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Comment by martinni | Hacker News Reader

Rich people got "lucky" but they don't define what luck is to begin with. To quote Naval, there are 4 kinds of luck.

1. Blind luck - Where I just got lucky because something completely out of my control happened

2. Luck from hustling - luck that comes through persistence, hard work, hustle, motion. Which is when you’re running around creating lots of opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lot of things, lots of things will get stirred up in the dust.

3. Luck from preparation - If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in that field. When other people who aren’t attuned to it won’t notice.

4. Luck from your unique character - You created your own luck. You put yourself in a position to be able to capitalize on that luck. Or to attract that luck when nobody else has created that opportunity for themselves.

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2-4 are great examples of survivorship bias.

For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures.

If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.

It's just like in sports. Usain Bolt is not the fastest man alive. He is the fastest professional runner. Within a sample set of 9bn people, there are likely ones with better genetics - but no access or chance to become a professional runner.

This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit. A net worth of 100mil still means generational wealth. But once you're in the billions, the gap to all the other employees in your company becomes just crazy - but none of the billions would have been possible without their labor.

Remember: a million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds? 31.71 years.

You’re looking at it way to black and white.

I would bet if Gates had been born in Rwanda, he would have stood a good chance of being successful there, better than average.

Not really.

When I was a teenager we hosted at our home kids running from Rwanda , my mom was working in an hospital that cured them, doing the best possible for kids (kids!) with arms or legs amputated or a big part of their skull chopped off with a machete.

You're assuming Gates had probably more chances when the chances weren't there to begin with.

Libertarians who talk about how the state just gets in the way of innovators like Gates forget how hard it is to start a business when the central government fails and people start hacking away at each other with machetes instead of programming computers.

Okay, but this is a strawman, because a basic tenet of libertarianism is that a government is necessary to forcefully (if necessary) prevent others from trampling on your individual rights. You are describing anarchy, not libertarianism.

I have in fact read from libertarians that the government has no business doing such a thing and that's the rightful place of private militias and police to enforce.

In theory yes, but in practice most libertarians involved in politics want to ruthlessly prune government down to courts for arbitration of contractual disputes, and police for enforcing property rights.

What you are describing is not anarchy, for that matter. Anarchy means absence of rulers, which is not the same thing as chaos and warlordism. Political anarchists are concerned with the establishment of systems that disallow concentrations of power or wealth that enable oppression.

Libertarianism is not exclusively capitstic. Philosophical anarchism can include autonomism, autarchism, and market anarchism, for example: https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/anarchism-libertarian...

It's doubly wrong to describe the situation in Rwanda as anarchism because the genocide that occurred there was not due to some lack of contractual or property relations, but planned, engineered, and carried out because of tribal animosity, partially pursuant to grievances stemming from a particularly brutal period of Belgian colonialism and subsequent civil war(s). That genocide was highly organized by social elites of one tribe over a period of about a year. To maintain otherwise is either product of ignorance or bad faith, so I hope you'll abandon this erroneous position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

I haven't said anything about rwanda. I wad only adding nuance to your extremely blanket characterization of libertarianism which clearly calls for a government of some kind.

If you read back up the thread, the whole context of people hacking each other with machetes arose from speculation on how well Bill Gates would have done had he been born in Rwanda. I default to assuming that people read the threads to which they are commenting, and that it's not necessary for everyone to restate all the context every time.

Is it still survivorship bias if it took 20 failed attempts before a successful one?

Yeah, of course. If the chances of some success are distributed geometrically, so that "winners" are randomly chosen at e.g. 0.001% per year, then somebody who wins the dice roll looks pretty smart to themselves and the rest of the world, having done something seemingly difficult. However across a population of a million individuals, 10 or so will achieve that success in the first year.

What is usually achievable through hard work, and worth achieving, is an honest life, a home of one's own, and for some, kids. These are things that bring contentment and happiness. Wealth and power beyond a reasonable measure only endangers these things.

Kinda. The usual rate is apparently 5 failed attempts before a successful one.

Survivorship bias is looking at only the successes and not the failures. All those self-help books about "the 25 things all successful entrepreneurs do" without acknowledging that thousands of unsuccessful entrepreneurs also do the exact same 25 things.

It's standing up on stage and saying "I worked really hard to get here, I deserve this", without acknowledging that other people are working just as hard but didn't get the same result.

