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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

Life isn't fair. We're all born into different means and of course more money allows for more optionality. The "poor kids" have to work harder to save up their money to get their chance, but that's completely possible and is the majority of those who start companies.

This article is the typical BS that assumes "entrepreneurs" only do SV startups or want a big exit. The actual reality is that there are millions of small businesses out there, full of hard working entrepreneurs who saved and sacrificed, and are perfectly happy growing modestly and providing for their family. That's the prize that many chase, and many do end up winning.

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> Life isn't fair

The whole point of human culture is to transcend the raw reality the universe hands us. Not just by inventing math and microchips, but also by inventing ways to reduce randomness and unfairness, be it the randomness and unfairness of weather, birth, disease, or human nature. Especially human nature. Culture invented morality and laws and notions of justice. The more advanced the culture, the less your birth circumstances matter for political power, social station, or economic opportunity.

But culture can also succumb to that base human nature which it was supposed to help us transcend. When a culture decides that self-interest is the fundamental reality of human nature, that the best thing to do is yield to rather than counter this nature, such a culture becomes a self-fulfilling prophet, and we all end up prisoner's of the dilemma.

> Life isn't fair. We're all born into different means and of course more money allows for more optionality. The "poor kids" have to work harder to save up their money to get their chance, but that's completely possible

That's making the mistake of equating the way things are with the way they should be.

While there's a lot of variations in opportunity from ability that should be respected, I don't think "being born well off" deserves the same kind of respect.

What's the mistake? What's the way things should be exactly?

Nature and humanity will always have inequality. Chaos and entropy are normal and inevitable. Even if you stop the world and reset everyone today to the same exact situation, things will change the moment you let them go. So what is this utopian ideal you think is possible?

I'm also assuming you'll be leaving your children with nothing so that they won't get any unfair advantages right or respect right?

As Biggie Smalls once said, Either you're slingin' crack-rock, or you've got a wicked jump-shot

There's a difference between life, and the economic system of capitalism. More than that, if rich people are only willing to fund the ideas of other rich people, eventually society becomes static as does technological progress.

And the article is focusing on the SV startup scene because that's where most of the new economic growth has been focused. The only other big growth areas have all been in energy.

You create value, you get paid. You don't need any rich person to fund you and many who are rich today got there without a dime invested by anyone else.

The article is talking about entrepreneurs, which are people who start businesses. The amount of people starting SV startups is insignificant compared to business owners around the world. You seem to be assuming something about economic growth and some connection to SV, but I see no such statement in the article itself.

> Life isn't fair.

Why not?

Capitalism.

Ha, my 7yr old twins could explain that one to you. It's just not. You have to make the most of the gifts you are given.

> Ha, my 7yr old twins could explain that one to you. It's just not.

That's not an answer to his question.

The answer is: > It's just not.

Because really, "Why isn't life fair?" is not a valid question. "Life" is unique. Why are two unique items not the same? Because unique and same are antonyms.

The 7yr old part is the context for my initial answer from my world view.

No matter how hard we try, it's impossible to make life fair for our twins. We do our best to treat them fairly, but while they are the same age, they are not the same. They are not the same physical size and they have different mental strengths and weaknesses. They are not evenly matched in all/many areas. That can make things feel unfair.

On the other hand, maybe it is fair, we just do not have enough context to do a proper measurement.

What reasons are there for expecting life to be fair? Where would this hypothetical "fairness" come from?

Life could be fair-er. Artificially made so. Hypothetically made so. Do we have to rest on social Darwinism as the organizing principle of society simply because it is natural? Human history is in part a gradual divorce from such naturalism, a gradual mitigation of the base suffering of animals.

One of the basic functions of society is to make life fairer than the default. If your neighbour is sick, you help him out, knowing he will return the favour. For both of you, life gets fairer.

You may argue that "fairness" is "unnatural". Then it is also "unnatural" e.g. that people physically stronger than you can't just kill you and take your wife and all your stuff. Would you rather we go back to a completely "natural" system like that? Complete all-out Mad Max-style anarchy? Of course not.

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't work to make things less unfair. I fully support such endeavors. Obviously, it is a difficult task that should be done with great care.

I meant to show that "perfectly fair" is an unobtainable non-sequitur. We need to know what we are up against when we attempt to balance out some of the indifferent harshness of the universe, at least in our little patch of space.

