Just as bad for you is believing that hard work and intelligence will get you nowhere. The reality is somewhere in between.
Similar with experiments. Good experiments are those that produce expected results, but those teach you nothing. A well designed experiment is in fact the one whose results are as unpredictable as possible, as it has the highest chance of providing new information. While an experiment designed to achieve a predicted result can only teach you something new by sheer accident, when the prediction turns out to be wrong.
There being more ways than one individual can attempt also has a solution. Anyone who wants to can go in with the other scientists, have each one try one of the options but agree to share the spoils if any of them succeeds. Then you succeed if anyone does and the proceeds from winning are reduced but the probability increases.
One reason not to do this is if you think one specific option is more likely than the others and you're willing to risk individual failure for individual success. But if you're correct to do that then you're correctly rewarded for doing it.
And there are reasons the individual method can produce better results in addition to that -- if you're in a pool with many others and succeed when any of them do, you have a reduced incentive to be meticulous because your personal reward is no longer strongly correlated with your personal success or failure. Anyone can join the pool, slack off and hope to profit if someone else succeeds. Then many people do that and many advances are lost. See also employees of any large bureaucratic organization/government.
So we want individuals to take good risks, but the only way to tell if they're good instead of just risks is when they succeed. And the reward has to be in proportion to the risk to get people to do it, which means attempts with a low probability of success require a large reward.
An economic and social system with many games one must play does sound an awful lot like a gambling house.
(Edit: substituted "games one must play" for "many games for one to play" — it's about the necessity and lack of choice, not the freedom to play games if one desires to do so)
Humans play games. And business is just lots of humans playing lots of games. You can either accept it, go along, and build a career, or take your shot at doing your own thing. The latter is terrifying and incredibly unlikely to succeed, so most pick the former.
What seems like a "lucky break' to the casual observer is very frequently the result of years of work that allowed that person to take advantage of that moment. The moment is also frequently only clear in hindsight, and is often more of a "I heard you know about X, do you have a minute to talk to Y about X?" thing, than a "Here's a crazy promotion!" fairytale.
Tell that to people that were born poor or with a big disability or into an abusive family. Compare their chances and fate with those that were born into a good family with plenty of resources. What do you call the source of that difference? Most people would call it luck.
Or do people imagine that there’s a global repository of souls which are randomly drawn from when two people have reproductive sex? The contrasting idea to luck is fate. People don’t have as much of a problem with luck as they do with fate.
Also, while that extreme example is somewhat illustrative, I think for most of us it's that we're one of 20+ engineers, illustrators, business-types, etc in a department, and the "luck" we see around us is explained by what I wrote.
Luck implies unexplainable randomness. Example: The person who got the promotion was "lucky", because they just happened to have knowledge in a field that was needed. There's no luck there, they spent years learning that information.
Or maybe you're just lucky enough that you've never been in a frame of mind to notice its absence?
I know nothing of you as an individual, but if we define "luck" as events unfolding in your life beyond your control in a positive manner it's absurd to say it doesn't exist. We are all brought into existence either lucky or unlucky, relatively speaking. Were you born healthy, attractive, tall, rich, smart, with loving parents with a stable income, in a first world country? Or were you born poor, diseased, addicted to crack, and into sex slavery?
Yes, there are things you can do to improve your lot in life, but saying luck doesn't exist is a harmful truism. You believe it because it makes you feel in control of your destiny, not because it has any basis in reality.
Tell me how you feel about luck after being diagnosed with a terminal illness that will make the rest of your life miserable and deplete the savings you pass onto your grieving loved ones.
This is the idea of "luck" when discussing "meritocracy" and people being promoted, which I think was kind of clear if you read past the first three words.
No wonder you don't believe in it if you don't think luck includes any element of randomness.
I bet you also believe the justice system is fair and that a poor Black teenager caught with weed will be treated the same as a White kid in the burbs...
People who have been born into royal families managed to bring their countries to poverty and their dynasty to an end. People winning the lotteries end up poorer than before.
There is 100% "unluck" though: getting an incurable decease cannot be turned around in a positive way
It's not just about parents or upbringing either. Mark Zuckerberg's roommates - Hughes, Moskovitz, and Saverin - were his roommates by luck. What if they'd gone to Yale or Brown or Stanford? Or not been assigned to those rooms? You might say "But they worked hard to get into Harvard and be exposed to those opportunities!" - but so did (almost) everyone else who got into Harvard. Most of the other people from that class aren't billionaires now - they're merely highly successful professionals.
Wow, this attitude manages to have a victim mentality, blame others, spread hopelessness, and be arrogant and disparaging, all in 14 words.
I've heard this attitude a lot recently, and even bought into it some myself, but this comment clarifies how toxic this attitude is. There is literally nothing positive in this attitude, and I think that part of the problems with America right now is the feeling of victimization. A victim mentality never has positive long-term outcomes. A victim says "things can't change" which is why there isn't collective action. Be the change you want to see.
My current lousy situation is not the result of something internal and unchangeable, so it is worth figuring out how to change it and get into a better situation.
It's easy to take that attitude too far, but maybe keeping a little bit of it around could be helpful for some.
I'm not a take big risks and hope to be lucky kinda guy.
Yet more conclusory statements.
You very rarely hear people claiming that "hard work and intelligence" is always ineffective in every context.
> Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false.
Yes, he offers a token line at one point that effort and skill can be relevant. However, most of the article makes a bunch of unsubstantiated claims about Gates's success being due purely to luck, and fortuitous circumstances (as though examining the right tail of the distribution is even relevant, of course, he also doesn't even provide any evidence for his claim anyway).