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Comment by yupper32 | Hacker News Reader

Why care about luck?

Luck and the family you were born into are two of the big things you can't change. Doesn't matter how much you acknowledge it, it won't change.

Putting in the hard (and smart) work and persevering is all you can do. It's a waste of time and energy to worry about Kylie Jenner calling herself a self-made billionaire or whether others are just "luckier" than you.

Disclaimer: I am probably a target audience of the article and maybe a bit biased. I was "lucky" many times in my life which allowed me to move from a family income of around $30k growing up, to around $400k solo now.

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It isn't the thought of not being lucky that makes this sting.

It is the connotation among the wealthy that people in poverty aren't working hard enough. It creates an environment where the job creators create jobs with nowhere to go, all the while toting this idea that they create huge opportunity for others.

When it isn't true, it causes damage.

No one is creating jobs with nowhere to go on purpose. Business owners create jobs that fulfill the needs of the business in the most cost effective manner possible. For instance, what growth can a mom and pop restaurant or grocery store offer it's employees? None. Is that because they don't think poor people are working hard enough? Of course not.

Then offer them training and experience. Give your best worker a fancy title in lieu of a raise to pad their resume. Enabling someone to grow doesn't mean you get to keep them forever. Unless, of course, you truly are giving people jobs in the hopes that they will have nowhere better to go. Which is also extremely common.

I recall a woman who owned a hair salon who asked Bernie Sanders about providing health insurance to her workers. Her point was that she is about to grow her business, but if laws are passed that force her to provide insurance for her employees she won't be able to expand.

Bernie let her off easy, but if she had asked me I would have told her that her business obviously isn't providing the kind of value to society that it needs to in order to grow larger. What's the point? To enslave more people that you never intend to provide a living wage too? If you go out of businesses maybe a salon will open that can afford to provide a decent wage to the same employees you take for granted.

Training and experience doing what? What fancy title can you give someone who runs a register at your store to pad their resume?

Insurance, sure. That's just another part of comp that you can provide. It's not as straight forward as just money, but it's certainly much easier than training employees for jobs you don't offer.

Claiming to be "self-made" isn't directly advocating that the poor need only pull harder on their bootstraps, but it's only a few steps apart.

If someone believes you can be "self-made" without also necessarily also having a substantial amount of luck, that someone can't explain the gap between success and mere subsistence as anything but "lack of determination", often with a moralistic tone.

The very successful shape our society with their influence, which they wield in advancement of their beliefs. If those beliefs are incomplete, or lack empathy, it affects all of us.

the anti-"self-made" rhetoric is eventually going to backfire. There are plenty of people who are only modestly privileged, or even hugely privileged that had to pull through a ton of bullshit or work hundred hour weeks, oftentimes succeeding in spite of what they had to endure, that bristle at the connotation that because they happened to grow up with some amount of privilege, everything they did is unearned.

Even if they were wrong and "they would have made it anyways" devaluing someone's effort like what I see happening these days (and moreover, socially pressured to shut up about it) is not a sustainable strategy for ameliorating social disparity.

Let's look at this scientifically. Being successful takes 100 units of energy. If one monkey starts with 0 units of energy and another monkey starts with 90 units of energy, how many units must each monkey spend to become "successful?"

Now imagine the monkey who spent 10 units of energy sitting on Ellen's couch telling the world about how hard he pulled on those bootstraps.

Edit: Fixed a typo.

> "scientifically"

I'm sorry. I am actually a former scientist, and I pulled hundred hour workweeks in the lab. You do not know what that word means.

Moreover, you completely missed the point.

The median American has a pretty easy life growing up, they don't have any reasons why they can't succeed yet they almost never do anyway. And there is no reason to believe that the poor Americans would do better than the median Americans if they were given the resources of median Americans.

> they don't have any reasons why they can't succeed yet they almost never do anyway

This seems like a failure of imagination to me.

Having adequate food and shelter is a long way from being able to start a profitable business, and it can even be the case that as society becomes more prosperous it becomes HARDER to start a business. Example: try starting a restaurant with the regulations today vs 1950.

