Survival of the Luckiest | Hacker News Reader

Survival of the Luckiest

theatlantic.com

If a population is small and you are only looking at a few generations, of course random events can have bigger effects than selective pressure. However the odds of two options being perfectly equal in terms of selective pressure is low - and even a very tiny advantage matters for large numbers over large time spans. It is an unfortunate reality of genetics and many other fields that we have only a few decades of good data and a scarce few older data points from which we must extrapolate complex trends that occur over many thousands and even millions of years.

Certainly in the case of the blue tigers, where there is a clear mechanism by which the variation would affect fitness (the red photoreceptors that make tigers stand out to us as a bright orange are quite rare among mammals, to most prey animals tigers appear as grey or a dull yellow which blends in quite well with their surroundings, while blue photoreceptors are much more common and blue tigers would thus stick out clearly to many prey animals), and where the data is so sparse (we don't even have a preserved specimen) it seems extremely inappropriate to conclude the absence of evidence for selection pressure is in fact evidence of absence of selective pressure.

Luck is uninteresting to focus on. I undoubtedly believe luck influences many things. The majority of who I am is dependent on "luck." My gender, my parents, the country I live in, my childhood growing up, and even the name I identify myself with is outside my control.

The problem I see is too many people focus on things outside their control. Even if luck controls 95% of the outcome. It's uninteresting to focus on. Focusing on it doesn't change the outcome. Too many focused on it and surrender to it. "It's all luck anyway."

Many people are so unlucky that they control nothing and there is nothing that they can possibly do to get themselves out of their situation. Just like good luck, bad luck also compounds and if you start out very unlucky, your bad luck will always be there to pull the rug from underneath you at every turn.

Everyone tries to focus on the things they can control. Everyone does that. That's not special at all. The difference is that some people have fought so hard for so long that they realize that the only way they will succeed is if the entire system fails.

And these days it's actually profitable to complain about the system to help usher in its failure. Just look at Bitcoin.

That mindset of focusing on things you can control has been overbought and now it's about to tank.

This comment sounds pretty pretentious if you ask me if you're coming from the western world. If you tell me that your bad luck compounds so much here that you become incapable of actually doing anything, you're just some bourgeoisie upper class person that thinks they know what it's like to be poor. Most poor people are poor primarily because of children. Full stop. Next stop is spending excessively beyond their means. If you only make $8/hr, maybe you shouldn't own an iphone X and a contract with AT&T.

Most virtue signalling leftists think that being poor means you're entitled to comparable standards that the middle class get. That's not the case at all. You have to evaluate what you can do to cut costs. Literally live a spartan lifestyle. Do whatever it takes to inch forward or roll with the punches. Car breaks down? Bike. Can't bike in winter? Take the crappy bus. You have plenty of options in the west. You can't tell me there isn't one or more solutions to every major problem that exists here. People who get dealt bad luck often are on occasion dealing it to themselves. Have type 2 diabetes at 30? Maybe put down the big Macs. It's not as if the universe is looking at just screwing you over.

I mean the overall tl;dr here is:

"Always look on the bright side of life."

Otherwise you're no different than a boring do-nothing twitter-ite that complains constantly that the world isn't perfect.

I know what it's like to be unemployed and not have enough money to buy mobile phone credit in order to call a prospective employer to ask them for directions to their office in order to attend a job interview... While being homeless and staying at cheap AirBnBs in a foreign country (because the country I lived in before did not have any jobs for me because I didn't speak the language and my previous employer stopped giving me freelance work and none of the recruiters would answer my emails because of my foreign mobile number so I had to move to a different country and use my dwindling funds to buy a sim card).

Being a white male and nerdy-looking makes it even worse because everyone assumes that you're a spoiled brat and they give preference to other people who fit the typical 'disadvantaged' mold.

What I'm saying is exactly what you're describing. You have options. You have the ability to get by one way or another. I"m not saying poverty is amazing. I'm saying that even with all your negative situations that occurred, here you are talking to us over HN. You've made it another day. All because of the wealth of ways you can continually get by in the western world.

But people these days have to resort to heroic feats just to get by. It used to be that people who went through these kinds of obstacles would become relatively successful. Not anymore, now defying all odds and doing everything right means that you merely get to survive. I haven't had it easy, but obviously some people have had it even harder than me.

I'm sure many fail (through no fault of their own) then end up in a really bad place where there is no escape then end up doing drugs and overdosing.

You might say that doing drugs is a choice but I don't think this is the case; constant stress and risk taking without any payoffs physically destroys the brain and can lead anyone to self-destructive behaviors.

A different way of approaching this mental categorization is political involvement. If "it's all luck anyway" translates to "let's change things to address structural and societal problems" in the political sphere, it's not so bad. The inverse streak would be the concept of pulling yourself by your bootstraps or the moralistic punishment-first attitude towards social ills such as drug addiction and so on.

Lucky people at the top of society believing they made it all by themselves are far more dangerous than fatalism among the masses.

Luck-based selection allows unfit individuals to thrive and this makes populations less fit and more fragile.

When you combine this with environmental forces which encourage increasingly homogeneous behaviors within a population, it sets up that population for sudden mass extinction.

that's not even wrong

All of history is luck.

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