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| Thread: The role of luck in success |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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Raelag84
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posted April 18, 2011 10:03 PM |
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Edited by Raelag84 at 23:40, 18 Apr 2011.
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Before I say anything else Corribus I would like to say we agree more than we disagree.
We agree success is some combination of luck and hard work even if we might disagree as to what degree.
We agree that social programs should not be just a hand out and should instead “put people on the path of success“ as you say.
Finally we agree that perfect equality is not possible and we should not try to achieve it.
Also I did not mean to belittle your argument.
The arguement that was made during our posts was as follows:
(Raelag) You and I have never met, but if you are an average human being then by default you have already assumed that my poverty is a result of lazyness.
(Corribus) And with all due respect, you are making a grossly inaccurate assumption about my perception. I’ve said nothing of the sort. I’ve implied that poverty or wealth, in general, cannot be wholly attributed to chance.
(Raeleg) Of wealth belonging to its possessors on account of righteousness and poverty belonging to the poor because of the sumation of their faults)
(Corribus) Where are you getting this? I certainly never said anything at all about morality!
Realag) Hence I would agree with his drive for greater though not perfect income equalty.
(Corribus) Just out of curiosity, do you think income equality is even possible?
To clarify these statements and answer your question, I used the words “an average human being by default”, not Corribus or you as part of my wording. This implies I am touching on a general statement on human nature. Human beings are naturally hypocritical and frequently act on impulse to inflict guilt on other persons. They are also easily convinced by corrupt data that agrees with their favored viewpoint. If you are “average” or “normal”, you will react in exactly the same way. It is not said that I am either rich or poor. But it is said that if I were poor, your assumption would immediately be that it is self-deserved, if indeed that circumstance exists. Chance is commonly less a factor because of this tendency for perception. Both “luck” and “equality” refer to psychological concepts which my be interrelated.
The statement made on “possessors on account of righteousness” versus “poverty due to a summation of their faults” is a continued argument that “luck” is somewhat less critical in the argument over wealth distribution. But it does imply that I disagree with the voice commonly echoed through the thread that either the possession (or prosecution) of wealth equates that it was ethically gained and possessed. It does not discount that those whom have earned wealth do not deserve it. It makes a comment that those whom have wealth (or fortune) are not holy men because of resources in their possession. But neither are the poor “unholy” or morally base for being poor. This concept is closely tied with the perception of fortune, fate, luck, chance or whatever have you since the argument that poverty is just retribution for personal failings is standard. This stereotype is perpetuated through social mainstreams such as religion, film, and literature, but has little hold on reality.
The reality is that even before the welfare reform passed by Clinton most welfare recipients did not stay on longer than two years http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-welfareblack.htm and until the recent recession welfare reform had put more people to work http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-01-25-welfare-rolls_N.htm a far cry from “money going to people who probably never get employed. Also it has become harder to use food stamps to buy drugs as they have become non-transferable cards that are closely monitored.
There is a large number of moral persons with wealth. But there are just as many immoral ones. Similarly, morality among the poor is a matter of personal decision rather than wealth or even fortune. By the same standard, pleas to take money on grounds of morality are just as invalid as pleas to keep money on grounds of morality. Socioeconomic self-interest is the only real scale to be used in a vacuum. But when real people get involved resources have to be distributed in a non-scientific, human way to accommodate for psychological perceptions. That is why the topic of morality ties in with “income equality”.
As for the reason I brought up food being wasted. First off one-fourth of our food is indeed thrown away http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=earth-talk-waste-land. In order to allocate resources more equally (in other words to make sure food resources go to those whom need it and not those whom have an excess which may be thrown away), progressive taxes and social programs are important. All of society is a social construct unique to humanity. It can and is structured by mankind either for its benefit or detriment. I would advocate that any social network including government be wise in its purpose.
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Doomforge
Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
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posted April 18, 2011 10:25 PM |
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Here's some advice for kids therefore:
1) Pursuit your interests:
a) if your interests are "conventional" in the sense that you can cover them with conventional high-grade education and see a well-paid regular job at the end of it, put all your effort into it to get all the conventional formal qualifications necessary with a grade as high as possible.
b) if your interests are "unconventional" (you can't see a regular job behind it), pursue the interest obsessively, putting all your spare time into it. Reduce educational efforts to the bare minimum necessary to proceed and make the grade.
2) Always play the lottery with a minimum bet.
Never forget: mediocrity doesn't earn wealth.
Good ones! but taking path b) takes some serious balls 
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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JollyJoker
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posted April 18, 2011 10:52 PM |
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It's actually what most kids do anyway nowadays - minus pursuing interests obsessively, maybe.
But as I said - mediocrity doesn't make millionaires. Of course it takes balls. If it was easy, it wouldn't pay anyway.
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JollyJoker
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posted April 19, 2011 11:26 AM |
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I have to say, I've mulled quite a bit about this - thanks, Corribus - and it's a pretty difficult question, that touches the free will/determinism debate. Let's try to make some sense out of this all.