I do find it interesting that you thought my previous comment implied such things. I suppose it did sound a bit like certain shibboleths.

Interesting question.

What makes you think anything should be fair?

> What makes you think anything should be fair?

Because it helps the human race maximize their collective potential. Imagine how many Einsteins we've had over the millennia, there may have been hundreds/thousands of them but they never had the chance to shine because they were born a serf or a slave.

It doesn't have to be 100% fair, but being somewhat egalitarian produces better results for everyone on the economic scale.

>> It doesn't have to be 100% fair, but being somewhat egalitarian produces better results for everyone on the economic scale.

Why did you perceive my question to be anti-egalitarian?

I understand that a more equal society == better collective potential. BUT, our whole species (and life on this planet) is based on inequality. It started right from evolution (other animals got extinct) and it goes on until today because not all genes are equal.

Now this doesn't mean that we shouldn't remove/reduce artificial barriers to equality but we gotta realize that inequality is inherent. What makes humans awesome is that we have a brain and can strive for the collective good.

What is collective good? Is it denying handicapped people a livelihood? Is it ostracizing the mentally ill?

Personally I believe that our striving for advancement is something that's deeper than our daily brain-oriented struggle. Our evolution is being driven at the cellular level, so we don't need to translate that into attempting to personify an egotistical concept of progress.

Does your idea of fairness only apply to monetary issues?

If some good looking but dumb guy is getting too many partners, should the government/society try to level the playing field to allow the smart but socially inept guy to make some more "Einsteins?"

If you solve the monetary issues then those things are within an individuals control to a certain extent and at worse can be mitigated. Ugly people can have plastic surgery or tooth realignment if they can afford it, or the can work out enough to either become good looking or compensate. The socially inept can learn to be more social.

Those are choices for individuals though, not society as a whole. Society doesn't decide the attributes you were born with, but they do decide if your money has any real value.

Because life and the rules of the universe are not a human creation. Fairness is a human concept, in which we decide what that means, and it tends to vary decade to decade and culture to culture. Also worth noting, rules are not necessarily fairness (lots of animals in nature have automatic instinctual systems or rules of how they exist, without a consciously thought-out system of defined fairness).

It's a matter of the order of things. Life can't be fair by default because it's not subservient to fairness, it's the other way around. The concept of fairness derives from existence, it doesn't come before it. It takes a great effort to create and sustain large systems of fairness as entropy is constantly acting to undermine our efforts and destroy us (while we simultaneously deal with irrationality, chaos, scarcity, injury, etc etc). On this planet, only humans expend such immense energy attempting to accomplish elaborate systems of fairness, while trying to strive toward even greater fairness (learning from and applying, attempting to improve over time; our charitable systems for example have radically improved over the last few hundred years).

When a dolphin murders a porpoise for fun, or a troop of chimps raids another territory and murders competing chimps, is it fair? Fairness has no role to play, because it's a human concept. Humanity is still subservient to the greater rules and limitations of the universe, which means our best efforts at applying fairness can inherently never be perfect or ideal. Just the fact that we act against an erosion by entropy at all times guarantees that outcome (to say nothing of the inefficiency thrown into the equation by routine imperfect human judgment).

Do you argue that hospitals shouldn't provide emergency treatment to people with heart attacks on the same grounds?

I'm also going to call bullshit on your entropy argument: the accumulations of wealth we see are unnatural, and a product of artificial social choices about policing. Your entire argument is nonsense post-hoc rationalization about what's "natural".

In a natural setting, things would be fairer because we'd have already murdered a bunch of rich people.

In stark contrast to your claims, it's the inequality and present social order that's artificial and unnatural.

Couldn't agree more.

Not to mention other mammals, certainly primates, DO seem to have an innate notion of fairness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BYJf2xSONc

Anybody who starts in with the 'natural' order of things argument usually starts off on the wrong foot, in my experience. It's such a loaded word.

I'm confused by your comment. It feels like you're upset about the parent advocating for unfair life, but I think they're merely pointing out what they're observing, not making any moral arguments of what should be.

Are you saying that life is actually fair, and thus the parent is arguing in the wrong direction? Or do you agree with the parent that life is unfair, but think that alternative arguments should be used to argue for it?

I think primates are innately fairer than modern society is, though they're not totally fair. I don't think we even want things to be totally fair (I don't for instance)... Just fairer.

