01021
That might be true. I don't actually know how much more auditing of funds and
brokerages than what goes on already would have to happen in order to prevent
that sort of thing.

I don't think the problem is obviously insurmountable, though.

------
cmurf
Veil of ignorance. There's a significant part of the upper end (wealth wise)
of the population that like our classist society just the way it is, or maybe
that it should be more classist. Everything should be a rent, there should be
no public lands, everything is to be exploited, and if you're on the short end
of the stick it's merely unfair, not a wrong or a failure of society. Or the
more extreme versions of this, higher class folk have better money, better
ideas, better genes, make and sell better things. They are better than others.
Democracy and socialism are threats to these notions.

------
chrishacken
Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think any one denies the role luck plays in one's
success or not. However, to completely discard effort and determination is
selling everyone short. I'm running a successful company partially because of
"luck", I happened to start it at the perfect time, but also because I pour
every ounce of money and time I have into it. My nights and weekends don't
exist. Some people aren't willing to put in the time to turn luck into
success.

Telling people that success is just a matter of luck will only reinforce the
thoughts of unsuccessful people to believe they're "unlucky". You are able to
make your own luck to an extent.

~~~
Hasu
This is exactly what the article is talking about. You're not acknowledging
how much of your success comes from luck, you see yourself working hard and
you don't like being told you're lucky. You're not only lucky because you
started your business at the correct time, you're also lucky because you had
the resources and connections to be able to start a company in the first
place. Most people never have that opportunity.

I have no doubt that you work hard and put in the hours. But part of the
reason that you do that is because you've been lucky. I'm sure you know that
most business ventures fail. Some of those businesses, maybe the people there
didn't work hard enough, and that's why they failed. A lot of them did work
really hard, though, and they failed anyway, for myriad other reasons. Many
people work hard and fail anyway. That doesn't exactly encourage further hard
work. You're lucky that your hard work is turning into success.

The position that "You are able to make your own luck to an extent" is one of
extreme privilege that can't exist without having already had loads of luck
that you didn't make yourself. You wouldn't tell people starving in Africa and
India that they're just not working hard enough to make their own luck, would
you?

------
jeffdavis
Just like when people are trying to sell you something, they call it an
"investment"; people trying to implement government spending programs call it
"spreading opportunity".

Some government programs really do spread opportunity, but that requires close
examination and criticism; I don't just buy into it because a politician calls
it opportunity. Is college an opportunity? It can be a huge opportunity to get
ahead in life; but it can also just subsidize a partying lifestyle and a phony
major for four years. It depends on the college, the student, and the
structure of the opportunity.

It's hard to tell the difference between spreading opportunity and spreading
results. It often requires looking at the details, measuring along the way,
and it is often different for different people.

~~~
kyleschiller
Yeah, probably one of the strongest arguments for both Progressive Tax and
Basic Income is that the current system is deeply broken, and despite doing a
lot of good, carries a solid amount of waste along the way.

I do think it's important to remember that a lot of mess of social spending
programs happened, at some point, for good reason. You can give everyone
$12k/year, but it won't take long for people in SF to ask for an extra housing
subsidy to counteract real estate prices, followed soon by rallies against
eugenics when lower income Americans don't get extra children subsidized.

I'm not at all against social spending, or necessarily against any of it's
alternatives, but as a software engineer, I sometimes have difficulty
remembering that problems like this don't exist in a closed system and resist
top-down design.

~~~
jeffdavis
It's not just that it creates financial waste. Phony opportunities are dead
ends that take other opportunities off the table.

If you have only a few plausible opportunities, you are likely to make them
count. If you have a hundred but 50 are phony, you will waste your time, feel
entitled to results (hey, I went to college, I deserve a good job!), and
become discouraged.

~~~
drawkbox
Quite optimistic thinking, some kids might not have ANY opportunity at all and
the 1 shot at college will change their world and ours for the better, or not,
but at least there was an opportunity.

I wouldn't call college, or any person educating/bettering themselves, a
waste/phony, I think it pays dividends throughout life. Does it immediately
help? Not likely, but life is long and a right educated mind (or humbled
person) will turn it to good for them and the people around them the best they
can in most cases.

An educated populace leads to more opportunity I believe across the board and
smarter authorities as people question more. However, we love those short term
metrics and calling out single failures that overpower the successes.

