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Comment by lumberjack | Hacker News Reader

When people try to be positive by saying: "it's not all natural talent, you must also work hard and persevere!", I wonder, aren't those also shaped by our genes? Is the ability to work hard and the mental fortitude not to give up not also something dictated by our genetics?

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You can take that one step further. Couldn’t the willingness to believe in the foreordaining nature of genetics also be determined by genetics? Maybe those people, who believe that genetics does not determine everything, cannot believe otherwise, because of their own genes? In that case, isn’t there no point in you trying to argue about this? Those who believe in genetics and determinism will do so and leave everything to fall as it may, and those who believe in personal hard work and perseverence will try to work as hard as they can, because that is their nature.

Reminds me of this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8kX62n6yNXA

I prefer this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8

(Video is “You Are Two” by CGP Grey, 2016-05-31)

To fully generalize the concept, take Samuel Butler's formulation from Erewhon: If it were possible to know everything about the past, it would be possible to know everything about the future.

Zoom out far enough and nature and nurture are unified into a deterministic historical timeline. Freewill is an illusion and the universe is a static four-dimensional entity.

That's just a reformulation of Laplace's Demon, which repudiated long ago.

That assumes that the universe is deterministic... the more we learn about quantum mechanics, the less likely that seems.

QM is quite deterministic too, if you think of it like field theory.

Doesn’t quantum mechanics leave open the possibility that our universe is fundamentally probabilistic?

Also, how can we say anything about free will when we have not come to grips with defining the hard problem? Of course, if you want to model biological processes based on deterministic physics then free will does not exist. I’m simply suggesting that the fundamental assumption that are universe is deterministic is flawed.

> Doesn’t quantum mechanics leave open the possibility that our universe is fundamentally probabilistic?

Not really. A wave function propogates in a perfectly deterministic manner. There's not anything probabilistic baked into QM.

Probability comes in at what's called the Measurement Problem. Right now, we ad hoc apply the Born rule to project complex amplitudes into probability distributions whenever convenient, but there's actually no good understanding of why the Born rule works at all. It's just sorta tacked onto QM at this point.

It really doesn’t matter if the laws of nature are deterministic or not. Consider the past. At no time did a die come up both two and five, nor did a photon’s wavelength collapse in two places. Why should the future be considered differently? Events in the future will happen one specific certain way – we just can’t know which way until they actually happen. But we don’t have to be able to (even theoretically) predict future events for those future events to still be fixed in a four-dimensional space-time.

This is my lazy excuse for not being an overachiever. I see people at the top of their fields and they so obviously seem innately driven to perform and be amazing. I was not born with that instinct and my brain doesn't reward me the same way theirs does. I'm fine with this.

I love the way how meta your last sentence works. Kudos, you must've got a talent for this.

History teacher claimed that the Ancient Greeks thought being happy and contented was a gift from the gods, not something you could achieve.

I'm inclined to agree.

Personally show me one highly successful driven person that became that way by gambling everything and I'll show you five easy that broke.

Why jump to the conclusion that it's all nature? Perhaps upbringing and life-experience also shape motivation and work-ethic.

My comment is less focused on the cause and more about accepting the result. I have no strong opinion on nature vs nurture but regardless my genes and upbringing have led me to accept I'm not that type of person

I agree completely as I come to terms with my self. With much humility, I have enormous potential but it is tempered by a lack of that drive to fullfil it. My path has been largely driven by chance and yet I am in some ways way beyond average. I'd rather work on my percieved shortcomings than make use of my advantages. I should probably change my priorities. \drunkpost

You could also be "fated" to begin achieving the things you want tomorrow. The universe being deterministic doesn't mean that you personally know your own future. Our predictions for ourselves are likely to be wrong in many ways. We can't know until we try.

It's a balance to both accept reality as it is while also striving to achieve things that we didn't know for sure were possible (or that we hadn't even conceived of yet!).

It seems that we must carefully straddle the boundary between the known and the unknown. Of course, this will look different for everyone.

I focus on gaining meaning and happiness in life from things other than achievement. The things I do mean less to me than the experiences and relationships I have in life. I don't need a $100 million yacht and a Wikipedia page to love the people around me and feel loved in return. I think what I have is a lot more valuable.

That is awesome. Nothing wrong with that at all. I was mainly responding to the fatalist side of your comment.

I've observed for quite some time that determination, charisma, and the ability to sustain focus are more significant than either natural ability or education. If you don't believe me spend some time in New York.

It's something that came up a while back in a discussion with a friend on the concept of AI super intelligence. I personally don't think you would need superhuman IQ to run circles around humans. Superhuman focus and drive would do it. Something with a 150 IQ but able to operate like a person on amphetamine but minus the side effects and enter sustained periods of "flow state" focus at will would be godlike. Hell even mediocre IQ with superhuman focus would be scary.

> "it's not all natural talent, you must also work hard and persevere!"

I understood this to mean that to achieve your full potential ( naturally given potential ), you have to work hard and persevere.

A kenyan long distance runner might have a natural potential far greater than everyone else, but he still has to train to reach his natural potential.

> Is the ability to work hard and the mental fortitude not to give up not also something dictated by our genetics?

Genetics may predispose you to working harder and being mentally strong, but that's something you can change through hard work. You can't grow to be 7'5" like yao ming by working hard. You can't run as fast usain bolt by working hard. There are natural/genetic/physical limits. And there are natural predispositions.

I'm not a geneticist or a biologist so take it with a grain of salt.

surely it's both—that our capacity for mental fortitude can lay dormant until woken by conditions

Conscientiousness and intelligence are both traits and they are independent of each other. So it’s possible

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