[projektir]

I think it's a very poor idea to convince ourselves of falsehoods for personal benefit.

Believing luck is not real pretty much immediately activates the just world hypothesis, which is responsible for some rather awful things happening to people. It's the kind of shallowly selfish, short-term belief set we do not want to have.

It's not just about a given person and how productive they singularly happen to be, why are we focusing on that so much?

[nostrademons]

"Believing luck is not real pretty much immediately activates the just world hypothesis."

This doesn't follow, and the article adnzzzzZ linked explains how it doesn't follow. In particular, if you divide the concept of truth up into "objective truth" and "pragmatic truth" as the article suggests, you can believe the just-world hypothesis is false on an objective level while still believing that you should ignore luck on a pragmatic level, because it - by definition - holds no bearing on what you can control.

[projektir]

Are you sure? If you are careful about how you divide these worlds it should work well enough, but then adnzzzzZ goes ahead and makes this statement:

"Stop using luck as an excuse for your failures and other people's failures."

This doesn't really sound they have the objective world setup well, and would trivially slide down to judging unlucky people. I'm convinced that the just-world hypothesis is one of the most evil cognitive biases a culture can have (in terms of how much suffering is created, see some developments in Christian religion), so I'm not sure this is a risk worth taking.

In my life I found the most true view (as far as I can find it) to be the most useful. Knowing that luck is an important factor fairly significant rotates what you do, why you do it, what you consider important, what you think about others, etc. I think if we do develop cognitive adaptations, we should nonetheless root them in what is true. I.e., if we go for the pragmatic adaptation, why? For a lot of people, the idea that luck is important is brand new information they should sit and chew on for a while.

> you should ignore luck on a pragmatic level, because it - by definition - holds no bearing on what you can control.

So this is not quite true, and it's somewhat related to the point above. A lot of luck based events are random to the person they happen to, in the sense that they were chosen for it randomly, but have a non-random source, or arise from a non-random pattern. Someone might get sick, which is random, but how the system deals with it is not random and makes the difference in how debilitating that event can be (in other words, society has ways of modifying the effect of randomness on the system). A person might be randomly targeted, but the source of the targeting is not random (i.e., the target of a robbery may be random, but there's nothing random about the robber and their choice to rob).

The problem with the randomness concept is that it's not symmetric. If you focus on the individual only you miss the cross-effects. What we say, when we say that luck is important, is that a given person cannot conquer the world, cannot override its rules, and many of its rules are unfair. What we are not saying is that we should sit down and do nothing, in fact, we're saying the opposite: the world is broken and requires fixing, and the world should be fixed before the individual is fixed. And it is the awareness of its unfairness that is needed here. What is there to fix if a given person is fully responsible for their lives? We just blame the person and move on, as humanity has done for thousands of years.

This sort of approach (separate things into true reality and pragmatic/relevant reality) requires a lot of justification before it should be adopted.

[adnzzzzZ]

>the world is broken and requires fixing, and the world should be fixed before the individual is fixed

This is just fundamentally wrong. The correct level of analysis to fix the world is the individual. If individuals aren't responsible for their actions and doing their best in life then the world will never be fixed. By saying that the world needs to be fixed before individuals you're giving people an excuse to not try their best.

[projektir]

Have you read my post? I've already addressed this, and my point specifically that individuals may not be responsible for what happens to them, but they often are responsible for what happens to others, and that the latter in many cases is a stronger lever than the former (i.e., luck is non-symmetric and not-global). By focusing on the dichotomy between the individual situation, you're forgetting this very important dynamic.

> By saying that the world needs to be fixed before individuals you're giving people an excuse to not try their best.

Frankly, it's the least of my concerns if I am giving someone excuses or not or if someone is trying their best. My concern is whether the world makes sense, is reasonably fair, and if people in it are happy. People trying, or not trying, their best, is only relevant if it is somehow interfering with that goal. At the end of the day I don't think people doing their best is all that relevant because it's not an objective measure and by definition varies between people. This smells of a religious kind of "sacredness", of people trying to create value out of nothing through "virtuous" action and living. This is the kind of thing people turned to when the world was so bad that improving it was impossible, so they turned inwards, so that even in the darkest circumstances they could feel good about themselves. Are you familiar with such philosophy? Is that what you're doing here? Do you think this is a good time and place for that?

If someone's best is a broken bridge, and someone's mediocre is a working bridge, guess which bridge I want? The world doesn't care about my "best" or your "best" and never did and never will. The bridge only works if it is built correctly, it doesn't care if someone did their "best".

We should not be focused on what is our personal best, because that's irrelevant and self-focused and leads to a shallow kind of selfishness. It undermines what can be built by human hands through collective effort. It gives credit when none is due (to work with no results). It makes us focus inward and generates concern with esteem and status. We shouldn't be worried about that, we're not animals. We should focus on what works, what's a good idea, what brings results.