------
jartelt
I think a lot of people do not realize that you are lucky if you are born into
a middle class or upper class family. Having parents with some savings allows
you to take extra career risks because you know that you can likely get help
from your parents if none of the risks pay off. It is more difficult to make
the decision to work at a startup or buy a house if you are totally on your
own when things go south.

------
real-v
This reminds me a little bit about one of my favorite philosophers, Alain de
Botton. Sometimes, he discusses meritocracy and meritocratic societies.

Basically, in a meritocratic society, such as the US, people tend to believe
everyone's lot in life is deserved; luck is not considered a big factor. This
creates a problem where the poor believe the rich made it through their hard
work, while the rich believe that poor people deserve to be poor because they
are lazy or stupid. People are where they are because they deserved to be
there.

I used to place a high value in the concept of a meritocratic society, but
experience is convincing me that the lack of compassion that such societies
experience is not worth trade off.

------
minikites
I think a lot of people are emotionally unable to deal with a world that is as
dramatically unfair as ours is, so they fall back to the childish notion that
people who have fallen on hard times deserve it and successful people
controlled their own destiny to get there, because the alternative is too
uncomfortable to think about.

~~~
kyleschiller
Yeah, that's probably part of it, but remember also that the people
controlling narratives are by definition in power, and that people in power
have strong incentives to justify their position.

~~~
minikites
I'm not sure what you're getting at, do you mean the ends justify the means?

~~~
kyleschiller
Oh, not actually.

I just mean that people have benefited from the existing system will naturally
be incentivized to legitimize it. In this case, that entails promoting the
narrative that we live in a meritocratic society where talent and hard work
rises to the top.

------
ChuckMcM
If you get a chance to experience an "exit", where a number of people suddenly
have much more wealth than others around them who are essentially doing the
same things but joined the company at a different time, you will get to see
all the different ways that people internalize that event (both positively and
negatively).

Luck is very much a part of success and a big part of the way that Vikings
talked of sailing with successful leaders ('they have a lot of luck'). And
most importantly luck has no bearing character. But internalizing that can be
hard when someone you despise gets rich, or someone you really care about
fails to get the rewards that others in the same place have.

------
charles-salvia
In the United States, at least, poverty tends to be concentrated
geographically in inner-cities and rural areas instead of being evenly spread
out. This would seem to indicate fairly conclusively that location and
environment affect opportunity and wealth more so than an individual
willingness to work hard. In fact, being born into an environment of
concentrated poverty like this molds your mental state and perception of the
world, to the extent that the idea of breaking out of poverty may not always
even appear as a _possibility_ , thus discouraging you from even believing
that hard work might pay off.

~~~
fnl
May I remind you that luck includes bad luck, too? ;-)

(In other words: the "luck phenomenon" happens at both ends of the spectrum,
not just the ones that got or were born rich and wealthy.)

------
emodendroket
This seems to take a sudden leap from a relatively uncontroversial (I'd think)
proposition into a political program. I wonder about this bit:

> The price of the average American wedding in 1980 was $10,000. In 2014, the
> most recent figure I had, was $31,000.

According to a random inflation calculator I checked online $10k in 1980 would
be worth almost $30k today. [https://data.bls.gov/cgi-
bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10000&year1=19...](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-
bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=10000&year1=1980&year2=2016)

------
luckystartup
> Then at the end students got a bonus for their participation experiment and
> they were told that they could donate some or all, any fraction of their
> bonus, to one of three charities, their pick, just by saying so to the
> experimenter. What she found was that people who had listed external causes
> of the good thing happening donated about 25 percent more of their bonus to
> a charity than the people who had listed things they had done to cause the
> good things to happen. The control group was somewhere roughly in the middle
> of those two.

> There have been many experiments that have shown if you prime people to feel
> the emotion of gratitude, they become much more generous toward others, much
> more willing to pay forward to the common good.

> If you want people to think about the fact that they’ve been lucky, don’t
> tell them that they’ve been lucky. Ask them if they can think of any
> examples of times when they might have been lucky along their path to the
> top.

That's the gist of the article. People get defensive when you say "you're
lucky", because they interpret this as "you don't deserve your success". By
reframing the message and asking people questions about times where they were
lucky, then this can make them feel more generous.

Very practical advice for anyone who is delivering a speech at a fundraiser.

