There are a great many things beyond our control. But we will never stop trying to figure out that one thing we can do by choice that makes some kind of difference -- the more difference, the better.
Except there's a lot more going on here and a lot more at stake. Beliefs about the world, specifically beliefs about, long story short, why bad things happen to good people, can dramatically affect policy decisions and what a given culture considers acceptable. Someone feeling good about themselves is absolutely not a good enough reason to mangle reality. And that seems to be all that this whole mess is about. You want to believe you are in control of your life so you bury everyone else with you when that's absolutely not what we need right now to actually understand why things happen.
Rejection of the influence of randomness means we do not examine or account for said randomness. It means we think safety nets are worthless. It means we vote against free healthcare. It means we leave people to fend for themselves because we convince ourselves that it logically makes sense. If people control everything and if their determination is all they need, then we do not need to help them.
For a large slew of events that can randomly hit a person, there is often a very non-random source. But we are so focused on an individual-based rhetoric that we cannot admit that sometimes people affect others and that is a much bigger lever to pull than trying to convince every individual person to be some sort of a superhero who has no problems.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what you were aiming at with the lottery ticket example, given that it's pretty much nobody's choice even if they believe in luck.
I worked hard at solving my problems and eventually got myself off the street.
There are lots of people who seem to apply that same general mentality to life. We know that diet and lifestyle are huge factors in health outcomes, but many people don't really take that seriously. The connection between eating right and better health isn't immediate and obvious enough.
I write about issues like homelessness and I generally look at both pieces of the equation -- what the individual can do for themselves in spite of society not being helpful enough and what society needs to do differently.
I see zero reason to assume that encouraging individuals to not engage in learned helplessness should be an excuse for society to not offer a social safety net or work on improving the one that exists.
Pocketputer.com should get you to both Street Life Solutions (About page) and San Diego Homeless Survival Guide (Links page).
My Patreon link is in my profile as well.
There's more room here than learned helplessness, in fact, I think that doesn't derive from the "luck is important" mindset at all. See my post here since I'd just be repeating the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17535786
1. I wasn't talking about you in specific.
2. It's a relatively brief forum comment. It's not reasonable to assume it needs to cover all possible use cases as if it were, say, a scholarly paper.
3. It's entirely possible to engage someone in discussion and say "Ah, well, that sounds like a dichotomy that I don't fit." or something like that without being attacking or dismissive of the basic point the person was trying to make.
4. I don't like talking to people who come across as hell bent on shooting down everything I say rather than trying to understand my point. So I think I'm probably done replying to you in this thread.
I am just going to note that you're doing a very similar thing with statements like these:
> I see zero reason to assume that encouraging individuals to not engage in learned helplessness should be an excuse for society to not offer a social safety net or work on improving the one that exists.
So you may not be getting the results you're expecting because you're generating strawmen in your posts to which naturally the other poster is going to be inclined to reply in the somewhat less understanding manner.
It's not always easy to keep these discussions fully level and polite, and I absolutely fail in that all the time, but, like, pot, kettle.
nodnodnod
> Rejection of the influence of randomness means [...] people control everything and if their determination is all they need, then we do not need to help them.
Well, it is complicated and gets very subtle. For every person who is struck by catastrophe through sheer bad luck, there is at least one who is struck by catastrophe after a series of terrible personal choices.
Deciding which is which is not an easy choice. For example, imagine a bush-walker standing at the bottom of a cliff - a rock falls, and kills them. Looks a lot like bad luck. However, in the Australian mining industry, workers are essentially forbidden from standing near cliffs because that sort of thing is /actually quite likely/. Because they deal with the risk all the time, they see it as a choice to made.
Not mangling reality cuts two ways. Just because a choice isn't obvious doesn't mean that decisions don't play a role. In addition we can't attribute success solely to luck. Success strikes randomly in a small pool of people who have the capacity to be successful. That pool is small, and the people in it shouldn't be made responsible for the vagaries of the universe at large.
This one will get complicated since it's effectively a discussion on free will. :) I will say that trying to examine why people do what one could call stupid or terrible choices is an interesting exercise.
Consider, for instance, the act of smoking in a smoking-dominated country. I have grown up in such a country and I did not pick up smoking because I considered it bad. But I am also a significant outlier for other reasons (let's say I didn't have a lot of friends growing up). From a 3rd party perspective, especially one originated in a country that doesn't smoke a lot, picking up smoking seems like a very terrible idea, and it seems very straightforward to judge those people.