Survivorship bias is not acknowledging that there is luck involved in success. That "meritocratic" blindness that divides the world into "winners" and "losers" and blames people for not being successful.

> This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit.

> Remember: a million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds? 31.71 years.

That was insightful and I am telling you: I am going to use your argument from now on---it was just beautifully simple and clear!

> This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit. A net worth of 100mil still means generational wealth. But once you're in the billions, the gap to all the other employees in your company becomes just crazy - but none of the billions would have been possible without their labor.

On the other hand, suppose you employ 30,000 people each with 10,000 in savings from working at your company. Without your initial labor to get everything set up and get the business going, none of their combined $300 million in assets would have been possible without your labor, so actually your net worth seems ever more justified.

You don't know that though. They could have just worked somewhere else and earned as much. It's not like you're creating money out of thin air.

>It's not like you're creating money out of thin air.

No, but money (and value) is created out of ideas, of labor, and adding value to products.

When an IPO happens, for example, and a company owner holding 50% of the company is suddenly valued at $20B, that value did not come from taking $20B from other people. It's the value of the company. It is value simply created out of thin air, that didn't exist before.

If the next day, someone prices the stock 30% higher through market forces, the owners value shoots up 30% also. That 30% increase in a single day was not taken from anyone - it is made up out of thin air.

When a craftsman buys a piece of wood for $10, crafts it such that others value it at $1000, that craftsman just added $900 of value. It might have taken a week, or might have taken 15 minutes. It's not simply some labor value per hour times hours. The amount of value is created out of thin air, but it took some labor to allow that increase to happen. The labor amount and value added is somewhat related, but varies greatly across all endeavors.

And saying the employees could have just worked somewhere else is shuffling the truth - to have somewhere to work, someone has to start a company, which often takes significant money and risk to begin with, before thousands of workers can have a stable job. That money too was created previously through invention, innovation, labor, and previous investment.

When an IPO happens, for example, and a company owner holding 50% of the company is suddenly valued at $20B, that value did not come from taking $20B from other people.

Unless you were the first to market in a completely new field, it's very possible that some of a firm's worth comes from gaining market share from existing players. That's the whole 'disruption' effect. This might be more economically efficient from one perspective, but that's not necessarily better - both because perfectly efficient systems lack slack, and because people are bad at valuing things.

So take Amazon back when it specialized in selling books. Good part - Amazon has pretty much any book you want, yay. Bad part - it kills brick-and-mortar bookstores. even today, while I'll go to Amazon for a specific book I want, I'll usually wait until I've looked around some other bookstores first. Not only do I like the chance discovery of books I might not otherwise have picked up in bookstores, I like bookstores themselves, especially used bookstores. And I don't like the fact that there are not as many bookstores as there used to be.

So what? Make co-op financing better, figure out a tired grant system for allocating startup capital from a public pool. You're just underlining the article's hypothesis - rich people often get that way because they start out with or have access to more capital than others of equal or greater ability, rather than through any inherent virtue.

In a previous life where I worked at a boutique computer supplier, I got a client who was running a small stock market research/analysis business with only a few employees, and needed high power workstations. I'm not a big people person, and I was looking at his operation and thinking that I'd prefer it to what I was doing, and (from seeing his work product and helping him get going technically) that it was well within my capabilities. So I put in a bit of extra effort to get friendly with him and to figure out how he got his operation off the ground. Turned out his dad was an investment banker and had given him a million $ to set up (at a time when that was a much more significant investment than it is now). I also learned that his biggest obstacle was not his competitors but the chip he had on his shoulder about how his brother was the favorite son and had been given $10 million.

That was the day I realized that wealth isn't a meritocracy.

>Unless you were the first to market in a completely new field, it's very possible that some of a firm's worth comes from gaining market share from existing players.

It is possible, but you can simply check that the size of the US and world economy has grown tremendously, so that argument doesn't explain the growth.

>So what? Make co-op financing better,

There are plenty of ESOP companies. If they consistently did well enough, then the excess capital they generate could be used to start more employee owned companies.

That this doesn't happen perhaps points to an inefficiency in this process for company creation. Perhaps simply having workers is not enough to drive the economy. It shouldn't be a surprise that when an investor takes a risk to allocate capital to a fledgling company, that the investor would expect a return for resulting growth.