------
nisse72
Tangentally related, I find it interesting that we often call people lucky
when something very bad happened to them, but they somehow managed to survive
the situation or land on their feet. We aren't as keen to describe people as
lucky who avoided danger entirely.

Lone survivor in a plane crash? Lucky. Took a cruise instead? Meh.

Personally I think it's preferable to not be in the crash, than to have
survived it.

~~~
niftich
This isn't much of a leap -- it's the difference between an independent and a
dependent variable, of which in these situations, most people have a good
intuitive notion of.

Given a disruptive event that happened to the person and they were able to
avoid a worse fate that befell others in the same event (e.g. others died in
the same plane crash) is more strongly perceived by people as an instance of
"overcoming the odds" than when someone did not experience that event at all.
By the time the disaster is past the event horizon (e.g. the plane is, say, in
an unrecoverable stall and plummeting toward the ground), the odds of avoiding
lethal shock, injuries, or dismemberment seems fairly low.

It's perhaps a perversely named 'survivorship bias', where all victims --
survivors or not -- got into that situation as a cumulative result of all of
their (and others') choices leading up to that moment, and that altering their
plans ahead of time (by deliberately changing travel plans) would have
invalidated the conditions required for their participation in that
_particular_ event. Interestingly, though, merely "missing the flight" is
often considered to be very lucky, despite often not guaranteeing that the
outcome would've been identical.

------
slitaz
"luck" is not a good choice as a word here. They mean something like a chaotic
event that ended up being positive to them.

Also, just waiting for such a positive chaotic event to happen to you, is
probably not the best strategy.

If you make good social interactions that you maintain, then those positive
chaotic events are more likely to come your way.

~~~
bostonpete
> "luck" is not a good choice as a word here. They mean something like a
> chaotic event that ended up being positive to them.

Isn't that what most people mean by "luck"?

~~~
slitaz
When people talk about "luck", they mean a absolutely random event that cannot
be influenced in any way. A chaotic event can become less chaotic by
controlling or reducing some of the parameters.

------
tabeth
I'm a strong determinist. Effort, hard work and skill is irrelevant (any
relevance comes from the fact that you're already in your statistical band for
expected success and are trying to maximize within that). I believe most of
your success is determined before you even take one step on this planet. Step
one is acknowledging the truth: your initial circumstances dictate your
future. Once this is acknowledged, we as a species can begin focusing on
making the initial conditions ideal for everyone.

Note: I am not saying you shouldn't work hard. I am just saying that it's not
doing as much as you think. Individual examples of success (I've done decently
despite two parents who didn't finish elementary school, live in inner city,
etc) are not of relevance for planning the future of the human race. The world
is chaotic, so there will be outliers in spite of the "determinist property"
of the world.

Parents' own desperation to "set their children up" for success is anecdotal
confirmation of this fact.

\---

Some examples:

Socioeconomic status v. Education
[http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/education.a...](http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/education.aspx)

Health v. Education
[http://www.nber.org/digest/mar07/w12352.html](http://www.nber.org/digest/mar07/w12352.html)

Health v. Socioeconomic Status
[http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/work-
stress...](http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/work-stress-
health.aspx)

Parent education v. child long term success
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853053/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853053/)

Skin color v. attractiveness
[http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0095798405278341](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0095798405278341)

Height v. success [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-
families/...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-
families/health-news/tall-people-more-likely-to-be-successful-in-life-study-
find-a6919431.html)

Weight (at birth) v. success
[http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/5882](http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/5882)

Attractiveness v. success [https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-
primates-play/201...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates-
play/201203/the-truth-about-why-beautiful-people-are-more-successful)

Gender v. success [https://www.historians.org/publications-and-
directories/pers...](https://www.historians.org/publications-and-
directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2013/gender-and-success-in-
academia)

Eye color v. alcoholism
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886900...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886900001574)

Geography v. socioeconomic success
[http://www.cid.harvard.edu/archive/andes/documents/bgpapers/...](http://www.cid.harvard.edu/archive/andes/documents/bgpapers/geography_socioeconomicdevelopment.pdf)

~~~
Raphmedia
I would rather believe in Existentialism. I come from a very poor background.
Much of my childhood friends are either dead, in prison or working minimum
wage. If I would have "acknowledged" the truth, like most of them did, I would
have ended in the same position.