If you poll people, almost everyone thinks things should be more fair -- to the point that some are nearing violence over the issue. I think it's quite unnatural for things to be this unfair, and requires elaborate orchestration to keep it so.

I also don't think the idea was a principled attempt to model the situation -- I think it was a post-hoc justification for why it should be as we see, and not an actual attempt to explain why things as they are. Nobody raises "well, it's just natural" for why we shouldn't try to stop heart attacks (and particularly, I've never heard it for why we shouldn't try to reduce the number of heart attacks, as it was used here about unfairness) -- only things like equality, gay marriage, etc. Which happen to all be things that align with the speakers' beliefs (either for or against; I've heard it both ways).

I think pointing out facts like primate fairness is missing the forest for the trees. [1]

To me the crux of the argument is that the environment of a new lifeform isn't constant. Indeed, it's pretty much guaranteed to be different for every live entity. One beetle may live a happy resourceful life, another one may get hit by an asteroid.

Lifeforms aren't provided equal opportunity by the universe. The default state is one of unfairness. However some intelligent lifeforms like primates, and indeed humans, have taken it upon themselves to artificially move the needle towards more fairness.

I too would like to see more fairness. I also think that things are unfair by default, and I don't consider this as moral justification for social policies that keep it in the natural unfair state or worse. While I don't know @adventured's moral policies of whether unfairness is justified, I have re-read the comment a few times and I still see it as purely a description of the situation with no moral judgement at all.

[1] It's possible that we're having trouble here due to semantics. When answering why life isn't fair, both my arguments and seemingly @adventured's entropy argument are talking about life as a sub-phenomenon of existence (which is to say, the widest scope). However if we're talking about life as limited to social structures, then I can see how any talk about natural unfairness can seem absurd.

You're wrong in your broad, abstract argument in a really obvious and shallow way:

It doesn't explain why the predominant strategy of life at all scales is mutualism and synergy between scales and kinds of life.

In no particular order, your "technical" argument fails to explain: eukaryotic structure, multicellular life, the interplay of fungii and roots, forests (which are more than adjacent trees), and really just about anything we see in the natural world. (Ed: I've thought of another 5 or 6 examples if you want to protest those -- mutualism is pretty easy to pick out in nature.)

And that's because you've failed to account for localized regions of stability able to ratchet themselves to greater and geater levels of stability -- and these metastable systems are the model we see on every scale of existence. Life does this as well, which means that we always see stable collaborations outpace competition (and unfairness) on an asymptotic scale. You literally failed to account for how life does work in your argument.

So I still don't believe you're advancing either a genuine observation (ie, it doesn't match fact to say it's unfair in general) or a principled theory (ie, it doesn't actually seem an internally consistent model -- at least, if you believe in physics).

I think you're trying to build a post-hoc justification for the human system being as it is.

I never set out to explain strategies of life, and I'm not sure why you thought otherwise. My argument is much more simpler than that. Like I said, it's about the environment. It doesn't really matter what strategy a beetle or its friends take, if it gets hit by an asteroid it didn't get equal opportunities compared to beetles who didn't, and that's not fair.

I am getting the impression that when you're talking about fairness in life, you're talking about how one lifeform treats another. Am I right? Life as an actor vs. life as a state of existance. When I'm talking about fairness of life, I'm talking about the latter, so I also include all the non-live entities (e.g. asteroids, or sulfuric acid if you want something more common) and how they affect the fairness.

Looking at this whole discussion in summary, I'm increasingly feeling like we don't really disagree on much. As best as I can tell, we both think life is unfair. Perhaps we even agree on the amount of unfairness. It feels more like you're describing the situation as a cup half full, and don't like that I describe it as half empty.

Disparities in fairness create opportunities for one group to advance their short-term interests at the long-term expense of another group.

Unfortunately, education levels in the general population are not yet at a level where the majority of groups are able to routinely identify threats to their long-term interests caused by optimising for short-term gains.

Its almost comical to watch Trump threatening all these wars when at the end of the day social inequality is so bad that effectively there is no one to draft. The typical cannon fodder of yore have been so beat down they would last 15 minutes or less on a battlefield. The only ones healthy enough to serve have parents rich enough to by their way out of a draft. You can't do a ground invasion with just drones manned by chubby kids with joysticks in a bunker. Corporate America has been so ruthlessly effective at pushing through such brutal levels of inequality that its actually become an existential threat to national security.