Creating companies without investment is possible, but likely less capable overall.

>That was the day I realized that wealth isn't a meritocracy.

Nothing is a meritocracy - everyone has luck and genetics. Income correlates both with IQ and hours worked, and I suspect most would consider the latter factor merit, and some consider the former merit too.

But wealth, correlating with many things one can control, is also not simply a random variable completely detached from merit.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... [2] https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/w11895.html

> It is possible, but you can simply check that the size of the US and world economy has grown tremendously, so that argument doesn't explain the growth.

Can it keep growing forever? If not, how much longer can it keep growing? Should we alter our economic system to account for the change in economic environment?

> Can it keep growing forever?

Why not? Can people keep adding value to things? Only once there is no possible to add value to anything would an economy have to stop growing. I suppose in some heat death of the universe scenarios, this may happen, but we’ve got billions of years before even our local sun destroys earth, and I suspect mankind will have changed significantly if we make it that far.

Why do you imply economies cannot grow for the long term foreseeable future?

> Can it keep growing forever? If not, how much longer can it keep growing?

I mean, I guess the strict answer to the first question is "no", but the answer to the second question is - it can keep growing for so long that it really doesn't matter.

There's no real reason to think that we've reached the end of innovation - we keep innovating, we keep finding ways to squeeze more stuff out of less material and labor - the economy keeps growing.

There are people that argue that innovation has slowed down - but I don't think everyone agrees, and even if they do, the mechanism is not well understood. And most importantly, even if it slowed down, it doesn't mean that innovation stopped.

> Should we alter our economic system to account for the change in economic environment?

Well it depends on what the change is and what our goals are. Most people who want the "economic system" changed have, I think, different goals than the ones who want it kept the same (e.g. what is more important - growth or equality? There are real, honest debates one can have about this, but if people land on different sides of this, obviously they may want different changes enacted).

Actually yes.. Production of goods does indeed create money out of thin air (and raw materials).

They could have earned just as much elsewhere. However since we are not in a situation of labor shortages yet, every income providing job is still important. If your employees worked elsewhere they may be as rich as they are with you, but the guy whose job they replaced would have to look for another job.

>...assets would have been possible without your labor, so actually your net worth seems ever more justified.

What? No, how is it justified?

Try again.

You are arguing against the article.

If Bill Gates didn't exist we could all easily be using Osbournes instead of PCs, or something equivalent would have occurred.

> If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.

Flip that around. There are thousands, if not millions of other kids who grew up with wealthy, connected parents. Why aren't they all billionaires if that's all it takes?

They're still wealthy, though, that's the main point. It's not that wealthy parents = billions of dollars, it's that the path to billionaire status overwhelmingly starts with abnormally good starting conditions.

Billionaire is a bad metric. These are outliers of outliers. Obviously everyone can't be a billionaire. That's like asking why everyone isn't an Olympic gold medalist. Of course the path to a billionaire is going to start with abnormal conditions. It's also going to be completely abnormal along the way, too. It's an abnormal outcome. Why would you expect anything different?

Because if you're not born rich your chances of dying rich are astronomically low. We pretend social mobility exists when in reality it does not, or at least it's extremely rare (even in the US, now more than ever).

I think the problem is the flipping from "Billionaire" to "rich". To get to the most insanely abnormal outcome imaginable, you need crazy good conditions and lots of luck. To get to the level of "rich", by most people's standards, you don't need anywhere near the same level (though of course, luck still plays a role depending on how you define luck - I mean in some sense, you're crazy lucky to even be alive given the odds against the particular sperm/egg matching that made you up.)

> Obviously everyone can't be a billionaire.

The question is should anyone be a billionaire? Many of us think the answer is 'no'.

Should anyone run a sub-4 minute mile? Should anyone be 7 feet tall? Should anyone make the world's largest pizza? What other outliers are you going to put yourself in charge of regulating?

None of these (except the pizza?) are the result of policy, a billion dollars is. None of these polarize undemocratic power, a billion dollars does. None of them are innate in the sense that they cannot be separated from the person like extreme wealth. Height and athletic ability are neutral in a way that extreme wealth are not. Height and athletic ability are biological and meritorious in a way extreme wealth could never be. These aren't in the same category and cannot be reduced to a value neutral "outlier".