Humans are not animals. We can evolve of our own free will. Statistics do not
apply at the individual level.

~~~
osti
And what caused you to not acknowledge the so called truth. Determinism
implies that even this acknowledgment was beyond your control, even though you
feel like it wasn't.

~~~
Raphmedia
I do accept that there is some "determinism" in life. You do not choose the
game, you do not choose the board and you do not choose the pieces.

However, _you_ are playing the game. To say that you have no control and that
the game is playing itself is to have "mauvaise foi".

Life might limit your options but only you can make choices.

To wait until life cuts out all options but one is not letting life make
choices for you. It's deceiving yourself. No choices are made, options are
simply slowly getting removed from you. That's not _having no freedom_ ,
that's _not acting on your own freedom_.

Hardcore existentialists will even say that the act of not acting on your own
freedom is an act of freedom itself. You are free to let life take all options
from you.

~~~
state_less
Suppose I could show you a "Raphmedia" response that I calculated, held aside
while you were making this post, then showed you my calculated responses
(top-5). If we compared the corpus to what you wrote, would you think
differently about determinism and who you are? Maybe right? This presuppose I
know a lot about Raphmedia, I'm thinking brain scan type detail (Google does
pretty well with the search bar autocomplete using a lot less info).

I sort of feel like Raphmedia could be encoded, same here as well. Still, I
enjoy the chats :)

------
baldfat
I am anti-determinist and Soren Kierkegaard (founder of existentialist
thought) so inspired me that I named my son Soren. The fight between the two
parties of thought is huge and bigger then Windows vs OS X.

> Jean-Paul Sartre:

"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that,
first of all, man turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards,
defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable,
it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and
he himself will have made what he will be."

Society sees luck in terms of fairness. This article used the word fair or
fairness zero times. Fairness is a HUGE issue in deterministic thought
especially dealing with how we perceive others around us.

------
kartan
> The whole process of constructing life narratives is biased in ways that
> almost guarantee that people won’t recognize the role of chance events
> adequately.

This is also a cultural thing. Here in Sweden it is easier that people
dismisses their achievements to not look like they are bragging and to accept
that chance is part of life. I do that myself. And I feel better and less
stressed recognizing that luck is part of why I have what I have.

So I work not too hard - that can be bad for my health and a bad long term
investment - not too little - work is needed to achieve anything and you have
to do your part to not let other down. So you work lagom.

------
dang
This topic always reminds me of a line of pg's from years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621768](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621768).

~~~
2sk21
Thanks for posting - I was just thinking of this myself !

------
Karlozkiller
So if I believe in luck I will be more inclined to pay high taxes? I don't
think that's how it works.

I mean of course people with money who realise not everyone who is poor is
poor because they're lazy bums will be more inclined to help a "poor person"
than they would if they believed all poor are lazy bums. But does that mean
they will accept high taxation? Say I am rich and narcissistic, I believe I'm
better than everyone and that my skill put me on top. I then realise that
other who are skilled are poor and I want to help them become richer. Do I
believe that paying the government to use my money for welfare to be the most
effective use of my money to fulfil this end? Probably not in that case.

Furthermore some people are lucky, some unlucky. This does not mean that no
effort but mere luck goes into building an empire. If luck was the only factor
then sure, this argument or taxation might hold. But there's a lot more than
luck to it, which is much more in the control of the individual.

~~~
fnl
If you can't see luck as deciding factor in being extremely rich or poor, your
world-view will dictate that hard work and discipline can get you out of
poverty. Therefore, there is no need to help other people and the only tax you
need to pay is the minimum needed to keep the nation state you depend on
afloat. If you see luck as a factor, then you either understand that those
with good luck need to give a bit more (=pay more tax) so that those with bad
luck are better off, or you are a cruel person and just say "well, unlucky
you, go to rot, I don't care." So yes, accepting luck as a factor in life
plays a fundamental role, including your (possible) willingness to pay tax. At
least, if you posses some kind of empathy.

> Furthermore some people are lucky, some unlucky. This does not mean that no
> effort but mere luck goes into building an empire. If luck was the only
> factor then sure, this argument or taxation might hold. But there's a lot
> more than luck to it, which is much more in the control of the individual.

The point here again is that for the extremes the luck factor becomes dominant
over anything else: If you are among the very worst off, you probably didn't
just accrue that due to being lazy (or, in fact, anything within your control,
assuming you are not somehow mentally handicapped - which is bad luck,
again...). And similar for the opposite end: There are a significant number of
persons with nearly the exact same abilities and ambitions as the very top
performers, so the final "selection" of who gets to be the top performer
depends far more on luck than on those skills (as the article outlines, by the
way).

