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by coderintherye 1063 days ago
I think you can apply the author's thinking to also looking at how our societal and economic outcomes relate to our circumstances of birth. People want to delude themselves into believing they succeeded from "hard work" where others were lazy rather than recognizing that had another seed been planted in your place and nurtured with the same resources (or lack thereof) it'd probably have equal chances of having surpassed your success as it would have of having withered in failure.
3 comments
s1artibartfast 1063 days ago
How do you find that this relates to the article? Do you really think that hard work as a concept is a delusion?

Buy your own metaphor, a different seed planted and nurtured the same has a chance of success or failure. The fact that chances at all implies that the seed matters and not just the environment, otherwise any seed would be expected to have an identical outcome.

To speak plainly, children from the same parents with the same opportunities can and do have drastically different lives.

The crookedness the article speaks of is unpredictable and unique to every tree. Seeds planted in an orchard of the same soil do not produce identical trees

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gochi 1063 days ago
>To speak plainly, children from the same parents with the same opportunities can and do have drastically different lives.

But children do not have the same parents. Not unless they are twins. Parents treat each child differently. This is common knowledge, expected even. This is why outcomes are so drastically different, not because of the "seed" but because everything else has changed alongside the seed.

Ask the oldest child of a family how they view each of their parents. Ask the youngest. They often see such different people. This is exaggerated in families where addiction was overcome for example, where the first child grew up without a loving home, and the last grew up experiencing parents that finally figured out how to love.

You can see how even the tiniest of changes affects this, and why "same parents same opportunities" doesn't apply to most, again excluding twins.

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s1artibartfast 1063 days ago
Yes there are different environmental factors in families. But that doesn't negate the fact that there's differences in individuals as well. Some people literally come out of the womb mentally handicapped or gifted or anywhere between. To talk things up 100% to environment for capability is a silly as saying height is 100% environment. It's unscientific and putting one's head in the sand. It is one factor but not the only Factor.
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s-lambert 1063 days ago
Twins have different parents too, being a twin doesn't mean you're treated the same in every instance, there are actually difference between twins even if we do look similar.
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whatshisface 1063 days ago
People still deserve credit or blame for their actions even if some percentage within their demographic will do more than them and some percentage will end up in jail. (Whether you deserve any credit for making money is another question...)
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s1artibartfast 1063 days ago
Indeed, even if you take a completely deterministic view of human behavior, you still have different people at the end of the day.

Someone fated by circumstance to commit murder, is still a person that murders others. Someone fated by circumstance to saves lives is still saving lives.

You have to figure out if you want to treat these people differently, even if you dont blame them for the things they do.

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WalterBright 1063 days ago
In a free country, the circumstances of one's birth matter the least.
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