You are missing the point. When you start talking about what "should" be, you imply that there is some authority in charge of deciding the rightness of what is or isn't. Who is that authority? Which bureaucrat in Washington do you want to sit at a desk and decide how much money you are allowed to have?

Right now Jeff Bezos "has" umpty-billion dollars because he owns so many shares of Amazon stock and the market values those shares at a certain amount. So, how do you propose to make him not a billionaire? Are you going to confiscate his shares and hand them over to the government? Would the government be better at running Amazon than Jeff Bezos is? Are you going to pass a law that forbids anyone from buying a share of Amazon for a value any more than what would make Bezos a billionaire? What exactly is the plan here?

People who spout off nonsense like there shouldn't be billionaires, haven't ever though through what that means or what it would imply to make their half-baked notions into a reality.

I'm not missing the point at all. Yes, in short, I believe the government could make that choice. Yes, I believe in redistribution. Taxes are one means for that. Your argument seems to be that literally no one has thought this through, which is patently false. Anyway, we've shifted from a theoretical question about billionaires to a question of practical implementation, which is beyond the scope of an HN comment from a dumbass like me. If you want to know who I think is doing some of the most serious and noteworthy research and writing on this and many other topics related to social welfare and redistribution, check out the People's Policy Project: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/

There is nothing on that website about any proposal to cap personal net worth at $1 billion or any other amount.

No one suggested that being rich is all it takes, just that it increases the odds substantially.

  "If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today."

You are unfairly using an extreme example. It would be like saying that someone wouldn't be 6'5" if they had been born in extreme poverty with malnutrition. Yes, extremely bad environment can stunt your growth, but you can't use poverty and malnutrition to explain in general why some people are shorter or taller than others.

There are wealthy people outside of the USA and those who weren't born wealthy.

It's a mistake to claim that differences in wealth (or height or IQ) can be explained by environmental factors.

>2-4 are great examples of survivorship bias. >For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures.

I guess that is the reason why 2-4 start with "luck from...".

I read it like this: from the ones who do/are X only a few lucky succeed. But (almost) all who don't do/are X fail. To succeed you need both: luck + X.

> If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.

same IQ, same hustler and you'd have a warlord or a revolutionary leader. There are genius everywhere, and they don't create only software.

There are African-born self-made billionaires.

// Still on the backs of “labor”.

However, 2, 3 and 4 can be reduced to 1.

You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life.

In the end, everything is just blind luck, but our egos want to feel like they are in control somehow.

Hustle and preparation are not luck, they're skills you have to hone for them to be useful. You have to actually do something. They aren't something you can be born into (much to the dismay of rich parents with deadbeat kids). By reducing 2 and 3 to luck you're implying that people have no agency. Sure, the person who develops those skills in rural Africa isn't going to go as far as someone who develops those skills in Chicago but they'll both go a hell of a lot farther than the average persona around them.

Being prepared doesn't mean anything unless 1 happens. Hustling => success and preparation => success are dependent on lucky opportunities.

No they are not. Yes, there is more opportunity in some settings than others but the people with the skills are much less likely to be passed by by that opportunity than everyone else. There's a lot more opportunity that usable to the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation) and have the drive to do so (hustle).

Again, imagine 1 does not occur. You hustle and there is never a lucky opportunity. Do you still achieve success? You prepare for a job interview and you never get the opportunity to interview. Do you still achieve success?

No one is saying that there aren’t factors to increase luck insofar as people are saying that success doesn’t necessarily have a linear relationship with preparation or hustle.

IE. Person A who earns 100x more than person B did not necessarily prepare 100x harder, or hustled for 100x as much. Person A may only have hustled/prepared 10x or 5x as much, or 0.5x as much and just got exposed to better opportunities.

> You hustle and there is never a lucky opportunity. Do you still achieve success? You prepare for a job interview and you never get the opportunity to interview. Do you still achieve success?

You don't achieve success, nor do you experience luck. In this case you describe, are you unlucky, or are you simply bad at "hustling" or whatever work you are putting in?

Hustling on its own doesn't guarantee good luck. Nothing does; it just (if done right, sometimes) increases your odds.

What if you hustle and all you get is bad luck?

I think one of you is saying that neutral situations should allow one to scramble up just due to willpower alone. I'm not sure I agree.

But some people are born with one foot in a bucket. They just keep getting hit by sic relatives and floods and what have you and everything they get never lasts.