~~~
Karlozkiller
No.This was exactly the response I was expecting and giving more does not
equal pay more taxes.

Putting an equal sign between helping your peers/being altruistic and paying
taxes is the logical flaw in my opinion.

I argue that paying taxes is not the most effective way of helping others and
therefore whether I believe becoming rich is a matter of luck or not becomes
irrelevant in regard to whether rich should pay high taxes or not.

Though of course not everyone will have my views on that matter and therefore
a subset, however big, will follow your line of thought instead, meaning the
number of happy-to-pay-tax people would increase if their perception of luck
changed as proposed in the article.

However what I'm arguing against is that A >necessarily< leads to B. As it
does depend on other factors too.

------
thret
It's hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you've earned.
- Frank A. Clark

------
jrs235
I believe
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13437977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13437977)
ties in with this in that many "lucky" people prepared so that when luck
struck things were aligned to take off.

------
aresant
Ben Franklin has a great line on this topic - "Diligence is the mother of good
luck."

The author illustrates this major point with an example of the "TOP" cellist
in the world:

"One [cellist] earns eight or nine figures a year while the cellist who is
almost as good is teaching music lessons to third graders in New Jersey
somewhere. . . The person who is eventually successful got there by defeating
thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of rivals in competitions that started at
an early age. . . [but] the luckiest one . . [is] that person who is going to
win the contest most of the time."

EG - you need to put in the hours of preparation & subject yourself to
competition of the highest order to even have a chance at being the "luckiest"
in your field.

~~~
kyleschiller
This just pushes the question back one step. How many people have the
opportunity to buy a cello at a young enough age to practice enough hours to
become the best?

I'm not saying it always ends in luck, actually I just don't think this is the
right line of reasoning. Frank's point is about the importance of luck in the
real world, but also about taking the appropriate attitude towards it. As
weird as it might sound, those two points aren't necessarily related.

------
jrs235
"It takes 10 years to achieve overnight success."

[http://www.inc.com/empact/why-successful-people-
take-10-year...](http://www.inc.com/empact/why-successful-people-
take-10-years-to-succeed-overnight.html)

------
swolchok
Related reading: Fooled By Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

------
djyaz1200
There is a pretty good book that addresses some of the business aspects of
this... "Competing Against Luck" by David Duncan and Clayton Christiansen (the
same guy who wrote "The Innovator's Dilemma"). I'm not done with it yet but so
far it goes into some interesting detail about how to reframe everything
people pay for as jobs... and that building a successful business is about
understanding the job to be done and mastering it.

~~~
tdaltonc
I've read the book and the title still makes no sense to me. I was expecting a
book about how to 'rectify'(in the electrical engineering sense) chaos in
business.

It seems like "Jobs That Need Doing" or "Products Have Jobs Too" would have
been much better titles for the book.

~~~
djyaz1200
Agree, I think the title is more about marketing the book than accurately
describing the content. That said I think there are a lot of people (me
included sometimes) who make interesting things without thinking carefully
about what the user really wants to achieve... so the book has some value.

------
coka
A few of the commenters here mention meritocracy, and it seems to me that they
value it, or think that it is something we should strive for. I would just
like to point our that the term "meritocracy" originally carried a negative
connotation, with a very elitist endgame[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Early_definitions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Early_definitions)

------
MikeTLive
the first thing that impacts your future success is the luck of the conditions
of your birth. you have no control over this. hard work MAY make up for this,
however having a "better" birth condition plus this same hard work does not
negate the value of that first starting position.

this is lost on many successful people who wrongly attribute the entirety of
their success to their own efforts and presume that anyone who is not
successful has simply not worked hard.

------
jagtodeath
Not super related but I cant resist. The guy in the article looks almost
EXACTLY like Steve Jobs.

~~~
rublev
Standard urban/casual intellectual uniform.

~~~
AstralStorm
Only in the United States.

------
pier25
This reminded me of the film "Match Point" directed by Woody Allen. IMO his
best film.

