I don't know how we can even consider that luck doesn't play the biggest role in life. We are influenced by a trillion of decisions made by people that directly pass through our lives everyday. To your competitors in business to the people that decide they are sober enough to drive at the same time you are driving.
Not to mention the physical world which plays no favourites.
I look at Bezos/Musk/etc and they are on top of wealth pyramid solely because someone has to. Next year it will be someone else.
All we can do is try to make clear rational decisions and then let the universe unfold as it will.
Luck = All the things that that are too complex for us to understand bunched up in to one.
Luck is a narrative concept that is not useful in reasoning.
For example in the article:
> As many people pointed out, Jenner’s success would have been impossible if she hadn’t been born white, healthy, rich, and famous
She could not have been born as anything but those things. Those things are what she is and removing them would not simply make her "unlucky", it would make her in to another person. Luck as used here in the article is just a way to differentiate and classify people, it does not have causal power.
Yeah I am not a confrontation person but luck is a hard thing to talk about for me. To me it seems lazy to just say "oh you're successful because you got lucky". But that seems to be the consensus.
...I mean I suppose it all is right... It was luck that we exist goldilocks
> I look at Bezos/Musk/etc and they are on top of wealth pyramid solely because someone has to.
By this logic, it could have been anyone. How do you account for the fact that people at the top of this list all started their own businesses (or inherited one)?
Both of those people are to some degree con artists. They take both credit and money as middlemen for running companies. In Musk's case, it's even more visible as every venture he directly managed (and was not managed out of by someone smarter) has failed, yet he has billions of dollars for his quality con.
And he used a plenty of unearned means to kickstart his con.
Bezos is a bit harder. I would have to look in detail on his earlier history.
Came here to reply with exactly this. I think I've had my set over 15 years now. For awhile I was going to the gym just for fun and to mix it up, but now with the pandemic, I just reverted back to my home equipment with no service interruption. I've probably paid for the equipment 6x over vs. yearly gym fees, and I never have to wait for a squat rack to be open (because I'm the only one in the gym)!
I've been thinking about getting a squat rack into my garage, but it's gonna be a very tight fit, and I'm not sure I'll be comfortable having 45 lbs plates around my Tesla.
I always thought that there is a specific cadence or rhythm to the human mind and I would create some music (or sequence of tones) that would get people addicted and I would sell it on a per-listen basis and make trillions.
Maybe they should maintain the postal boxes, have enough sorting machines, maintain the necessary manpower/processes, and remain independent enough to deliver the fucking mail.
Even if they did all that, all the states would need reliable mailing lists. Oregon and Washington have been rigorously checking their lists precisely because of this problem, while other states don't need to do that if the onus is on the voter to show up at the correct poll.
It turns out that 17% of Nevada primary ballots had the wrong address.
If over 10% of votes are mailed to the wrong address, it would be a major crisis in a hotly contested election.
I developed https://www.activegoals.net with mental health in mind especially since I deal a lot with the autism community who usually have poor executive functioning.
The more we understand about the universe, the more it's structure resembles the brain. Galaxies, or more accurately, the black holes in the middle of galaxies resemble the neurons and these filaments and magnetic fields are the synapses.
I knew I would get this answer if at all. Just shows that humans feel we are at the centre of the universe, whatever that universe is. Sounds like the 1500's all over again. I don't understand how one can answer like this. We can't even explain the simplest of experiments; the double-slit experiment, but here we have some HN subscriber saying bullshit to something that he/she doesn't understand, and even pressed the down-vote to further show their disgust at the insinuation that the universe may not adhere to their ill-formed, or how do I say politely, childish view of what the universe could actually be.
But he/she said that 'clearly' I am wrong. Not thinking that maybe reality isn't quite what we think with the small amount of information that we have at the moment.
The only physical limitation is the Planck length and everything above this is fair game. Our universe could be a solitude brain and the multiverse could be the collective of brains but damn I've been shot-down by a HN subscriber that told me it's clearly bullshit.
I probably should not be engaging with you at all, because you appear to be convinced that your theory of we-are-in-a-celestial-brain must be correct or at least very probably correct. Why else would you dismiss my, admittedly blunt, refusal by calling me childish?
What evidence do you have, other than "gee looks like a brain to me", that your theory might be correct? Is it not, indeed, childish, to hold such a view, out of a trillion other similarly justifiable views?
Just because current information cannot refute your favorite model doesn't mean it's true! This is very basic logic. At least come up with an experiment to verify some aspect of your theory; otherwise you’re going to forever be in the “gee looks like X to me” la-la land of idiots.
In other words, what the hell are you going on about?
Double slit / quantum eraser definitely suggests to me that we don't understand some very fundamental aspects of the universe. If I think about the scale of the universe, points in time before the universe, or why there is something rather than nothing at all, really scrambles my brain.
I can see both your side and the other commenters side. I think it likely your suggestion isn't true - there is no strong evidence for it and I think therefore the default position should be 'it most likely isn't so but the door is open to convince me otherwise'.
I sincerely hope that isn't our reality because we would then find ourselves in a weird recursive situation where we can never understand the total system.
Not to mention the physical world which plays no favourites.
I look at Bezos/Musk/etc and they are on top of wealth pyramid solely because someone has to. Next year it will be someone else.
All we can do is try to make clear rational decisions and then let the universe unfold as it will.