[krisoft]

> I did say that "any random person" was a plausible choice.

And I'm saying that it was not a __choice__. A violent man committed one more violent act in a life full of violent acts. Calling it a choice and thinking it in terms of pros and cons makes it sound like a much more deliberative act.

> Start breaking the arms of random people from your village and you'll see a lot of your political support start to waver.

Which is exactly what happened with him.

> I don't think the role of luck is particularly significant.

Only lucky people think that. :)

[thaumasiotes]

> Only lucky people think that. :)

Perhaps, if you just didn't bother reading my comment.

We have someone who was very badly suited to her culture and achieved results that were well below average.

She didn't die, which is the article's metric of success.

Women who fit into the culture better, a large majority of Yanomamo women, also didn't die, and this is unsurprising because our case study didn't die even after screwing up in major ways several different times.

This is why luck is insignificant - even if you do very badly, you'll still succeed. Success is nearly guaranteed, and therefore there isn't a role for luck to play in it.

Luck could have made the difference between Helena succeeding and failing - she might have been eaten by a jaguar. But that was not a risk for a normal Yanomamo woman.

[krisoft]

> Perhaps, if you just didn't bother reading my comment.

I assure you I did read your comment. Carefully and multiple times.

I disagree with it as I wrote. Doesn't mean that I didn't read it.

> This is why luck is insignificant - even if you do very badly, you'll still succeed.

I really don't understand your reasoning here. She was lucky. Random things turned out well enough for her so she could tell her story and let us hear it. That is where the luck is significant. You can't argue from the fact that she was lucky, that luck wasn't significant.

If she wasn't lucky and the jaguar eat her, if she wasn't lucky and the poisoned arrow killed her, if she wasn't lucky and the chief she mocked have executed her we would not know about her.

She didn't survive because she was so careful with things. She didn't survive because her environment was free of dangers. She survived because she rolled the darwinian roulette wheel (multiple times) and things happened to work out randomly well enough for her to survive. Therefore the role of luck is significant.

You are basically saying "well it worked out okay, so what is the fuss about it". But some of these things only worked out for her due to luck. I read your comment (multiple times!) and still confused how can you can think that the role of luck is insignificant. Especially when you agree that the jaguar could have killed her.

> But that was not a risk for a normal Yanomamo woman.

Ok? Two things. One: What do we care? We are talking about Helena and the significance of luck in her life. Even if the normal Yanomamo woman were 100% impervious to jaguar attacks wouldn't change anything about Helena. The jaguar is a danger to her. Avoiding it is up to luck for her.

Two: how do you know? Do you have some good data source on the relative probabilities on jaguar attacks on the normal Yanomamo woman? Or just making assumptions? For all we know it might be danger to everyone living in that environment.