> the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation)

In a great many cases this boils down to already having enough money to survive a failure in a condition that you can get up to hustle again.

If you are supporting a family, the size of that financial backstop needs to be bigger. For every story of person X who bet their family's security and ended up a big financial success, there are far more who ended up in the negative.

Lots of people hustle and prep who are not rich. Luck is largest factor and its usually the luck of already being in a position to capitalize on opportunities.

Of course not, but you still have to either be born as the type of person who would seek out and hone this skill, or have been born into a situation where someone showed you this and you were naturally receptive to it.

I had a coworker who went to Stanford on scholarships. The thing that surprised him about all the rich kids there was how prepared they were for life already. It was no wonder to him how they get ahead and stay ahead, and it wasn't just money.

But one of my theories in life is that power is money, not the other way around. We know that's something that the newly rich run into over and over. We even have movies with that story arc.

'They' are all too happy to see us get hung up on how much money we're going to allow them to have. They'll still be just as powerful and influential. Probably the easiest thing they spend that 'currency' on is to have enough money to cover the exchange rate with people outside their circles.

I think it's a mistake to assume that just because something is a skill it's not influenced by "luck".

For example, from what I understand, in the big five model of personality, conscientiousness is over 40% heritable.

Anecdotally, I remember how even in the first grade there were kids that were clearly low in conscientiousness and kids who were clearly high in conscientiousness.

Pretty sure the kids in the latter group didn't instill a work ethic into themselves by age 6.

I hope that it's possible to develop conscientiousness as an adult, at least to some degree, but clearly it is something that you can be born into.

I'm using "conscientiousness" as an example, I don't think it's the same thing as "hustle", in fact I'd even suspect that there's some conflict between the two.

However, my point is that development of skills aren't independent from luck, since we all are dealt different cards with which we then have to play.

"Fortune favors the prepared mind."

not

"Fortune rewards the prepared mind."

Although the latter is effectively Calvinism, which the US culture was founded on. It will probably echo through the ages.

I've never heard Calvinism talk about either "fortune" or the "prepared mind". I get that you're denigrating Calvinism here rather than making a precise statement, but what part of Calvinism are you referring to? The Calvinists I know would be more likely to say that God willed your situation or gave you the preparation for your mind. This is more akin to fate than fortune. ("Fate" being what will inevitably happen, and "fortune" being chance events.)

If you work hard and sacrifice you will be rewarded. Frequently it is presented as quid pro quo.

At the end of the day if you work hard and do well, you could still have been lucky. Rather than that negating all of your hard work, a better reaction to this fact is a bit of charity for others. And I’m not talking donations, I’m talking about being a decent person and not judging others who haven’t got what you got.

Hustle and preparation are very important, lucking into wealth vastly outweighs those factors, because a) it provides room to fail and b) it makes it easy to hire the busy and well-prepared.

Try playing multiple games of monopoly with 4 or 5 friends (or run monte carlo simulations if you want a fun machine learning project, since Monopoly is a game that can easily be taught to computers), but randomly assign one player 10x the starting capital and $2000 every time they pass go instead of the normal $200.

> You don't choose your genes

I agree with this one.

> or where you are born

Not really agree with this, you can change the country you live in. And it's more important where you live not where you are born. For example lots of people from poor countries go to US or Europe and are quite successful there.

> 2,3 can be reduced to 1.

Don't agree either. Let's be realistic, what are the chances of success for a person who stays at home watch movies vs. someone who go out talk with people get involved in all sorts of activities + prepare the homework for those social events.

Changing the country you live in is not possible for most people - it requires luck to have the resources necessary to do so.

And even if you do change the country you live in, it won’t be equivalent to having been born there.

100% true. No idea why you were downvoted.

See: all those undocumented kids who grew up in the USA and now are stuck hoping that DACA doesn't get cancelled.

I wonder how much of someone's genetics determines how likely they are to watch movies over hustle.

I couldn't get a visa to work in the USA even if I wanted one. My right to work in Europe is about to be taken away and replaced with... something. I don't know what other countries I can work in but there'd be visa requirements for most of them.

I could change country if I tried really hard but it isn't straightforward. And I'm an very experienced frontend dev. Other people would find it harder.

