Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical of a definition of luck where you can be trained to be lucky. That's not luck, that's skill. There is no skill to luck by definition.

But let's take what we've got here and engage with it:

>She came up with a few basic strategies for parents to teach their kids, including being open to new experiences, learning to relax, maintaining social connections, and (yes) talking to strangers. All of these techniques had one theme in common—being more open to your environment both physically and emotionally.

Okay but this is still luck, we've just moved it further down the chain. Now these are kids who are lucky enough to be born into a family which is concerned enough with these things to train them. Heck even prior to this training what is it that a kid needs to become an adult who has 'learned to relax'? Probably a safe environment, one where relaxing won't be punished. Same goes for 'talking to strangers', even more traditional concepts of luck being related to hard work, these all rely on growing up in an environment where these traits are present and are rewarded frequently enough for a kid to draw the connection. That is luck and I don't think these articles with the implicit message: Skill is the real luck, ever do a very good job, they just smuggle the luck away into some other unaddressed reality of our environment.

Seems very similar to the classic, "Luck favors the prepared".

I was at a board game conference this weekend and someone was kind of looking at my game prototype but hadn't engaged me. So I just started explaining how it worked and what was unique about it. Turns out he is also a designer and a publisher had previously asked him if he was interested in designing a game like X. He didn't have the time or interest but that is exactly what my game is. I now have a hot lead to get this game published because I got lucky. If I hadn't talked to this guy or even gone to the conference, I could never have gotten "lucky".

Louis Pasteur: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/louis_pasteur_159478

The harder I work the luckier I am.

That saying is really what this article is getting at. There are a lot of opportunities that happen in life. What people CALL luck is highly dependent upon taking action when an opportunity is presented. What the article is saying is that the people we consider lucky are more likely to take advantage of an opportunity. Maybe some people are more lucky than others (I mean stats would suggest that this is likely true), but they may not be the people we generally consider lucky.

But that's what I'm saying in my comment, I even directly address the issue of hard work. To be a hard worker implies all sorts of luck on its own. If you're a hard worker you've probably grown up in an environment where either the value of hard work was present and its importance was impressed on you explicitly or you've learned implicitly by having contact with hard workers and contact with not hard workers where the hard workers were rewarded and the not hard workers weren't (which btw does not happen all the time). Both of those situations take a lot of luck! You're a hard worker, I totally believe that, but that doesn't eliminate or even reduce the role of luck in your life, it masks it, the luck is just further back, playing a role in the development of a hard-work attitude in the first place.

e: So maybe instead of thinking of it like "I'm lucky because I work hard" perhaps we should think of it like "I work hard because I'm lucky."

It's more like "Seek and you shall find". Or "the last place you look is the first place you find."

You might be lucky enough to be born on top of a geyser of bubbling crude. If not, you need to go prospecting, not sit and wait for it to come to you.

This type of "seeking" behavior is easier to justify when you can afford to take more risks. Consider the stock market adage "Never invest what you can't afford to lose."

Travel the farthest afield when you have nothing left to lose.

But isn't luck is being in the right place at the right time? If so, a sensible approach is to find the right place and just hang around...

(Unless the right time was last week, in which case you're out of luck.)

I think the most important part of the article: "You lose your peripheral vision the more anxious you are because your flight-or-fight mechanism creates binocular vision."

Kids growing up in chaotic situations are likely to be very anxious, and will have so much more to worry about. So I think you are right to an extent, that the real luck is growing up in a more stable situation.

What makes it worse, is that being taught how to relax in chaotic situations is so dang helpful in all areas of life, but only those given the opportunity to relax in the first place will discover that. You're otherwise stuck in a downward spiral.

Anxiety and fear make us retreat to safety. This means we do what we can to reduce risk. Less risk = less reward. There is the "luck".

You're not really arguing with the original article, which is talking about perceived or perhaps realized luck. You're talking about the absolute or objective amount of luck which a person has. What the original article is really saying, isn't that you can train yourself to have the kind of luck that causes people to be born with a silver spoon in their mouths; rather, that you can become subjectively luckier by learning (i.e. a skill) to eliminate the mental barriers which cause you to underappreciate or underperceive the amount of absolute/objective luck which you have to work with.

It's a rhetorical shortcut.

A more complete description might be:

> The Key to this thing that is commonly assumed to be Good Luck Is actually a skill, an Open Mind which is something that can be learned.

Yes! See also the AI Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

I look as environment (and privilege) as an equivalency group. If all other factors are the same, then evaluate this as advice with that cohort.

You can be trained to be lucky, and it is a simple problem of exposing yourself to more and more. Try more things, spend more time, be open to new ideas.

I would love to hear more about this if you have more thoughts.

I was thinking "skill" is best measured relative to a benchmark cohort (ie. a control group). In other words, _given_ your education, upbringing, connections, etc., where did you end up relative to the average person in your cohort?

I'd like to think _that_ difference could be explained by skill.

But this falls short for many reasons, including:

1. You could simply be a statistical anomaly, and where you ended up reflects nothing about your skill. If you were to "repeat the trial" (or your life), you may end up average or below average.

2. The more narrow your control group (eg. controlling for parents, beliefs, what TV shows you watched, which friends you had), the sample size becomes smaller and smaller, which means it's hard to find a statistically meaningful cohort. At the other end, too broad a control group and you risk not controlling for the factors which by mere chance highly influence life outcomes.

That's basically it; control for economic situation, race, etc and then evaluate advice and tips based on that.

1. Statistical anomaly is interesting, and it is where I spend time reflecting on advice I give people that I mentor. Is given advice wise? or just bragging? or just flat out bad.

For the article, I think it is good advice. Open minds see more possibilities and can see more things to try. However, you need resources to try multiple things.

I think a more reasonable takeaway is despite your upstream odds, being more open to things increases the number of trials you expose yourself to which increases the chance you realize your underlying odds in the first place.

So there’s a balance, and at extremes, a well-off person can sabotage themselves by not trying, while an entirely disenfranchised person will be screwed no matter how hard he tries.

"I'm skeptical of a definition of luck where you can be trained to be lucky. That's not luck, that's skill. There is no skill to luck by definition."

On the other hand, by that definition, no one can be luckier than anyone else. And yet, some people seem to have an easier time navigating reality than others.

>On the other hand, by that definition, no one can be luckier than anyone else.

Huh? That doesn't follow at all. Luck could be described as 'beneficial acts of god', there's no connection there to everyone having the same amount of those acts befall them.

You can't inherently be luckier than another person, but you can certainly have a luckier outcome.

serendipity = preparation + luck.

The combined force is greater than either alone.

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