~~~
starf
Came here to second this.

------
jgalt212
here's my formula (and I've been around the block a few times).

decent level of success = 0 units of bad luck + 3 units of skill and 2 units
of hard work

yuge level of success = 5 units of good luck + 3 units of skill and 2 units of
hard work

------
Mendenhall
Dont tell your friends there is no such thing as luck. There are only factors
that are too numerous for you to account for them all.

------
philosopheer
huge success may have luck, but it is always in combination with greed.

The average worker and entrepreneur wannabe in Silicon Valley has nowhere near
the requisite and absolute focus on pure self interest that Larry Ellison,
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. have/had. Look to how Woz or Paul Allen was
treated by them.

------
rbanffy
Why would I? They live in this timeline.

------
chrismealy
Frank is a terrific writer and his books are excellent (rare for an
economist).

~~~
kyleschiller
Any other recommendations?

I enjoy reading Dan Ariely but ended up feeling like a lot of his studies
ended up veering into anecdotes and then overgeneralization.

~~~
djsumdog
Debt The First 5,000 Years

It's the most influential non-fiction book I've ever read.

------
andrewclunn
A lot of this "luck" can be traced back very easily to causes like "had two
parents who gave a damn" or "had enough to eat eat growing up." The people
pushing this narrative that you're not really responsible for your failure /
success want it both ways. They want to make you admit that you benefit from
living in a peaceful stable society with infrastructure, while also not
wanting to hold parents accountable for having too many kids too early, or
admit that impact that divorce has on young children. It always comes down to
pushing some narrative that is meant to justify further state intrusion into
our lives and the dismantling of the family unit, all with pseudo-scientific
(see "the gray sciences") justifications and emotional appeals. Spare me the
bullshit, I aint buying it.

EDIT -

Looking for another example of this obvious propaganda? Try the latest episode
of RadioLab:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-media-
busted...](http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-media-busted-
americas-poverty-myths/)

~~~
andrewclunn
Though this is really just giving people the opportunity to down vote me
twice, I feel the need to expand on this:

The war on self-determination, and promotion of the notion that you're not
really responsible for your lot in life is an ongoing narrative. Basically the
introduction are always the sanest arguments: There's a history of racism /
sexism that people are still struggling to overcome. The benefits of having a
safe society with infrastructure. Of course the implications they then allude
to are that if you question the wisdom or effectiveness of any particular
conclusion or prescribed policy they advocate for, then you are racists and
hate public roads (this should sound awfully familiar to any libertarians).
Also the hypocrisy of saying that others are just ignorant of all the hidden
things that helped them succeed, while also ignoring things like single-
motherhood and having large numbers of children as being obvious causes for
failure (both for the parent(s) and children) is particularly glaring.

What it comes down to is basically not wanting those who succeed to feel like
they are in any way superior to others, by giving all credit to institutions
that the modern neo-marxists (who now call themselves progressives) support
(such as public school systems), while also not wanting those who fail to feel
like they are in any way inferior to others, by giving all credit to
institutions that they dislike (like law enforcement). Also the benefits of
institutions they dislike are also completely ignored (family, religious
communities, etc...)

Make no mistake, this is a lie meant to justify stripping you of your
individual freedom by asserting that you are not in fact an individual capable
of any sort of self-direction, but a predictable causal robot of the society
in which you live. The continuing inability of the social sciences to make
reliable testable claims is merely in an inconvenience to their demographics
as destiny mentality. That such an ideology, which attempts to shackle you to
easily sorted "identities" bills itself as transcending these barriers, is
some sick form of double think that is now spread as gospel by public
educators (the priestly caste in this faith that refuses to admit that it is
one).

I urge those of you who are have children, and are concerned for their well-
being to make sure you expose your children to the insanity of this philosophy
in the same way that you would seek to vaccinate them from the virus of
religious BS. Because make no mistake, if you don't tell them about it with
the appropriate criticism and skepticism, others will do it for you, but in an
attempt to sway your child to giving up their self-determination to a nanny-
state, and embracing a perverse view of justice called "social justice" where
the individual reaping what they sow is of no consequence, and all that
matters are peoples not people.

~~~
iza
I recently saw a very enlightening video on the subject of individualism
versus collectivism that somewhat echoes your thoughts:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNB38U04sNM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNB38U04sNM)