But consider it from the dynamics of the country: what does it mean to be a smoker, what does it mean to be a non-smoker, in such a country? Are there consequences to each? Why do most people end up smoking? What would they have to give up to not do it? Is a decision of an outlier like myself relevant/useful? What is the breaking point after which a culture switches from an activity being mainstream vs not?
If we say smoking is a terrible choice, we'd be forced to conclude that people in countries that smoke a lot must be worse people in some sense than people in countries that do not smoke a lot. A similar conclusion was once made by Milgram. But I think by now we realize that these conclusions are definitely not the right ones, so we need some other explanation.
> For example, imagine a bush-walker standing at the bottom of a cliff - a rock falls, and kills them. Looks a lot like bad luck. However, in the Australian mining industry, workers are essentially forbidden from standing near cliffs because that sort of thing is /actually quite likely/.
This, for example, doesn't sound like a choice from the perspective of the walker or worker, because they don't have the information. So on that level it looks to me to still be random. It's like choosing a career when you don't know anything about the market or what makes a good career - it's basically random from your perspective, even if there are deterministic paths all around. After all, most physical luck (i.e., accidentally tripping) is also deterministic internally, but it's luck to us because we can't tell.
It is not random for the whoever manages the Australian mining industry, because they have the information. One way to reduce randomness is having more information, which can be extended to educating people more.
Now, it's possible for someone's actions to suggest that they have some subconscious motivations that are in conflict with what they say makes them happy. And it's also possible for them to grow in ways that overcome these cognitive distortions, such that chasing an ambition over all else is no longer fulfilling for them. But even if that happens, in the moments before growth they still were not losing out on anything, because their psyche at the time didn't care about what they missed out on.
Saying happiness is a kind of mental state doesn't mean that you're guaranteed to be right about whether you're in it. People are constantly in denial about whether they're jealous, depressed, angry, etc. Happiness is the same thing. We all undergo some mix of positive and negative experiences in our life. We come to a conclusion about whether those add up to happiness, and that conclusion is colored by many things, like the idea that we're fulfilling some important purpose, or "crushing it" or whatever else.
As for your point about "who can tell you you're not happy", that's missing the point. It's true that someone else who is not privy to your stream of consciousness probably isn't in a position to tell you whether you're happy. But that in no way implies that your own judgment is infallible. Nothing about the world guarantees that every truth is knowable by someone, at least not easily. It may be that you're blind to your own mental state.
However, we have very good evidence in aggregate that many people chase success at the expense of happiness. They often later describe a feeling that they were deceiving themselves.
The presence of a trait doesn’t imply that it’s in any way an active ingredient, even a very little active. Post hoc analysis is bullshit.
I would hypothesize that some founders succeeded despite being jerks, but most jerks are not successful founders, and most successful founders aren't jerks.
In any case, if somebody has excellent ability in performing correct inferences and a healthy dose of self belief as he knows what he's doing and knows he has indeed accumulated more than many others trying the same thing, those can indeed be positive personality traits. However if one goes as far as really to "distort" the reality/self perception, I don't think it can end well at all and might well wreck havoc and can even be classic signs of depression. Objectively evaluating evidence, understanding that human beings are not fundamentally different, genuinely listening to others and immediately acknowledging own folly can only be a plus in all sorts of scenarios.
If these unlucky people you describe win the power ball they'll just lose it because they failed to become millionaires (discipline/money management) before they got the millions.
Still not sure I agree in this case (you can think luck is real bit still behave optimally) but it could be a helpful way to think in other scenarios.
Once you get into any specific situation and you need a higher resolution view of things then you can look at the situation as it should be looked rather than defaulting to the low resolution view that luck doesn't matter.
We can all put our big boy pants on, accept that luck is a part of reality, and act in the best possible way with this fact in consideration.
This is where we disagree. A cognitive distortion automatically filters the world for you. Your body does it without you being consciously aware of it. You want these distortions to be helpful, otherwise your body will automatically filter the world in an unhelpful manner to you.
For instance, in the face of this PDF, the person I first replied to said something like "the people who get stuff done got there because they're lucky". This worldview is poor because it doesn't help you get more stuff done in any way, it's just a blame game (in this case the thing that's getting blamed is luck). And it's something you'll do automatically if you're always considering luck in how you see the world.
The point is to get rid of this mechanism in your brain/body that jumps to luck (or any other harmful concept) and to substitute it with something more helpful.
There are times that changing the original strategy/task/behavior is not the optimal thing to do, but your "no luck" world view does not allow for that possibility.