>Let's be realistic, what are the chances of success for a person who stays at home watch movies vs. someone who go out talk with people get involved in all sorts of activities + prepare the homework for those social events.

Probability of success depends what environment you are in. A person with poor uneducated and possibly negligent parents living in a slum with no network has a very different probability of "success" than a person with well educated, well connected, and rich parents.

Even they are able to see that perhaps instead of a minute chance of success on par with winning the lottery, perhaps they ought to spend the present enjoying a movie. Many times, not being around the right people and environment leaves you in the dark about opportunities in the first place. I'm not saying that one should despair and sit at home watching movies, but it can be rational to feel that way. We need to do better as a society to even out the odds.

Totally agree with you, parents and environment is one of the most important factor but this is not 100% of the odds, there are still things that you can influence yourself (especially in these times when we have access to the internet).

I spent most of a year living in Cambodia. I met some amazing people there. People who had put way more effort and work into improving their lives than anyone I had met in either the UK or Australia. But they were still (comparatively) poor. And that was never going to change, because they just didn't have the opportunities there that we take for granted. In some places, birth and family is more important than any amount of effort, talent or intelligence.

I think the person you are replying to is making the more basic interpretation that such propensities (someone who stays at home watching movies, someone with the motivation to move to another country, etc) are themselves composed of variables outside of one's control-- genes, gene expression, nutrition, etc, etc-- i.e. blind luck

lots of people from poor countries go to US or Europe

Have you noticed the existence of extremely anti-immigration politicians who are trying to reduce that number to zero by rewriting the rules in the most inequitable fashion possible?

Hustle and preparation allow smaller quantities of blind luck to be turned into success. Otherwise it takes a lot more blind luck to overcome a lack of preparation, and large quantities of blind luck are harder to find.

So, yeah, it all boils down to #1. But #s 2-4 determine how much of #1 you need.

Ummmm... Hustle and prep get you absolutely nowhere if you're hustling and prepping for the wrong thing or doing so the wrong way.

Seems like this is a free will argument. In a reductionist view, yes, everything is all blind luck because the universe was set in motion at the Big Bang and has evolved according to the laws of physics since. If you got rich through intelligence, determination, and good choices, that was still luck because your intelligence and determination are largely determined by your genes and your choices by your environment, both of which were determined before you were born.

This argument may be true but it isn't very useful, because the concept of "useful" itself implies free will and active decision-making. In other words, yes, maybe it was all predetermined before we were born, but if you're the sort of person that believes in free will, that decision was predetermined before you were born, so why challenge that belief? And the reason we evolved to believe in the fiction of free will is because humans who did do better than those who don't, so whether it's correlation or causation, it's still adaptive.

But, the best we know is the laws of physics are not deterministic!

The quantum states that your neurons fire to is unknowable in advance and determined only at the point of measurement.

Therefore, you are _free_ in the exact results of your neural mass are unknowable in advance and truly random. There's certainly a distribution of probability to the randomness... but be free and don't by the deterministic, 19th century nonsense!

Quantum events might not be completely predictable by our puny human brains, but that doesn't mean that they're not pre-ordained or pre-determined in some sense.

The world could be 100% a "clockwork universe", but we just aren't capable of understanding how it all works or fully predicting what will happen.

To say that something is "random" is more of a statement about our own inability to see a pattern in the data than about the data not having some pattern in it.

My physics professor met with the Dalai Lama to discuss this exact point - whether the indeterminacy in quantum mechanics can give rise to free will.

The thing is, the randomness in quantum mechanics isn't really the same as what we talk about with "free will". Quantum mechanics is really a statement about coupling - it finds that you cannot separate the results of a measurement from the act of measuring, and so you will always introduce uncertainty into the measurement of any physical quantity.

There are a lot of possible philosophical interpretations of that. Does it mean nature is inherently random? Or is nature deterministic underneath, but our knowledge of nature is inherently random? Does it leave room for God in the machine? Free will? Are the laws of physics lines of code in a computer program, and we're Sims trying to reverse-engineer them?

Physicists tend not to concern themselves much with these quesions: as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, there is uncertainty in the measurement of any physical quantity, and this uncertainty can be quantified. The laws of physics are just models anyway: they've worked remarkably well at predicting reality, but we'll never know whether they're actually reality, and that's not really the point.