If the monkey with zero gains 5 and the monkey with ninety loses 5, the monkey with zero was more successful.

It's not enough to look at where someone is, you have to look at where someone started. If you are a millionaire and your dad was a billionaire, you are probably one of the biggest losers on the planet.

What if you had super rich parents and you decided to become a school teacher (~$60k/yr in the US)?

Being raised rich taught you that wealth isn't everything, in fact it can be quite toxic and maddening.

So you end up owning a house and some retirement investments after 40 years, but most of all feel proud of the work you've done and the lives you've bettered.

To be called the biggest loser in the world seems like a stretch.

If your goal is to educate people, a billion dollars educates more people than your tireless efforts ever could.

You could instead focus on some sort of personal goal, but if you are actually doing that you won't care how much money someone else has.

Your business mogul father had said the same thing to you. He seemed to believe money was the only thing that mattered.

Luckily you were not that shallow or self-deceived and realized that living a humble life and taking the time to work with your students one-on-one was true value you could provide.

Unlike your father, you will leave this world having given more than you took. You will have truly empowered the children to work for a better world than the one they were born into.

I don't see how A comes to B. How does telling people that they're not as self-made as they think they are some how excaerbate social disparity?

Fwiw, I don't believe in being self-made because everyone's idea of "a ton of bullshit" is different.

I feel like by American standards I'm "self-made". I taught myself how to program as a kid and made a career for myself that pays extremely well (I work at a "FAANG-adjacent" company, equitable pay).

My parents didn't co sign any loans, I didn't even go to college. No connections ever involved in getting a job, no friends of parents for summer jobs or anything. Just mind numbing famounts of hours spent single mindedly working on things from childhood to adulthood. Struggling to teach myself, struggling against everyone telling my I was wasting my time (in their defense, I almost didn't graduate high school over how focused I was on projects that ultimately didn't become anything), sacrificing a lot of what most people experience growing up because I was convinced this was what mattered.

But then you have my parents. My dad grew up with a father who was a non-functioning alcoholic in a 3rd world country. He'd farm for yams to get a few cents to pay for school uniforms. He'd walk a mile out to his friend's house in the middle of the night to be able to read by a lantern because they didn't have one.

My mother's father died and a young age and she had to grow up with relatives who didn't hide their disdain for her. As I've grown older I've realized she downplays how bad her situation was growing up, but in the end she wanted to continue education and they forced her to be a seamstress, so she taught herself to type (in the days of typewriters not computers) and joined the police as a secretary in her country.

Today my dad has a PhD and my mother has her doctorate. Compared to them I might as well have been handed the world in a silver platter for the simple reason, at least I had time. I wasn't struggling to find food, I wasn't cleaning up after my father after he soiled himself in a drunken stupor. My parents might not have agreed with what I was doing, and it might have brought conflict between us, but they didn't hate me.

Of course if you look around you'll find someone who would make their story look like they got a silver platter. After all, at the very least in their poverty they still had peace. They weren't dodging bullets, they weren't in a war-torn country or something.

That's why I have no problem with social pressure telling "modestly privileged, or even hugely privileged" people to shut up about how absolutely terrible the odds were and how they struggled. Everything is relative.

Put a prince who's never lifted a finger to even wash his face in an upper middle class life and he'll cry real tears struggling to figure out how a 9-5 works.

There's nothing wrong with giving him a shoulder to cry on, but there's nothing useful or teachable about his struggle (except maybe driving home the how deep his privilege was...) I'd much rather hear from what it took people with much less to get to where they are. There's often more to learn there.

Telling people who have actually worked hard that they are "privileged" and dismissing their success is also bad.

Look at this block of text that you wrote. It's almost entirely all about yourself. You weren't listening at ALL to what my claim is.

Suppose you're middle class, and you haul ass to get ahead. You're not born into abject poverty or anything, but you really DID need to work hard. And some asshole, who probably hasn't worked nearly as hard as you, comes around and tells you "well, you made it because you're white, male, or tall" or whatever (I, personally am only one of those things). AND you can't complain about the metanarrative, because you'll get cancelled, or whatever.

This is not a "prince who's never lifted a finger". This is someone who had to struggle.