Let's simply call all outside material factors combined in the event of the birth of a child the "material handicap". Material Handicap would be the summary of things like relative wealth and status of the parents (but not their personality) and the neighborhood, stability of the country. Genetic predispositions describable as "talents" and so on, however, would NOT be part of the handicap. The reason for this is - at this stage of discussion -, that it is quite difficult to determine whether typical "success traits" like will power and so on are based on a combination of genetics and education or the actual "fit" of genetics plus handicap(for example, certain talents that may favor a successful career in one country or even parental home may actually be suppressed by outside or parental influences which may have an influence on other individual character traits).
So this is the MATERIAL HANDICAP: the starting point. It has clearly a high influence on the development of a person.
Next come genetic dispositions: talents, basic health or "strength", basic intelligence or "learning capacity", these things. I will call this "Individual Potential".
Handicap influences potential (see example above) in many ways, but it's not the only influence. I will call the modificational factors for potential "Education and Learning".
The Fourth factor is CHANCE (happenstancial good or bad luck). Chance is always a factor.
So these 4, Handicap, Potential, Education and Chance are the dominating influences so far, with the interaction of those forming the character.
Question: where is the individual so far? Do these 4 factors already completely determine the life of a person? Where would free will be in this case?
Another question is, whether there is only one way to success. We can effortlessly determine a talented musician whose parents don't want her to follow that line, but forcing her to take a more conventional route. It is absolutely possible that this will lead to the girl, instead of marrying and having children - as intended by the parents - she will divert her creative talents into cooking and starting a successful deli business, when she had become a successful violine player with more progressive parents, raising the question whether there may be a "success gene" or not.
So where IS the individual and the personal contribution to success?
The only real solution I see here is the postulation of quantum processes in the brain - an uncertainty principle in terms of thinking. The mentioned influences would give "things" only a certain probability, with lots of extremely important decisions would be made by a virtual toss of a coin (within the brain). Will I make my homework as best as I can or will I do it cursory and read the cool X-Men comics yet again? Do I visit that boring class or not?
The really interesting thing, however, is, that success AS SUCH doesn't seem to be plannable. You cannot say, that IF you decide to do youz homework properly the chances of success are bigger than in the case you read comics. It may be the other way round, since it may lead to you become a comic artist later instead of an unhappy accountant.
What about GENERAL observations? Dilligence as opposed to lazyness. Even that is inconclusive: there are extremely lazy AND successful people. All we can say is, that ACTIVITY, mental or physical, seems to be good. That and FOCUS (as opposed to unfocussed hyper-activity). With diet influencing this... well.
With all that said, is it really wrong when the more wealthy people are called FORTUNATE?
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Elodin
Promising
Legendary Hero
Free Thinker
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posted April 19, 2011 02:45 PM |
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@JJ
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The really interesting thing, however, is, that success AS SUCH doesn't seem to be plannable. You cannot say, that IF you decide to do youz homework properly the chances of success are bigger than in the case you read comics. It may be the other way round, since it may lead to you become a comic artist later instead of an unhappy accountant.
What about GENERAL observations? Dilligence as opposed to lazyness. Even that is inconclusive: there are extremely lazy AND successful people. All we can say is, that ACTIVITY, mental or physical, seems to be good. That and FOCUS (as opposed to unfocussed hyper-activity). With diet influencing this... well.
With all that said, is it really wrong when the more wealthy people are called FORTUNATE?
Success IS plannable.
Oh, I VERY much disagree with your assessments. If you study and do your homework in school you will do better in school and be more prepared to enter college or to be a better asset in the work force. The better an asset you are to your employer the more he wants to keep you employed in his company resulting in you more likely getting pay raises/promotions.
I'm quite amazed that you argue that diligence and hard work in "inconclusive" as a factor in being successful.
I'll fire a person who is lazy or not diligent in his job performance in a heartbeat. And certainly if you wish to start your own business and are lazy or not diligent you will fail miserably.
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JollyJoker
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posted April 19, 2011 03:17 PM |
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Elodin, your definition of "success" is lacking. A LOT.
A person that can be fired in a heartbeat because of PERCEIVED lazyness, cannot be called "successful". Being solely dependant on the whims of an employer cannot be called successful either.
Being successful is definitely not the same as being employed - although there ARE employees who can be called successful.
To give an example: if you are an employee for McDonald's you can't say you are successful - you just have a job that pays miserably.
Being diligent, polite, able and willing to learn are probably good prerequisites for being promoted through the years, and 30 years later you may well end becoming restaurant manager.
On the other hand, if you are female, the same qualities may win you a lot of unwanted attention from the current restaurant manager or your supervisor which may give your career a very unexpected turn in both directions.
You may call being promoted to restaurant manager after 30 years of service a success - but WEALTHY?
Which is what we are talking about here, when SUCCESS is mentioned: success that makes wealthy.
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Fauch
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted April 19, 2011 03:45 PM |
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what is hard work? working a lot, or forcing yourself to do something you don't like?