"Free will" usually implies some form of agent that can shape actions in the future. The mind, soul, whatever is a distinct thing that determines our actions. Personally, I'm of the opinion that we don't actually have free will, but I was predestined to believe that I do, and as a model of reality it works fairly well even if it's false, so there's no particular reason to discard that model. Similarly, I don't actually have a "self" - I'm just a collection of neural impulses firing - but it's convenient to believe that I do, so why not?

free will doesn't necessarily require quantum uncertainty. it could also be that the force that set this universe in motion (as opposed to one of the infinitely many other possibilities) is the same stuff that composes our own free will. we simply don't know enough to believe in the lack of free will, either.

If I knew for sure that everything was deterministic, would I decide to live my life differently?

I think I would still experience the ability to discern, make decisions, and take responsibility for the direction of my life.

self-awareness means that you might. it's why there are no sure things in the stock market, for example. we humans incorporate new information swiftly and deftly.

I favor the idea of free will but I don't buy this argument. Everything in the universe is bound by the same physics/quantum mechanics but you wouldn't say a rock has free will.

Quantum mechanics has the free will theorem: if you have free will, then so do sub-atomic particles.

Thus if you want to have free will, then so does a rock.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem

To me, free will implies choice. I don't see how non-determinism is equivalent to choice. I can see it as necessary but not sufficient. I do not see how the "free will theorem" shows that elementary particles are choosing their spin. It seems that they mean free will differently than I do.

>It seems that they mean free will differently than I do.

No, they mean it the same way you do; they only made it precise.

You probably suppose a scientist doing an experiment can choose between A and B for some setup. If so, then so can particles, because one can make experiments where a physicist can make a choice affecting the outcomes, and the particles in the experiment can choose their behavior in exactly the same manner.

So, since there are experiments that allow you to "choose" freely, and such experiments have particles able to do whatever you are doing, then either your free will implies their free will, or neither has free will.

Follow the links from the wiki page to learn more. It's quite precise, and is exactly the usual concept of free will.

> This argument may be true but it isn't very useful

It's useful to some in the sense of justifying the taking and redistribution of the outcomes from whatever mix of luck, skill, and labor went into the creation of wealth.

it doesn't have to be a free will argument at all, but rather luck overwhelming skill when it comes to outcome. we still have some margin of control, but on a much smaller scale (and effect) than we believe.

it's not even surprising we'd jump to such conclusions: our brains are designed to tease out and magnify the significance of the things that we do and control.

I agree, but I think the discussion is not about luck vs skill.

Imagine a poker tournament. The winner is determined by a combination of luck and skill. But somebody who didn't play had no chance to win.

Life, in most cases, is built upon all 4 points listed by OP with a varying degree of applicability. If magically, everyone decided to just accept 1 without doing any of the others, you would likely find society going down the drain or the few who attempt 2,3 or 4 with an exceptional return of investment.

I find it difficult to undermine all four 'kinds of luck' when you look at someone studying hard to get into a certain university, or you look at a foreigner deciding to uproot their lives to hopefully get a better life in US/Canada,etc or someone who decided to knock on every door to get their first client and hone their skills throughout that process.

Genghis Khan was exiled and had nothing by age nine. At the time of his death he left the biggest land empire the world has ever seen to his children. You need very little of 1 to make a difference

His campaigns also contributed to something like 60+ million deaths[1]. Maybe the Hitler of his time?

In his case, perhaps everyone who got in his way simply didn't have any luck.

[1] https://www.scifacts.net/human/genghis-khan-death-toll/

That is also an impressive achievement considering the technology and logistics he had available from a certain perspective

You can’t choose your luck, but your originating genes aka parents did...more reason why there should be a checklist for responsible procreation.

Having children without a plan puts ones own copies of genes at risk. As is not having the resource to raise them well. It’s self sabotage..as it were..by two people who decided to combine their genetic material and their immediate circle of friends, family and acquaintances who enable their sub optimal decision. Society and media should be ignored anyways while making important decisions.

> You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life.

if you workout and are in the best shape your genes can provide, you will be more lucky when meeting people and more interesting people will be interested on you. That would be 3, not 1. And if you have a good conversation and go out every day, you will also have more chance of meeting interesting people. That would be 2.

unless, of course, you skipped that critical networking event because you were at the gym. Unlucky.

Gotta pick your horses.

