[skookumchuck]

> I think it's because intelligence doesn't help when it comes to earning money.

What evidence is there of that?

> The luck and social component is so strong that there is very little incentive for people to be intelligent.

People tend to make their own luck. For example, if you sit home and watch TV 6 hours a day, you are highly unlikely to get lucky. If you're out swinging the bat, you're far more likely to get a hit.

[jodrellblank]

Lucky if you're a person with the drive and motivation to go out swinging the bat.

[skookumchuck]

Drive and motivation is a choice, not luck.

[jodrellblank]

I see no reason that brain makeup would be any more a choice than eye color or height.

But even if it is, that just pushes the question back another stage. People make choices for reasons, based on their experience and predictions. Lucky to be someone who had the appropriate experiences and made appropriate predictions to choose drive and motivation. There should be no reason to doubt this unless you believe in some kind of external soul or intervening deity - a child who is hit every time they speak or move without being told to, will make different choices about "drive and motivation" as a child who is encouraged and praised when they do things of their own accord. It can't be otherwise, to suggest that people do things /without/ their environment affecting them at all is so absurd as to be instantly dismissible. The idea that infants might know what "drive and motivation" even are, without being taught, that everyone must learn that they are effective and valuable, independent of all experiences, doesn't stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever.

Put simply, if what you say was true, /everyone would choose that/.

[skookumchuck]

You're denying people have free will.

People are all born with different characteristics, sure. But this does not predestine them. You, with your brain, can choose your path. You can choose to take advantages of your inborn advantages, and train to overcome your inborn deficits. It's why you HAVE a brain.

You can CHOOSE. People do it every day.

To claim to be fated to be a victim of circumstance is choosing to be a loser. You'll not be what you could be.

[UnFleshedOne]

Free will is an incoherent construct.

Free will implies that if you make a decision (after a long process of deliberating) then roll back the universe to before the start of that process and run it again, you can make a different decision even though exactly nothing changed.

In deterministic universe, everything will run right on the same tracks, and your cognitive process influenced by its internal structure, its accumulated experience and current inputs, will arrive to the same conclusion. No free will here.

In non-deterministic universe, something will randomly happen differently and you will arrive to a different conclusion, but that is still not your doing. You don't control that atom decaying or not decaying and flipping your neuron or something. So no free will here either.

In dualistic universe, your "soul" will influence the decision differently, but that is merely moving the problem into soul realm. Depending on how much decision making your theology places into the brain and how much into the soul, the soul acts as a generator of randomness (it is is not influenced by materialistic inputs and experiences) or as a whole processing unit (if all thinking is done there). You don't control that either.

[jodrellblank]

You're denying people have free will.

Yes, I am.

You are using a dream of free will as an excuse to put down people and be rude and judgemental, and to put yourself above others.

[icebraining]

What evidence is there of that?

[skookumchuck]

You can get up and go jogging and improve our health. Or you can turn on the TV. It's your choice. Just like you chose to write "What evidence is there of that?". You weren't fated to write that.

[icebraining]

The question is not whether one has choice, but about the mechanisms that leads one to choose one or the other.

One can choose to go jogging, but one can't choose to have the motivation to choose to go jogging.

[skookumchuck]

> one can't choose to have the motivation

Of course you can. Sheesh. Take responsibility for yourself.