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Comment by RobertRoberts | Hacker News Reader

>...the game is not rigged against those from poor backgrounds

Rigged isn't a fair word, it's just reality.

Also, as another commenter pointed out, there are people that are successful in a wide range of ways, money is just one of them. And those that had it easy early on often times don't do well later in life when things can get hard.

Edit: I spent time on the streets as a teen (yes it affected me) but my siblings did not, but they are worse off then me. I hit bottom and bounced back, they are still struggling in many ways. (not just money)

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Rigged isn't a fair word, it's just reality.

It's only reality because people accept it. If we stop accepting it the reality can be changed. For example, for several hundred years many people accepted slavery and believed owning people was justifiable. When enough people decided not to accept that reality it was changed fairly quickly.

Sorry to be a bit pedantic, but reality exists independent of belief or acceptance. However, a belief in whether or not a person can change that reality at some future point, I think is a more accurate description of the quality you're describing.

While generally you are of course correct, this is not always the case. Some facets of reality have been willed/believed into existence. Nations and social orders are real, but only exist as long as people believe in them. For example, when in 1991 people stopped believing in the existence of the USSR, it was erased from the objective reality in a very brief span of time.

It can be similarly argued that the modern income/opportunity distribution owes its continues existence to the fact that enough people believe that it exists and is lawful.

That is absolutely not what happened with the USSR.

Do you object to the notion that the USSR, like any country, was in a way an imaginary entity, or to the notion that it mainly ceased to exist because the its citizens decided to imagine something else and actually pulled it off?

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

> When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.

reality exists independent of belief or acceptance

I'm using the word in that sense of "The reality is that I can't afford to buy a Ferrari"; it's (sadly) true, but it could change in the future.

Slavery and owning people is still legal, explicitly so in some countries, less explicitly so where sweatshops/slave labor and factory economies function, and implicitly so in places like America and Europe, especially in high churn job sectors where employers figured out you can exploit a constantly new labor pool and by the time they figure it out there is a new batch of suckers to take advantage of(Uber is an example of this model.) Slavery and owning people never went away, it just got better at disguising itself. It will never go away either, because that is how reality functions (or else reality wouldn't function that way)

Several thousand years, at the very least, and in some quarters it's still practiced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

Practices can change, and it's nice to think that once we realized it was possible for "owning people" to not be a thing, we simply made it not a thing, but in fact mindsets can be the slowest to change.

Eradication of an evil social practice is not like invention of a science or technology. We invent the car or the computer, and 25 years later it's in every country on the planet. The Father of History mentions the ills of slavery, and 2500 years later we still haven't quite got this thing licked.

In the US, the right to use prisoners for slave labor is enshrined in the Constitution.

>Rigged isn't a fair word, it's just reality.

The universe and the laws of physics are "just" reality.

Other things, and especially society, is more like what we make them.

Our society and its functioning is not some god- or nature- handed immutable, it's something that we can change, update, fix, build upon etc (and of course, regress).

The reality the person you replied to also includes the immutable nature of our biology, and the fact that people vary wildly in intelligence and personality, which will result in vastly unequal outcomes for individuals. Society cannot be endlessly molded to our will because we're not masters of our bodies yet.

> Rigged isn't a fair word, it's just reality.

It is reality, but rigged is a perfectly accurate word, including the implication that this is a deliberate and actively preserved design element and not an accident.

> Also, as another commenter pointed out, there are people that are successful in a wide range of ways, money is just one of them

And virtually all of them are rigged against people with poor backgrounds.

> And those that had it easy early on often times don't do well later in life when things can get hard.

Not as often as those who didn't have it easy early on don't do well later, or simply don't even make it to later in the first place.

While I sympathize, I can't help but read this as an example of OP's first sentence (survival bias).

It's not survivor bias because all my siblings are still alive and I was the only one that nearly didn't make it.

I think it's a common enough situation where people who don't suffer enough to change their bad behavior continue in their bad behavior.

To put it in extremes, if someone had a gun to their head right now, could they quit smoking? I'd say most people could. (some people are suicidal)

I had a gun to my head and had to make a choice, my siblings did not.

But back to my point, reality isn't rigged, it is what it is.

There aren't rich people forcing poor people to stay poor at gun point (at least not in free countries). While rich people do make it easier for people in their circle to stay rich though (ignoring the differences in habits). That, I would say is rigged, but not in the way it seems commonly claimed.

> It's not survivor bias because all my siblings are still alive and I was the only one that nearly didn't make it.

Survival bias isn't (necessarily) literal. And you are ascribing your success (relative to your siblings) to drive developed from your rough times, not to a million other possible variables you're not aware of, and your story is just one case.

It is survival bias, regardless of whether your analysis happens to be true.

I will concede that only having my one data point presented seems to indicate that what I did to "save myself" won't work for everyone.

But don't you think that if everyone who smokes, if they quit today, all of them have a better chance at being healthier in the future? Maybe not all, but wouldn't their chances be greatly improved?

What is the difference between smoking and any other self destructive behavior people have?

I agree with you, but the game is rigged in that those with a better pedigree learn things others do not. That realization came slowly over several years, no one likes to believe they have built-in inequities.

But that's reality for you, you work with what you have.

The people arguing against you, exactly what are they thinking? That we should outlaw parents giving their children an edge in life?

They concentrate their efforts on the wrong things. And the solution is generational, teach children they can, and they will.

>...those with a better pedigree learn things others do not

Yes, I agree completely. But what I learned from my own experience is that I could teach different things to my kids than I was taught. No one forced me to teach the same things.

And I agree there seems to be a general unfairness in the world. How to fix this seems like the hard part because of your other points. (force people to not help their kids?)

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