[ta1234567890]

However, 2, 3 and 4 can be reduced to 1.

You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life.

In the end, everything is just blind luck, but our egos want to feel like they are in control somehow.

[nostrademons]

Seems like this is a free will argument. In a reductionist view, yes, everything is all blind luck because the universe was set in motion at the Big Bang and has evolved according to the laws of physics since. If you got rich through intelligence, determination, and good choices, that was still luck because your intelligence and determination are largely determined by your genes and your choices by your environment, both of which were determined before you were born.

This argument may be true but it isn't very useful, because the concept of "useful" itself implies free will and active decision-making. In other words, yes, maybe it was all predetermined before we were born, but if you're the sort of person that believes in free will, that decision was predetermined before you were born, so why challenge that belief? And the reason we evolved to believe in the fiction of free will is because humans who did do better than those who don't, so whether it's correlation or causation, it's still adaptive.

[rubidium]

But, the best we know is the laws of physics are not deterministic!

The quantum states that your neurons fire to is unknowable in advance and determined only at the point of measurement.

Therefore, you are _free_ in the exact results of your neural mass are unknowable in advance and truly random. There's certainly a distribution of probability to the randomness... but be free and don't by the deterministic, 19th century nonsense!

[nostrademons]

My physics professor met with the Dalai Lama to discuss this exact point - whether the indeterminacy in quantum mechanics can give rise to free will.

The thing is, the randomness in quantum mechanics isn't really the same as what we talk about with "free will". Quantum mechanics is really a statement about coupling - it finds that you cannot separate the results of a measurement from the act of measuring, and so you will always introduce uncertainty into the measurement of any physical quantity.

There are a lot of possible philosophical interpretations of that. Does it mean nature is inherently random? Or is nature deterministic underneath, but our knowledge of nature is inherently random? Does it leave room for God in the machine? Free will? Are the laws of physics lines of code in a computer program, and we're Sims trying to reverse-engineer them?

Physicists tend not to concern themselves much with these quesions: as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, there is uncertainty in the measurement of any physical quantity, and this uncertainty can be quantified. The laws of physics are just models anyway: they've worked remarkably well at predicting reality, but we'll never know whether they're actually reality, and that's not really the point.

"Free will" usually implies some form of agent that can shape actions in the future. The mind, soul, whatever is a distinct thing that determines our actions. Personally, I'm of the opinion that we don't actually have free will, but I was predestined to believe that I do, and as a model of reality it works fairly well even if it's false, so there's no particular reason to discard that model. Similarly, I don't actually have a "self" - I'm just a collection of neural impulses firing - but it's convenient to believe that I do, so why not?

[clairity]

free will doesn't necessarily require quantum uncertainty. it could also be that the force that set this universe in motion (as opposed to one of the infinitely many other possibilities) is the same stuff that composes our own free will. we simply don't know enough to believe in the lack of free will, either.

[collinmanderson]

If I knew for sure that everything was deterministic, would I decide to live my life differently?

I think I would still experience the ability to discern, make decisions, and take responsibility for the direction of my life.

[clairity]

self-awareness means that you might. it's why there are no sure things in the stock market, for example. we humans incorporate new information swiftly and deftly.

[pmoriarty]

Quantum events might not be completely predictable by our puny human brains, but that doesn't mean that they're not pre-ordained or pre-determined in some sense.

The world could be 100% a "clockwork universe", but we just aren't capable of understanding how it all works or fully predicting what will happen.

To say that something is "random" is more of a statement about our own inability to see a pattern in the data than about the data not having some pattern in it.

[ultraism]

I favor the idea of free will but I don't buy this argument. Everything in the universe is bound by the same physics/quantum mechanics but you wouldn't say a rock has free will.

[ChrisLomont]

Quantum mechanics has the free will theorem: if you have free will, then so do sub-atomic particles.

Thus if you want to have free will, then so does a rock.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem

[ultraism]

To me, free will implies choice. I don't see how non-determinism is equivalent to choice. I can see it as necessary but not sufficient. I do not see how the "free will theorem" shows that elementary particles are choosing their spin. It seems that they mean free will differently than I do.

[ChrisLomont]

>It seems that they mean free will differently than I do.

