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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
I think I would still experience the ability to discern, make decisions, and take responsibility for the direction of my life.
Thus if you want to have free will, then so does a rock.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
So, yeah, it all boils down to #1. But #s 2-4 determine how much of #1 you need.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
In his case, perhaps everyone who got in his way simply didn't have any luck.
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.
And even if you do change the country you live in, it won’t be equivalent to having been born there.
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.
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.
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?