Thanks for the laugh. To miss the point so amazingly, it's beautiful.

Woeeee is you, you struggled sooooooo hard and now some random person tells you that you only made it because X and that will somehow social disparity... because?

What, you're going to be extra mean to people who aren't in your social strata or something now? Like us vs them or something?

I mean, you realize:

Thats... that's me. Literally word for word. Down to "one of those things". Or did you... not realize most of the comment is not about me?

Someone tells me that I only made it because I'm male and I won't even give them the time of day! How often is this happening to you that you're crying about it?!

And if I was forced to reply, it's so easy to say the absolute truth: being male didn't hurt! Like holy shit, I struggled and sacrificed but being male never hurt!

Maybe that's what's really hurting you? The fact that despite struggling, there's some property of your path that was out of your control but made the path easier? Yup that's how it is.

No one is 100% self-made. Being cognizant of that helps you be a better person.

That’s why we ought to give people a sense of the odds. The chance that you’ll be a $400k income earner is somewhere around 1 in 100, so not too likely.

You can increase your odds by getting certain kinds of degrees and by living in certain areas, but odds are still going to be against you. I’m not sure how much since I don’t have the conditional probabilities at hand.

Try to get your hands on the stats to set your expectations accordingly. Good luck out there!

The chance gets greatly increased if you are smart though. A smart person with a stem degree is would easily get a $400k salary by joining Google (they mostly test for intelligence so not hard to join for a smart person) and staying for 10 years.

"Being born smart is luck"

Depends on how you view it, we normally say luck are things that doesn't affect merit. "You were lucky to be born being able to do stuff others can't", well sure but that is how society should work, a person who provides more value should naturally get more of the rewards. Otherwise you'd have to say things like "Einstein discovered all the things he did almost solely thanks to luck!".

Getting a STEM degree is a low probability event, say 1 in 10, then getting in google is another low probability event, say 1 in 10. So making it sound easy/likely seems misleading. I was acknowledging that there are things you can do to improve your odds. Einstein didn’t make it into the Google of his day. He worked as a patent clerk for some time while working on groundbreaking physics until he was accepted.

It’s okay to be an average income earner, most are. Don’t get too hung up on something that isn’t likely for you.

Also don’t forget what is valued can change. A farmer might be very lucky and valued, by a chance turn of events. If your doing well, be kind and try to raise the floor up for lesser income earners. Maybe they’ll remember you well if you have a turn of bad luck.

Google tests for traditional Computer Science skills taught in a typical set of Algorithms classes at a 4 year degree program. A 400k/yr job at Google hired externally would typically be an individual with 10+ years of experience solving hard problems in production with exposure across organizational, engineering, management, and research domains.

It's a fairly recent phenomena that Google began hiring from most universities at the college level, in 2010 they didn't even perform campus recruiting at all of the top-40 universities let alone dedicate valuable phone screen and interview time to candidates outside of top university programs with high GPAs.

Hell this is the company founded by Stanford PHDs that famously required industry hires to furnish proof that they held a GPA higher than 3.5!

The odds aren't quite 1 in 100 for the typical individual weighing their options at High School age. Typically one would need to get a degree from a good school which requires both money (Harvard costs $198k for 4 years now), and a school good enough to create Harvard admissions (1 in 6 students attend a dropout factory), and a stable enough home life that one isn't compelled to simply work to support the family/themselves at graduation.

There is an immense societal advantage in the belief that people can do anything if they work hard enough. Without this belief most workers would optimize for minimal effort. If we create a society where forward advancement is impractical eventually people will optimize towards the latter and actively dissuade others from trying to be better.

The peasant doesn’t think they’ll become a lord by working harder.

Would be nice if the people who got chewed up and spit out by working hard to no effect got to capture a little of that immense advantage.

You could also, idk, try to improve the system so that luck isn't so heavily weighted.

Those who can, do. Those who can't try to change the system to favor them.

Entirely logical.

My only problem with those engaging in such behavior comes from the subset of them who have much more privilege than vast majority of Americans - like say upper middle class and wealthy minorities. They often tilt the system even more in their favor over other poor, struggling Americans of whatever color or creed.