Believing luck is not real pretty much immediately activates the just world hypothesis, which is responsible for some rather awful things happening to people. It's the kind of shallowly selfish, short-term belief set we do not want to have.
It's not just about a given person and how productive they singularly happen to be, why are we focusing on that so much?
This doesn't follow, and the article adnzzzzZ linked explains how it doesn't follow. In particular, if you divide the concept of truth up into "objective truth" and "pragmatic truth" as the article suggests, you can believe the just-world hypothesis is false on an objective level while still believing that you should ignore luck on a pragmatic level, because it - by definition - holds no bearing on what you can control.
"Stop using luck as an excuse for your failures and other people's failures."
This doesn't really sound they have the objective world setup well, and would trivially slide down to judging unlucky people. I'm convinced that the just-world hypothesis is one of the most evil cognitive biases a culture can have (in terms of how much suffering is created, see some developments in Christian religion), so I'm not sure this is a risk worth taking.
In my life I found the most true view (as far as I can find it) to be the most useful. Knowing that luck is an important factor fairly significant rotates what you do, why you do it, what you consider important, what you think about others, etc. I think if we do develop cognitive adaptations, we should nonetheless root them in what is true. I.e., if we go for the pragmatic adaptation, why? For a lot of people, the idea that luck is important is brand new information they should sit and chew on for a while.
> you should ignore luck on a pragmatic level, because it - by definition - holds no bearing on what you can control.
So this is not quite true, and it's somewhat related to the point above. A lot of luck based events are random to the person they happen to, in the sense that they were chosen for it randomly, but have a non-random source, or arise from a non-random pattern. Someone might get sick, which is random, but how the system deals with it is not random and makes the difference in how debilitating that event can be (in other words, society has ways of modifying the effect of randomness on the system). A person might be randomly targeted, but the source of the targeting is not random (i.e., the target of a robbery may be random, but there's nothing random about the robber and their choice to rob).
The problem with the randomness concept is that it's not symmetric. If you focus on the individual only you miss the cross-effects. What we say, when we say that luck is important, is that a given person cannot conquer the world, cannot override its rules, and many of its rules are unfair. What we are not saying is that we should sit down and do nothing, in fact, we're saying the opposite: the world is broken and requires fixing, and the world should be fixed before the individual is fixed. And it is the awareness of its unfairness that is needed here. What is there to fix if a given person is fully responsible for their lives? We just blame the person and move on, as humanity has done for thousands of years.
This sort of approach (separate things into true reality and pragmatic/relevant reality) requires a lot of justification before it should be adopted.
This is just fundamentally wrong. The correct level of analysis to fix the world is the individual. If individuals aren't responsible for their actions and doing their best in life then the world will never be fixed. By saying that the world needs to be fixed before individuals you're giving people an excuse to not try their best.
> By saying that the world needs to be fixed before individuals you're giving people an excuse to not try their best.
Frankly, it's the least of my concerns if I am giving someone excuses or not or if someone is trying their best. My concern is whether the world makes sense, is reasonably fair, and if people in it are happy. People trying, or not trying, their best, is only relevant if it is somehow interfering with that goal. At the end of the day I don't think people doing their best is all that relevant because it's not an objective measure and by definition varies between people. This smells of a religious kind of "sacredness", of people trying to create value out of nothing through "virtuous" action and living. This is the kind of thing people turned to when the world was so bad that improving it was impossible, so they turned inwards, so that even in the darkest circumstances they could feel good about themselves. Are you familiar with such philosophy? Is that what you're doing here? Do you think this is a good time and place for that?
If someone's best is a broken bridge, and someone's mediocre is a working bridge, guess which bridge I want? The world doesn't care about my "best" or your "best" and never did and never will. The bridge only works if it is built correctly, it doesn't care if someone did their "best".
We should not be focused on what is our personal best, because that's irrelevant and self-focused and leads to a shallow kind of selfishness. It undermines what can be built by human hands through collective effort. It gives credit when none is due (to work with no results). It makes us focus inward and generates concern with esteem and status. We shouldn't be worried about that, we're not animals. We should focus on what works, what's a good idea, what brings results.
Fuck that. Luck is real. And I won't give up. It's called taking a leap of faith. You don't have to lie to yourself in order to take risks.
Your solution is harmful. If people stop believing in luck, then everyone who fails just didn't try hard enough.
>Your solution is harmful. If people stop believing in luck, then everyone who fails just didn't try hard enough.