No, they mean it the same way you do; they only made it precise.

You probably suppose a scientist doing an experiment can choose between A and B for some setup. If so, then so can particles, because one can make experiments where a physicist can make a choice affecting the outcomes, and the particles in the experiment can choose their behavior in exactly the same manner.

So, since there are experiments that allow you to "choose" freely, and such experiments have particles able to do whatever you are doing, then either your free will implies their free will, or neither has free will.

Follow the links from the wiki page to learn more. It's quite precise, and is exactly the usual concept of free will.

[sokoloff]

> This argument may be true but it isn't very useful

It's useful to some in the sense of justifying the taking and redistribution of the outcomes from whatever mix of luck, skill, and labor went into the creation of wealth.

[clairity]

it doesn't have to be a free will argument at all, but rather luck overwhelming skill when it comes to outcome. we still have some margin of control, but on a much smaller scale (and effect) than we believe.

it's not even surprising we'd jump to such conclusions: our brains are designed to tease out and magnify the significance of the things that we do and control.

[dorgo]

I agree, but I think the discussion is not about luck vs skill.

Imagine a poker tournament. The winner is determined by a combination of luck and skill. But somebody who didn't play had no chance to win.

[Gpetrium]

Life, in most cases, is built upon all 4 points listed by OP with a varying degree of applicability. If magically, everyone decided to just accept 1 without doing any of the others, you would likely find society going down the drain or the few who attempt 2,3 or 4 with an exceptional return of investment.

I find it difficult to undermine all four 'kinds of luck' when you look at someone studying hard to get into a certain university, or you look at a foreigner deciding to uproot their lives to hopefully get a better life in US/Canada,etc or someone who decided to knock on every door to get their first client and hone their skills throughout that process.

[mikestew]

Hustle and preparation allow smaller quantities of blind luck to be turned into success. Otherwise it takes a lot more blind luck to overcome a lack of preparation, and large quantities of blind luck are harder to find.

So, yeah, it all boils down to #1. But #s 2-4 determine how much of #1 you need.

[astura]

Ummmm... Hustle and prep get you absolutely nowhere if you're hustling and prepping for the wrong thing or doing so the wrong way.

[jelliclesfarm]

You can’t choose your luck, but your originating genes aka parents did...more reason why there should be a checklist for responsible procreation.

Having children without a plan puts ones own copies of genes at risk. As is not having the resource to raise them well. It’s self sabotage..as it were..by two people who decided to combine their genetic material and their immediate circle of friends, family and acquaintances who enable their sub optimal decision. Society and media should be ignored anyways while making important decisions.

[meiraleal]

> You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life.

if you workout and are in the best shape your genes can provide, you will be more lucky when meeting people and more interesting people will be interested on you. That would be 3, not 1. And if you have a good conversation and go out every day, you will also have more chance of meeting interesting people. That would be 2.

[lazyasciiart]

If you have, for example, chronic fatigue you will struggle to work out. That would be 4 constraining 3. And if you have significant social anxiety, or are bedridden with illness, or various other health limitations you will struggle to have a good conversation and go out every day. That would be 4 constraining 2.

[marcus_holmes]

unless, of course, you skipped that critical networking event because you were at the gym. Unlucky.

[RosanaAnaDana]

Gotta pick your horses.

[dsfyu404ed]

Hustle and preparation are not luck, they're skills you have to hone for them to be useful. You have to actually do something. They aren't something you can be born into (much to the dismay of rich parents with deadbeat kids). By reducing 2 and 3 to luck you're implying that people have no agency. Sure, the person who develops those skills in rural Africa isn't going to go as far as someone who develops those skills in Chicago but they'll both go a hell of a lot farther than the average persona around them.

[jayd16]

Lots of people hustle and prep who are not rich. Luck is largest factor and its usually the luck of already being in a position to capitalize on opportunities.

[agota]

I think it's a mistake to assume that just because something is a skill it's not influenced by "luck".

For example, from what I understand, in the big five model of personality, conscientiousness is over 40% heritable.

Anecdotally, I remember how even in the first grade there were kids that were clearly low in conscientiousness and kids who were clearly high in conscientiousness.