Many highly educated, wealthy female Brahmin Indian-Americans (2nd+ gen) are particularly adept at manipulating the system in this way to benefit them as "POCs" who grew up in exclusive neighborhoods with wealthy parents, and end up at Ivies. And yet constantly leverage their "oppression".

Everyone tries to change the system to favor them. Those who succeed try to distract from this by, for example, promulgating catchy aphorisms like the one above.

I think it's important not to get too cynical about this. It's simply not true that everybody is out there trying to adapt the world to their narrow personal interests. I can think of all kinds of policy issues for which I support a position that is unlikely to benefit me directly.

Sure. There is a form of argument that I call "proof by aphorism" or proof-by-catchy-slogan. One of the best and ultimately most effective examples of this was Johnny Chochran's "if it doesn't fit you must acquit" during the OJ Simpson trial. That argument was more effective because it rhymed despite the fact that this is clearly a logical fallacy.

"Those who can do..." is similar. It's catchy, and because it's catchy people are more likely to believe it, particularly those who are fortunate enough to enjoy the survivorship bias of success. But like Cochran's slogan, it is not true.

But proof-by-aphorism is hard to counter with actual logic. I mean, look at the argument I am presenting right now. Don't you think it's starting to get a little tedious? Do you not find yourself tempted to tune out? Don't you think a lot of people probably already have?

The sad fact of the matter is that the most effective counter to proof-by-aphorism is often another aphorism. If the counter-aphorism is not entirely true, well, that is just part of the point. And the other sad fact of the matter is that many people achieve success not by "doing" but by gaming the system. Not all, but a lot. So I think it's very disingenuous of anyone to get up on a high horse about less successful people trying to similarly tilt the odds in their favor.

And here I am, trying to change the system to favor others despite my wild success in a lucrative industry. Social equity is not just jealousy.

"Everybody wants to change the world, but nobody wants to change themselves."

Not everyone is as selfish as you are

Don't think that'll be doable. Luck plays a huge role, even the birth lottery - not just your parents, but your location. Which country you're born into can largely decide your fate as Immigration has been getting harder by the years.

Effective taxes, socialized health and welfare and safer communities. Collective bargaining at work. Those things should level a lot of the big bumps out.

Of course it can’t be solved, but it can be improved dramatically.

E.g. guaranteed levels of healthcare, education, and shelter.

It helps the poor be less poor but it doesn't help the poor become rich. Plenty of countries does those things and the poor still mostly remains poor, albeit with a better standard of living. A reason could be that when poverty hurts like it does in USA it motivates people to work hard to get a better job, while in countries where poverty isn't a big deal people can just choose to live the simple and easy life without much consequences.

I know I do it, I live in such a country and choose to live on much less than the least paid workers gets. I don't need more, and the low spending lets me work almost nothing and still get by. I don't feel I lack anything, and neither do any of the poor people I see here. College was free, healthcare is free, entertainment is super cheap with free public parks with sports areas and cheap internet, transportation is cheap with public transit and most stuff you need is within walking distance anyway.

If instead I was an American citizen I'd work a lot harder to avoid all the shit that can happen to you when you lack money there. I'd be richer on paper, but in practice I think I'd be worse off.

This is really not about getting a particular outcome (which is too subjective/relative to even have a meaningful conversation). This is about the reality and perception that there is some correlation between effort and outcome. You clearly feel that there is a correlation — whether you “utilize” it is your decision to make, as you explain, but you believe it is there. Many Americans dispute the existence of the correlation itself.

Note the parent didn't claim we should eliminate luck as a component of success, but rather adjust society, bit by bit, over time, so that luck is less of an effector.

Even beyond which country, when you were born is huge.

Most of us are lucky to be around now instead of 100 (or 1000) years ago.

For some reason people like to ignore temporal luck and temporal inequality, but for actual human outcomes they are massive influences.

That would require the US becoming more like Europe, in which the right-tail is thinner but the middle is fatter. Americans like the idea that they can join the right-side of the tail even if the odds are low. Germany has lower wages and higher taxes but more stability and security. It's a trade-off.