This is only harmful if you aren't willing or prepared to take responsibility for your actions.
I think it's useful to take a similar approach when considering luck. Good things (big contracts, investors) are the equivalent of "hazard", and good market positioning, professional networking, persistence etc. then increase the "risk" of them paying off. It's not about "being lucky", it's about increasing the likelihood of positive outcomes to a level where your overall success becomes likely.
Once you decide that everything is intrinsic, any instance bad luck is enough to declare people "untouchable".
- Being born into a good family.
- Winning the lottery.
Luck: Something you cannot affect yourself. If luck is your only game, prepare to be disappointed. Also: 70 percent of lottery winners, end up broke just a few years later.
Question: Is having good luck actually bad luck? Or does it trigger bad behaviours that rich people don't have? ... I think this well and truly debunks any notion that luck's got anything to do with it.
In fact I think the opposite. I think luck's got nothing to to with it, and that the only way you will keep your wealth, is to learn how to 1. increase it fast, and 2. how to hold on to it.
As a matter of fact, most people live from hand to mouth. They aren't even able to hold on to the little wealth they create. And thus so many of them think they're slaves, when they are in fact free to do as they like.
Thing is, most people are terribly afraid of the freedom, and – as the example with the lottery winners prove – most can't handle large sums of money anyway.
If you want an example of a guy who really learned about money before he got rich, look up Elon Musk. One of the reasons he dared to risk everything, was because he learned to live on much less than normal people would ever accept. He knows his bare minimum.
Do you?
With that security securely at the bottom, he could risk the venture that starting a new company from scratch is. In any case, luck's got nothing to do with it.
And people aren’t ‘terribly afraid of freedom’, what does that even mean?
Just because most technologists don't doesn't mean it's actually such an unknown.
That's simply wrong.
If "with adequate business research, those can be avoided" is true, it can only be true as a syllogism where 'adequate' is defined to mean the research necessary not to fail, and any company which fails hasn't done 'adequate' research.
Hard to take musk as a good example. Plenty of people lived on less making the biggest bets they could, and have nothing to show for it. Just consider if he had been born in another country or timeframe.
This is not to claim rich people don't deserve their riches. In large, that is a statement many of us fine meaningless. Rather, spare us the nonsensical justifications that require near deification of people that have acquired lots of money. Respect does not have to equal devotion.
There is tremendous survivorship bias in this analysis.
While these traits were found in a substantial portion of people who "Get Stuff Done", how about the people who exhibit these traits, but don't "Get Stuff Done"? We have no idea how large that population is.
Assuming the author's research is perfect, and every successful person who "Gets Stuff Done" exhibits these trait. The author, at best, has shown these traits are necessary, but not sufficient. Since many people potentially have these traits and don't "Get Stuff Done", there must be further special sauce which differentiates them.
This hardly proves much since the group of people who buy lottery tickets is self-selecting. A person who understands probability will not be buying a lottery ticket. Most people buying them are not in the best situation.
There's a lot more going on in the world than people who work hard vs people who buy lottery tickets.
This often quoted line is a complete media distortion of what really happens. It is wrong. I highly recommend being skeptical of the misinformation spread by news and looking into the primary sources yourself.
Here’s the Florida study that this line is referring to:
https://eml.berkeley.edu/~cle/laborlunch/hoekstra.pdf
Here’s the actual results of the study:
Results show that although recipients of $50,000 to $150,000 are 50 percent less likely to file for bankruptcy in the two years after winning relative to small winners, they are equally more likely to file three to five years afterward.
First, this study wasn’t people winning millions and blowing it, it’s people winning modest amounts under 200K. Second, they’re not going bankrupt at higher rates than other people, they’re filing less often in the short term, and at the same rates in the long term. In other words, the lottery winnings of $10K - $200K didn’t help their longer term life prospects.
Is that some sort of surprise? Anyone would spend $200K in 5 years.
The winnings did not create higher rates of bankruptcy, and I don’t know right now where the 70% number came from. The number of people who filed for bankruptcy was 5.5%.
“DENVER — Over the past couple of years several news organizations have attributed a statistic to the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) stating that 70 percent of lottery winners end up bankrupt in just a few years after receiving a large financial windfall. This statistic is not backed by research from NEFE, nor can it be confirmed by the organization. Frequent reporting—without validation from NEFE—has allowed this “stat” to survive online in perpetuity.“
https://www.nefe.org/Press-Room/News/Research-Statistic-on-F...