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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

> Which comes first, succeeding and then being happy, or being happy and then succeeding?

Er, that sounds suspiciously like the eternal question "which came first, the chicken or the egg?". If you start off with a "happy" state of mind because of "external" reasons, you are probably more likely to succeed at work too, but of course your work also should contribute to maintaining your happiness. So it's either a virtuous cycle of success at work (without having to invest all of your time into it!) leading to a better overall life; or a balance of work being (negatively) stressful and you needing to "recharge" in your spare time (family life, friends, hobbies...); or a vicious cycle of your work burning you out and also leading to personal problems - of course, a positive attitude helps, but IMHO asking the simplistic question "which comes first" is as dumb as in the chicken-and-egg example...

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The chicken/egg question always irks me. Eggs came first. Eggs have existed far longer than chickens (eg dinosaur eggs). Whatever the first thing we could possibly call a chicken came from an egg.

You're right but for the people who are confused, it's because of the semantics of the question. If you specify the question a little more and ask "What came first? The chicken or the chicken egg" then the question is how do you define a chicken egg. Is it the egg that comes from a chicken or the egg that a chicken hatches from.

In the first case, the chicken came first and in the second case, the egg came first. I think it's obvious the the second case makes more sense but some people might argue.

The deeper question is not really about which came before in any random pair of "chicken and its chicken egg" or "chicken egg and its chicken".

It's about how chickens and chicken eggs emerge (first means "very very first"), and it's supposed to point to this paradox: If you need both chickens to have chicken eggs, and chicken eggs to produce a chicken, how did either came about?

E.g. did something non-chicken-yet that could lay eggs suddenly laid a chicken egg? Or did a non-chicken egg suddenly produce a chicken? and so on...

Even if you put it like that, it is the egg that a chicken hatches from. The other option does not work at all.

Oh, so if a chicken doesn't hatch from the egg then it's not a chicken egg?

It's not even that simple. Evolution occurs gradually, so gradually in fact that there is no "first" chicken. Any given chicken/ancestor you pick will be so genetically close to its parents/children, that they're the same species by any definition.

Another way of putting the paradox is "Which chicken arrived first, the chicken or its parent"?

Chicken. If we establish some trait of a chicken we could be able to trace the first bird wich had the specific gene combination and it's parents had not. Still a well defined non paradox.

>Eggs have existed far longer than chickens (eg dinosaur eggs)

Which is neither here, nor there, and has little to do with the question, which is based on the paradox that you need a chicken egg to produce a chicken, and a chicken to produce a chicken egg.

It's not about whether some other random eggs existed before, but about when the cycle of chicken and chicken egg came to be, and how the vicious circle was resolved.

Your parent just explained, that there have been animals hatching from eggs before there were chicken. At some point some of those egg-hatching animals had mutated enough to be now called the first chicken. He thereby answered the chickend-egg-question through evolution.

Edit: Even if you specify, that it has to be a "chicken-egg" you just have to decide, whether an animal producing a chicken-egg is automatically a chicken. I would argue no, because you could then prove by induction that everything before has been a chicken.

>Your parent just explained, that there have been animals hatching from eggs before there were chicken

And I just explained that that alone is neither here, nor there, as the paradox is about the chicken egg, specifically, not whether eggs existed in general.

>At some point some of those egg-hatching animals had mutated enough to be now called the first chicken

Yes, but that's a different answer, which wasn't available when the chicken/egg question was posited - and it still points to a random (evolutionary) and fuzzy (when? how?) process.

There is a process called evolution going on. It's gradual and at some point there was a first bird which had the right gene combination for us to call it a chicken. It's parents did not have this specific traits and hence it's the egg which came first. Not some random "eggs".

We should come up with a better alternative paradoxes ...

>There is a process called evolution going on. It's gradual and at some point there was a first bird which had the right gene combination for us to call it a chicken.

Yes, but those initially positing the ancient chicken/egg paradox haven't discovered the theory of evolution yet, and for those later that still use it, the boundaries (when it "had the right gene combination for us to call it a chicken") are fuzzy. Those are the things the paradox aimed/aims to showcase.

Such a pre-Darwinian mental exercise. It's there some other common variant, which actually is undefined?

Let me try - rivers or rain? - ping or pong?

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