(Hard work doesn’t hurt, either, but that goes without saying.)
I think Thinking Fast and Slow talks a lot about maximizing your surface area for luck.
Nothing beats luck.
Sorry to all the unlucky people. I wish you could all be lucky, too!
I think sometimes success in life is from making a series of "right decisions" when those forks in the road come along. (And not fucking up when you do in fact luck onto the right path.)
Before him, I found math and physics unintuitive, but he explained it in a way that (to me) made the whole high school physics trivial.
I studied physics at the university where I learned programming, and switched to software engineering.
Where you grow up, what schools you attend, who your childhood friend group is, luckily not getting hit by a bus and put in the hospital, etc. A whole host of factors conspire to grant or deny you opportunities.
However once the opportunity arises you have to seize it. Many people have lots of opportunity yet accomplish nothing because they lack the skills, will, or both to do so. Conversely many people with the drive and skills never hit the right opportunity and end up nowhere.
For whatever reason the broader culture seems to bounce back and forth between both extremes. The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "get a job you lazy bum" crowd acting as if you can get rich purely with hard work. Then on the other side there seems to be this well-intentioned idea on the left that if we simply give every under-privileged kid opportunity they'll be successful.
Real humans and real lives are far more complex than such simple notions.
I would add that, while “giving every under-privileged kid opportunity” wouldn’t make them all successful, for just the reasons you said, I’m not sure that’s even the bottleneck! It’s like… how do you “give someone opportunity?” It’s a very subtle problem. It’s not easy. I doubt there’s any straightforward intervention where you can give everyone 10 units of opportunity, use them wisely please. School funding and clean streets and EBT and whatnot are sort of proxies for this, but it’s just really not that simple.
(This isn’t a disagreement with anything, by the way.)
I'd be surprised if more than a tiny minority of people actually believe that. It has more to do with believing that ideally, everyone should have access to the same opportunities.
It seems rather straightforward and non-controversial that providing more people opportunities to succeed will inevitably lead to more people succeeding, even if only a small minority of people are capable of seizing upon the opportunities they are provided.
The difference is I argue from an ideological standpoint that everyone should receive the same opportunities while acknowledging that only a fraction of people will be able to turn those opportunities into success.
I should point out this ideal is core to the very founding of the US:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The original quote was a typical conservative dismissal intended to demoralize: since not everyone who's given opportunities will succeed, we shouldn't bother providing opportunity to the riffraff.
Here's Daniel Lemire dunking on PhDs: https://x.com/lemire/status/2082851447499088173
Lemire in part claims:
"For social reasons, it is highly uncommon for people to fail the oral defense of their thesis. Some people are just terrible at it, naturally. They cannot think well on their feet. They get confused and answer the wrong question."
The fraction of your 1% with the credentials to be on the panel just hands them out regardless as a consolation prize.
Who is gonna be able to challenge them. Except on the whole being 1 of billions like everyone else.
It's social status moat chasing.
Every one deserves recognition for having completed that journey, if not for having meaningfully contributed to their field of research.
I am not going to say that I didn’t work hard for whatever success I have, but I was very lucky to have good parents who cared about making sure their kids were successful, and friends who didn’t really peer pressure me to do anything terrible, and just sort of a natural interest in computers that ended up being profitable.
I do think I am relatively ambitious and that certainly helped, but I am not naive enough to think that things would be as good for me as they are if there weren’t a lot of positive lucky factors.
If someone does exact opposite of what you've did, than it's not unfair he's doing worse than you do.
Well I never had the opportunity to meet that friend. I would have been a good friend to them and kept them for ages, but because of circumstances beyond my control, I never even had the opportunity to do so. Kind of seems like a good way to sum up that notion would be to say that the OP was lucky to have been in the right place at the right time, no?
>If someone does exact opposite of what you've did, than it's not unfair he's doing worse than you do.
But why would they do the exact opposite of what the OP did? If it turned out so well for the OP, why wouldn't others also want to do the same thing to end up with the same results?
>But why would they do the exact opposite of what the OP did? Well, for example. There are lots of nerd kids with perspective to succeed in professional life but are "usual" targets of bullies in childhood.
Some kids step-up for bullied kids because that's the right thing to do, other kids join the bullies as it gave them fake feeling of power.
A lot of the decisions that define us for our entire life are made when we are at our dumbest, or at least most impulsive: our teenage years.
I, like many (most?) teenage boys, really wanted girls to like me, and I didn’t have a lot of luck asking girls out in high school [1]. If a girl that I thought was cute had offered to hang out with me and tried to get me to do drugs, there’s a decent chance I would have done it. If they had gotten me to do the really scary stuff like heroin or meth who knows how different (and probably worse) my life could have been?
[1] To be clear, I am not an incel; the girls were always actually very nice in declining me and obviously even if they weren’t it’s not like I was entitled to a girlfriend.
Wealth distribution is a policy issue so it's not random. It's coupled to intentional politics.
What we can do is apply the law equally to people.