Pretty sure the kids in the latter group didn't instill a work ethic into themselves by age 6.

I hope that it's possible to develop conscientiousness as an adult, at least to some degree, but clearly it is something that you can be born into.

I'm using "conscientiousness" as an example, I don't think it's the same thing as "hustle", in fact I'd even suspect that there's some conflict between the two.

However, my point is that development of skills aren't independent from luck, since we all are dealt different cards with which we then have to play.

[SolaceQuantum]

Being prepared doesn't mean anything unless 1 happens. Hustling => success and preparation => success are dependent on lucky opportunities.

[dsfyu404ed]

No they are not. Yes, there is more opportunity in some settings than others but the people with the skills are much less likely to be passed by by that opportunity than everyone else. There's a lot more opportunity that usable to the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation) and have the drive to do so (hustle).

[SolaceQuantum]

Again, imagine 1 does not occur. You hustle and there is never a lucky opportunity. Do you still achieve success? You prepare for a job interview and you never get the opportunity to interview. Do you still achieve success?

No one is saying that there aren’t factors to increase luck insofar as people are saying that success doesn’t necessarily have a linear relationship with preparation or hustle.

IE. Person A who earns 100x more than person B did not necessarily prepare 100x harder, or hustled for 100x as much. Person A may only have hustled/prepared 10x or 5x as much, or 0.5x as much and just got exposed to better opportunities.

[ativzzz]

> You hustle and there is never a lucky opportunity. Do you still achieve success? You prepare for a job interview and you never get the opportunity to interview. Do you still achieve success?

You don't achieve success, nor do you experience luck. In this case you describe, are you unlucky, or are you simply bad at "hustling" or whatever work you are putting in?

Hustling on its own doesn't guarantee good luck. Nothing does; it just (if done right, sometimes) increases your odds.

[hinkley]

What if you hustle and all you get is bad luck?

I think one of you is saying that neutral situations should allow one to scramble up just due to willpower alone. I'm not sure I agree.

But some people are born with one foot in a bucket. They just keep getting hit by sic relatives and floods and what have you and everything they get never lasts.

[danans]

> the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation)

In a great many cases this boils down to already having enough money to survive a failure in a condition that you can get up to hustle again.

If you are supporting a family, the size of that financial backstop needs to be bigger. For every story of person X who bet their family's security and ended up a big financial success, there are far more who ended up in the negative.

[anigbrowl]

Hustle and preparation are very important, lucking into wealth vastly outweighs those factors, because a) it provides room to fail and b) it makes it easy to hire the busy and well-prepared.

Try playing multiple games of monopoly with 4 or 5 friends (or run monte carlo simulations if you want a fun machine learning project, since Monopoly is a game that can easily be taught to computers), but randomly assign one player 10x the starting capital and $2000 every time they pass go instead of the normal $200.

[davinic]

Of course not, but you still have to either be born as the type of person who would seek out and hone this skill, or have been born into a situation where someone showed you this and you were naturally receptive to it.

[hinkley]

I had a coworker who went to Stanford on scholarships. The thing that surprised him about all the rich kids there was how prepared they were for life already. It was no wonder to him how they get ahead and stay ahead, and it wasn't just money.

But one of my theories in life is that power is money, not the other way around. We know that's something that the newly rich run into over and over. We even have movies with that story arc.

'They' are all too happy to see us get hung up on how much money we're going to allow them to have. They'll still be just as powerful and influential. Probably the easiest thing they spend that 'currency' on is to have enough money to cover the exchange rate with people outside their circles.

[hinkley]

"Fortune favors the prepared mind."

not

"Fortune rewards the prepared mind."

Although the latter is effectively Calvinism, which the US culture was founded on. It will probably echo through the ages.

[prewett]

I've never heard Calvinism talk about either "fortune" or the "prepared mind". I get that you're denigrating Calvinism here rather than making a precise statement, but what part of Calvinism are you referring to? The Calvinists I know would be more likely to say that God willed your situation or gave you the preparation for your mind. This is more akin to fate than fortune. ("Fate" being what will inevitably happen, and "fortune" being chance events.)