If you have, for example, chronic fatigue you will struggle to work out. That would be 4 constraining 3. And if you have significant social anxiety, or are bedridden with illness, or various other health limitations you will struggle to have a good conversation and go out every day. That would be 4 constraining 2.

>In the end, everything is just blind luck

So you claim there is no correlation between, say, hours worked and money earned? That pay is some random variable not causally connected to any decision a person makes?

It all boils down to just how deterministic you're able to believe the universe is.

Is there a such thing as my own willpower that allows me to improve my position more than an equivalently-placed person would, or is the willpower to act to improve my own situation derived from the blind luck of where and when I was born?

I remember another study that looked at people who had made it very rich, and they saw that luck was something like 'being educated in a field just when that field is about to make a huge impact in the world' - in other words, great timing in addition to raw talent. I don't have the link to hand now though.

There's this ted talk to a similar effect, timing is the most important factor in a startups success.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpx7gpSqbY&t=1s

I loved the Whats App founder talk at the YC online class (I don't have the link either). I paraphrase: "we decided to make a messaging app just when that was the best, most profitable thing we could possibly have done." There was a ton of experience and talent behind it, but they acknowledge that they got lucky and timed it perfectly.

No, this article is entirely about blind luck. None of the things you describe matter.

There are plenty of prepared, hustlers who can capitalize on lucky events. For every one of them that becomes mega-rich, there are thousands who are exactly as fit who do not.

That is, 2 3 and 4 follow a normal distribution, wealth follows a power-law distribution. The attributes don't correlate strongly.

Makes me feel better to have a study confirm it.

My guess is that it's some kind of distribution curve.

You can certainly improve your odds via 2, 3 and 4, but some people will do all those and end up not doing well. The average person who does them all will end up a bit better-off than average, and some will end up very well off.

In other words, they help, but don't guarantee 'success'.

Will they? Wouldn't you need to not only do them, but do them better than average? So it's not just that you need to work hard, it's that you need to be working harder than average. But also if someone was already ahead of you, they could work less than that and still wind up ahead of you.

So now, is it the hard work that determined the end result, or just the luck again?

There are tons of people right now trying really hard to do all sorts of things. Many of them will fail, for a myriad of reasons. That's the idea of "luck". You can't know which reasons will lead to your downfall, because reducing labor and life to "hard work" is so absurdly reductive it's meaningless.

Basically, your individual circumstances are your own and comparing yourself to others might be helpful but it also might not and nobody can definitively tell you one way or the other if luck is even real.

You can't frame things like this without talking about misfortune in the same terms. Lots of things can happen that are 'unluckly', but are vastly skewed to certain demographics. Being unlucky like:

* Receiving little or no schooling

* Having to labour as a child

* Being abused

* Having your primary carers be addicts of some kind

* Growing up in a relatively poor/deprived

* ...

Really this list is endless, and other than blind luck (a lotto win, something that can really elevate you out of this situation, as well as having the sense to use the opportunity correctly), no amount of 'hustle' is really going to get you out of this situation.

The kind of attitude in parent's comment is prevalent amongst people who have grown up in relatively rich, successful environments, and see vastly more lucky people than unlucky people (when in reality there are orders of magnitude more unlucky people than lucky).

That reminds me a short fictional story by Jorge Luis Borges (if you excuse the quasi non-sequitur): The Lottery in Babylon. It describes how the lottery became so popular in Babylon that they began not just to play for money, but all kind of prizes, and then not only prizes but punishments. Finally, they decided that people didn't even need to buy a ticket. Everybody was implicitly part of the game, where good or bad things could be made to happen to you just by random chance... At the end of the day, The Lottery in Babylon became indistinguishable from normal life.

> but they don't define what luck is to begin with.

They do though, the paper is focused on what you call "blind luck" in (1). I suppose it can be summarized as a evidence based counter argument to the cultural narrative weight given to 2,3,4, especially in the US.

I don't think it is complete of course, but it is interesting.

That's a spot on point about the various types of luck. The common derogatory saying about smart / rich (referenced in the title) reveals more about the person saying it, than it does the person that it is directed toward. It's the surface assessment equivalent of thinking someone is rich based on the car they drive (or watch they wear etc.). It's a shallow & easy appraisal that someone runs because they're either incapable of deeper analysis or are too lazy to bother. In my experience it tends to reveal that the speaker knows absolutely nothing about money or wealth.

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