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Comment by tmoertel | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, most people probably underestimate the effect that several things have on where they end up in life: education, self discipline, hard work, making good decisions, persistence, and, especially, chance. If you screw up majorly on any the factors under your control, you dramatically reduce your chances of “the good life.” But, even if you do all of them right, you are still at the mercy of chance. Get born in the wrong year or at the wrong place or into the wrong family or with the wrong genetics and that's all it takes to set you up for a hard life.

The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.

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I really wanted to be a journalist when I was young, but then the PC era began and I became sort of addicted to computers and developed my first commercial website at a very young age.

I remember making more money than most people in my family (not a high bar, really) when I was working as a 20-year-old developer.

That led people in my family to think I was some sort of brilliant young man, but that bar was easily cleared (and still is) by pretty much anyone who had an interest in computers and applied themselves to pursue a career in the field.

My life would have been very different if I'd had a few more years to pursue journalism, which was already a very difficult field back then.

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi.

I wanted to be a professional artist, when I was younger[0]. I found out that even a mediocre programmer made more than even a relatively successful artist, and I enjoyed coding, so I stuck with that.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886

I also think that we should have mercy for people who’ve made mistakes. People who’ve willingly done dumb things, especially when they were young.

I feel this way because I did dumb things when I was young, and I’m sure you did too dear reader, and at least for me, I was lucky that those dumb things didn’t end in catastrophe.

It’s like it’s human nature to forget the dumb things you did if you were lucky enough to escape the consequences, and look down on those who weren’t so lucky.

Amen.

Source: Did really dumb things, when I was younger.

> I also think that we should have mercy for people who’ve made mistakes.

Yes. When people make mistakes, they sometimes fall into holes that are hard to climb out of. It is in society’s interest to place ladders in these holes so that these unfortunate people can climb out and become productive members of society.

Instead, we have self-interested parties who have figured out how to extract rents from keeping people trapped in holes. Some of these parties are preventing ladders from being built. Others are destroying existing ladders. Others still are even inventing deeper, stickier holes—crypto scams, ubiquitous gambling, addictive gas-station drugs, dopamine-hit apps—to trap even greater numbers of their fellow human beings.

When a society allows the suffering of others to become a profitable business model, good things rarely follow.

This whole thing is one of those fruitless arguments about a badly defined notion of "most people".

For instance the scope of the "especially chance" assertion has strange effects. Does "get born in the wrong year" include 300,000 years of human history? In that case chance has very little effect. You're overwhelming likely to grow up using stone tools, with a 1 in 3 chance of also having access to pottery.

But that would be silly and obviously wasn't the intended question. The intended question is one that's closer to home, a question that we care about. But how much closer to which home, and what exactly is the scope of the question? It can be made less about luck by filtering out the unlucky from the scope.

Wrong year as in landing on a giant generational recession at the time period in life when people usually accelerate or maybe a world wide pandemic landing in your formative years.

Wrong year is a much smaller time scale. An example more close to home on this site, you/me just missed the free money cash days of the fango mango tech companies. Sure, there are still some of those jobs but far fewer with where interest rates are at.

I used to think a wrong year was maybe 1:80 but at 50, I've seen some unpleasant shit every decade.

I keep thinking about some odd-ball numerology weirdo I met on a trip in GG park about cycles of the universe and prime number harmony.

In the real world there are just boom/bust cycles, make hay while the sun shines. IME you'll be part of 8 cycles, 5 of which you can control a small part of.

> education

eh, i kinda disagree on this. in the era of information being so abundant there's so much you can learn on your own.

sure you won't become a surgeon but there are so many other things you can learn and get a job.

and this is true even without having AI in the picture.

For the vast majority of higher-level jobs you need certifications, not knowledge. There are very few jobs that you can get by simply demonstrating that you know something.

The reason people pay $100k for a year of college education most certainly isn’t the lectures, which you can often find on YouTube these days.

I disagree. Education is about culture and not access. Even when books were rare, families that valued education (even more rare) would do better.

Learning about the world gives you an edge, full stop. Cultures that highly value education, surprise surprise, are far more wealthy.

Today, it is almost harder to learn because of how noisy and manipulative the world is today.

Most of life is luck, with regards to success and economic prosperity. We’ve built a system that ignores that for the benefit of a privileged few, using fairy tales around exceptionalism and faux meritocracy. We should build socioeconomic systems where luck is less a component for survival and living a good life, imho. I think we’re on our way there (support of democratic socialism and their candidates is at record highs, mostly around the young, and the old age out at a rate of 2M per year 55+ [higher support of capitalism because they were lucky under it]), but it’s going to take another decade or two to see the improvements (political cycles, electorate turnover, policy implementation lag, etc.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 (citations)

Luck is just as important even with perfect economic equality. It’s just that economic luck gets replaced by luck of genetics, luck of immaterial circumstances, etc.

I have always found the assumption strange that one is somehow preferable to the other, but most people seem to believe that, so maybe one day they’ll get what they’re asking for and then find out that it’s not what they wanted after all.

Yes and no. I can think of easily three decision or inflection points in my life where if i went left instead of right, id be a multi millionaire. I can think of even more where my life direction would have been radically different.

Luck plays a huge part on where you start and land but no one is totally unlucky. Luck strikes everyone across all starting points.

What i have seen with my loved ones that struggle is that they have had many lucky breaks and somehow keep squandering them in a sad self fulfilling prophecy. Success begets success and failure begets failure. Both cycles are reversible.

Keep in mind “success” is not rich/famous but financially stable.

You must be joking. Democratic Socialism is just Socialism with a prettier name. Socialism does not work, full stop, unless you're in the group at the top controlling the strings. Don't point at the nordic countries, they have far less progressive taxation policies that the US when you factor VAT in.

I thought it was more like, if it doesn’t work it’s socialism, if it does work it’s not socialism? This is why Norway is at the same time called not socialism (because it works) and socialism (because conservatives don’t want us to even try adopting what works in Norway).

Worked just fine when the US had a much higher tax rate. We just bring back the higher tax rates. Easy peasy.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcRRTC0ETlS/

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