[hinkley]

If you work hard and sacrifice you will be rewarded. Frequently it is presented as quid pro quo.

At the end of the day if you work hard and do well, you could still have been lucky. Rather than that negating all of your hard work, a better reaction to this fact is a bit of charity for others. And I’m not talking donations, I’m talking about being a decent person and not judging others who haven’t got what you got.

[LeftHandPath]

It all boils down to just how deterministic you're able to believe the universe is.

Is there a such thing as my own willpower that allows me to improve my position more than an equivalently-placed person would, or is the willpower to act to improve my own situation derived from the blind luck of where and when I was born?

[ChrisLomont]

>In the end, everything is just blind luck

So you claim there is no correlation between, say, hours worked and money earned? That pay is some random variable not causally connected to any decision a person makes?

[ReptileMan]

Genghis Khan was exiled and had nothing by age nine. At the time of his death he left the biggest land empire the world has ever seen to his children. You need very little of 1 to make a difference

[ativzzz]

His campaigns also contributed to something like 60+ million deaths[1]. Maybe the Hitler of his time?

In his case, perhaps everyone who got in his way simply didn't have any luck.

[1] https://www.scifacts.net/human/genghis-khan-death-toll/

[ReptileMan]

That is also an impressive achievement considering the technology and logistics he had available from a certain perspective

[Keloo]

> You don't choose your genes

I agree with this one.

> or where you are born

Not really agree with this, you can change the country you live in. And it's more important where you live not where you are born. For example lots of people from poor countries go to US or Europe and are quite successful there.

> 2,3 can be reduced to 1.

Don't agree either. Let's be realistic, what are the chances of success for a person who stays at home watch movies vs. someone who go out talk with people get involved in all sorts of activities + prepare the homework for those social events.

[lotsofpulp]

>Let's be realistic, what are the chances of success for a person who stays at home watch movies vs. someone who go out talk with people get involved in all sorts of activities + prepare the homework for those social events.

Probability of success depends what environment you are in. A person with poor uneducated and possibly negligent parents living in a slum with no network has a very different probability of "success" than a person with well educated, well connected, and rich parents.

Even they are able to see that perhaps instead of a minute chance of success on par with winning the lottery, perhaps they ought to spend the present enjoying a movie. Many times, not being around the right people and environment leaves you in the dark about opportunities in the first place. I'm not saying that one should despair and sit at home watching movies, but it can be rational to feel that way. We need to do better as a society to even out the odds.

[Keloo]

Totally agree with you, parents and environment is one of the most important factor but this is not 100% of the odds, there are still things that you can influence yourself (especially in these times when we have access to the internet).

[marcus_holmes]

I spent most of a year living in Cambodia. I met some amazing people there. People who had put way more effort and work into improving their lives than anyone I had met in either the UK or Australia. But they were still (comparatively) poor. And that was never going to change, because they just didn't have the opportunities there that we take for granted. In some places, birth and family is more important than any amount of effort, talent or intelligence.

[zepto]

Changing the country you live in is not possible for most people - it requires luck to have the resources necessary to do so.

And even if you do change the country you live in, it won’t be equivalent to having been born there.

[lazyasciiart]

See: all those undocumented kids who grew up in the USA and now are stuck hoping that DACA doesn't get cancelled.

[preordained]

100% true. No idea why you were downvoted.

[onion2k]

I couldn't get a visa to work in the USA even if I wanted one. My right to work in Europe is about to be taken away and replaced with... something. I don't know what other countries I can work in but there'd be visa requirements for most of them.

I could change country if I tried really hard but it isn't straightforward. And I'm an very experienced frontend dev. Other people would find it harder.

[ranie93]

I think the person you are replying to is making the more basic interpretation that such propensities (someone who stays at home watching movies, someone with the motivation to move to another country, etc) are themselves composed of variables outside of one's control-- genes, gene expression, nutrition, etc, etc-- i.e. blind luck

[a11yguy]

I wonder how much of someone's genetics determines how likely they are to watch movies over hustle.

[anigbrowl]

lots of people from poor countries go to US or Europe

Have you noticed the existence of extremely anti-immigration politicians who are trying to reduce that number to zero by rewriting the rules in the most inequitable fashion possible?