There are other ways to reduce the influence of luck other than the European safety model.

For example, reduce regulation, improve education, enforce anti-trust laws (which I see as a different thing than general regulation that is regressive toward small business), increase access to capital, reduce legal and administrative costs of business, etc. Reduce the influence of crony capitalism.

There's of course a ton of luck involved but you won't get struck by lightning by sitting at home.

I've tried to increase my "luck" by forcing myself to do things that have an asymmetric payoff: meeting new people, writing blog posts, saying yes to things, etc

It's worked pretty well so far!

I increased my luck by making five year goals, thinking about what behaviours I'd need to adopt to reach these goals and then making those activities a priority. I'm incredibly successful by my own metrics now and I'm very happy with how my life is turning out.

Doing what you need to do and not what is easy pays huge dividends.

It matters when it comes to voting for policies. If you believe that luck is the predominant factor to becoming rich, then you'd likely support policies that redistribute wealth, and vice versa.

You can also partner with a ‘lucky’ person.

Combining your grit and smarts with their luck (family money, connections, whatever) may take you both to the next level.

I think you just invented VCs.

Exactly. People can't do anything to ensure success, but they can definitely ensure failure. All anyone can do is the best they can, so that when and if lucky opportunities arise, they can capitalize on those opportunities.

Same thing with dating. There are no magic words or social skills to ensure that the person someone likes, will like them back. There are lots of ways to ensure failure, but no way to ensure success. Ultimately we're all at the mercy of other people to a degree, and that's the way it should be because we're all in it together. All we can do is make reasonable efforts to be the best versions of ourselves we can be, and accept that many things are beyond our control but we'll do our best anyway.

Success is winning the lottery. Hard work gets you more tickets.

and being cunning allows you to figure out the numbers beforehand or manipulate the drawing

> Putting in the hard (and smart) work and persevering is all you can do.

I mostly agree. But if the problem is systematic ( slavery, indentured servitude, etc ), leaving or trying to change the system is probably better than putting in the hard/smart work and persevering. There are other options than just hard work and perseverance depending on the environment/situation.

Because my decision of getting involved in a business or situation in which the outcome (say, we are able to somewhat make a qualitative estimate) is 10% effort and talent and 90% luck would be different if the % are reversed. That's one of the many reasons for reflecting on the odds.

> $30k growing up, to around $400k solo now.

how about someone who went from $30k to only $40k. Winning the birth lottery to be smart enough to get the lucrative programming or dev job, is also luck.

> Winning the birth lottery to be smart enough to get the lucrative programming or dev job, is also luck.

I literally said I was lucky in that same sentence. Come on now...

Programming ability is not a "birth lottery". I'd bet if you looked at the average IQ at a no name company paying $70-80k to junior developers it would be surprisingly close to average. It definitely requires motivation and drive to pursue, much more than many other professions where you tick the knowledge box and just apply it all day.

I hate it when people blame the system for everything and deny themselves any personal responsibility for their own futures. There is a balance to be struck and people here jump far too quickly to assign all blame to the system.

People with average IQ can't learn algebra properly, I don't think you will find many such programmers. Even the median college student struggles with basic Algebra, the median person doesn't have much chance at all.

I don't think you can say that. A quick Google shows some random school district in Pittsburgh says pass rates by the end of 9th grade were around 60% [1] and this percentage only went up around 20% for the "Gifted" track students. You also see that Asians started scoring substantially higher than average in later years, which if you believe that all races have the same IQ distribution as I do, must mean that IQ doesn't matter that much for passing algebra.

Much more likely is that learning software engineering requires dedication and perseverance over a long period of time. If your code doesn't work or you don't understand the math, you get 0%, not 70% like you would in a history essay or English essay. You can't wing it. The average person doesn't give enough shits about school or learning to achieve any level of mastery. I strongly believe it's a motivational problem. Asian parents force their kids to achieve academic excellence which is why Asians are so overrepresented in software engineering and other STEM fields.

[1]: https://www.pghschools.org/Page/5073

Exactly! Focus on the things you can control in life and forget about the rest.

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