Is the obesity rate among the under 30 crowd really that high that a draft wouldn’t be feasible? I’m not sure about that stat. Care to back it up?

The effects of poor health in the otherwise-eligible pool recruit pool has been a concern for a few years. As I recall, the health of WWI recruits, especially from the south (mostly due to poor nutrition and parasites), had similar implications for readiness, and this was the spur for a number of public health interventions.

There are other potentially problematic indicators, such as the fact that grip strength in young men has plummeted over the last few decades (avg 18yo male is not as strong as avg 35yo woman was at his age). Grip strength is a good indicator of overall fitness.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2016/09/11/...

https://www.google.de/amp/amp.timeinc.net/time/2938158/youth...

That's because poor people are fat and we have a volunteer military. A draft would solve that problem, by drafting richer healthier people and also by forcing fat poor people to exercise and eat better.

Just because it's life.

Even if everyone had the same amount of wealth, there are those that will be born good looking, or tall, or physically fit, or any other thing that would give someone an advantage over others.

we've limited means at the moment to influence our physical characteristics or our intellect or talent at birth, this we have to take as a given I agree. But money for businesses does not fall from the sky. How large the starting gap between poor and rich entrepreneurs is, how the environment looks in which we grow up, how easy we make it for people to perpetuate wealth without effort, that's a matter of choice.

Current state of the world.

Because some people do better than others and that's OK.

Nature isn't fair. Death is the norm for most life. Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed. The fact you are alive now, and are intelligent ,and have enough resources to contribute to this discussion is already extreme luck. Things are not evenly distributed. There is a natural pattern of fractal distribution in almost every measure of things. Wealth, power, populations, you name it, will concentrate. To reduce the ladder of success to a flat plane is to introduce something unnatural and nature abhors mono cultures. Where nature does allow for a plethora of success is in the discovery of new environments either through disaster or creation. Take the latest bitcoin craze for instance. The block chain is a new environment. Those early enough to get in, and if they stayed in, are now owners of vast fortunes. Unfortunately, we have no way to predict where the next big environment is or where one will appear. While the wealthy will have more ability to dive into those environments, recognizing where they will occur is a skill that can be learned by anyone. Trying to make life fair is to fight nature; you will loose. Ride the waves, don't fight them.

Because the universe, which we are born from and live within briefly, is not fair.

A single instant in time which we do not understand led to an unimaginable expansion where the tiniest of fluctuations at the quantum level led to matter randomly collecting and coalescing into stellar clusters of billions of galaxies with trillions of stars with planets, and we know of only one that led to life.

Fairness, a completely human societal concept, has no impact on the reality of our universe and unless you can change that, life will never be fair.

"This article is the typical BS that assumes "entrepreneurs" only do SV startups or want a big exit." I don't think it assumes that, and I don't think we should just resign to the fact that rich kids get rich.

So ex-bankers are starting your local bakeries and notaries and hair salons? 10s of millions of small businesses and most of them are started by rich guys? It clearly says "in silicon valley" at the end so yes it's limited to the typical example of VCs and exits.

The rich do get richer (up to a point anyway) but what I'm saying is that you don't need to be rich at all to be an entrepreneur, and some of those who start with nothing do go on to become rich as well.

All startups start small, but not all small businesses are startups. Startups are characterized by fast growth cycles and usually are intended to end in getting acquired or sold.

Bakeries and such don't fall under this description, usually.

Entrepreneurs start businesses. A small fraction of those businesses are SV startups, but the vast majority are not - so this article talking about "entrepreneurs" doesn't apply to the vast majority of them, has no sources for what it claims, and is thus rather useless.

Most small businesses fail. They fail because the founder doesn't have enough money to survive the dips and bumps. Being rich gives you an edge in making money, it's pretty cut and dry.

Most fail for lots of reasons, insufficient capital is only one of them. Another large reason is incompetent accounting - i.e. having a poor grasp of their financial situation. This is often confused with insufficient capital.

Besides, anyone can start a business with essentially zero capital. One can mow lawns, do babysitting, maid service, write apps, write a novel, etc. The only capital I invested in my own business startup was buying a computer.

Search Amazon books for "starting a business with no money" for lots of ideas.

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