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Elodin
Promising
Legendary Hero
Free Thinker
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posted April 19, 2011 03:57 PM |
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Elodin, your definition of "success" is lacking. A LOT.
A person that can be fired in a heartbeat because of PERCEIVED lazyness, cannot be called "successful". Being solely dependant on the whims of an employer cannot be called successful either.
Of course, that is not my definition of success. You seemed to be claiming that laziness had nothing to do with lack of success and that diligence had nothing to do with being successful.
Quote:
The really interesting thing, however, is, that success AS SUCH doesn't seem to be plannable. You cannot say, that IF you decide to do youz homework properly the chances of success are bigger than in the case you read comics. It may be the other way round, since it may lead to you become a comic artist later instead of an unhappy accountant.
What about GENERAL observations? Dilligence as opposed to lazyness. Even that is inconclusive: there are extremely lazy AND successful people.
Now, perhaps you can clarify your words. Which is more likely to result in success: diligence or laziness?
Also, you claim success is not plannable. Which is more likely to succeed: a businessman who plans out costs, projected sales and manufacturing needs, shipments, ect, or a businessman who plans nothing?
Which student is more likely to make better grades: a student who studies and does his homework and goes to his classes or a student who does not study and who does not do his homework and often skips class?
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Revelation
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JollyJoker
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Undefeatable Hero
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posted April 19, 2011 04:33 PM |
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What I mean is, that sucess (as in "becoming wealthy") doesn't seem to be a matter of being diligent or lazy. Nor does it seem to be plannable in the sense of being predictable.
Being diligent is no safe road to wealth - that's why I made the example. It's not even a LIKELY road. Diligence and so on will bring you only so far. If you are diligent you may make a "conventional career". You will get a job with an insurance company, a bank, a lawyer practise, a hospital, an engineering company, in a lab and so on. You will start with a certain salary which will rise with age, performance and, well, diligence, up the point where you may be called wealthy.
MAYBE.
But maybe not. Maybe you are NOT promoted, because your diligence is well-received, but not enough to justify promotion to more responsible positions. Maybe cleverer people get the promotion, people with better self-display. People who are more ruthless. People who are better able to do "what is necessary". More pragmatic people.
Dilgent people make great SUBORDINATES.
Diligent peoople don't get 10 million cash compensation when they leave a company they have nearly ruined - still I would call them wealthy and in that sense pretty successful.
On the other hand CREATIVE people may be successful - they have tons of ideas and try things out...
But maybe not. Maybe they ARE creative, but not patient enough, maybe they HAVE great ideas, but don't have the patience to really pull them through....
It's like trying to write a good AI for a difficult game: if it was easily possible to do so, the game wouldn't be difficult to win in the first place. If it was easy to find the formula that leads to success and wealth, more people were successful and wealthy.
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Doomforge
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posted April 19, 2011 04:49 PM |
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Also, you claim success is not plannable. Which is more likely to succeed: a businessman who plans out costs, projected sales and manufacturing needs, shipments, ect, or a businessman who plans nothing?
I have statistically extremely marginal chance to have knee problems without injury at my age. I have them anyway.
Planning is nice, but things not always go as we planned... That's what I call "luck". To be in that statistical 1%. Or 0.1%. Or 0.001%. It's either fortunate or misfortunate.
Quote:
Which student is more likely to make better grades: a student who studies and does his homework and goes to his classes or a student who does not study and who does not do his homework and often skips class?
The 2nd one if he's smarter than the first.
I have the 7th best grade average @ my institute and I'm a lazy student that skips most of classes and slacks off whenever possible.
There you go.
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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Fauch
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted April 19, 2011 05:08 PM |
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Edited by Fauch at 17:14, 19 Apr 2011.
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maybe the other students are slackers too?
I remember I got some of the best marks on a particular subject despite falling asleep during each of those class hours, but almost no one in the class gave a damn about that subject.
now there are real slackers and people perceived that way. and it is very possible that most people perceived as slackers aren't really slackers. your teachers will conclude that you are lazy if you skip classes, don't learn the lessons, but you might actually be very involved in learning an instrument for example. but for many teachers, it isn't not working, it is playing.
or you could make mods for video games. again, for many people, you aren't working, you are playing.
I could give you a point of view I heard from an employee of "Pole Emploi" : basically, if you don't want to wake up each day to do something that pisses you off, that means you don't want to work.
I don't know why something which is pleasant isn't considered as work according to some people.
well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that the french word for work originated from the name of a torture device, or so I read, but as if they knew it, lol
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Doomforge
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posted April 19, 2011 05:44 PM |
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Quote:
maybe the other students are slackers too?
Not all. Some of them just don't have the "thing" required to learn even simple things like integrals. See, it's really all about talent, if you don't have it, you will fail in whatever you're aiming at. Elodin will of course disagree, but whatever, I've seen enough in my relatively short life to be sure of that.
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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Fauch
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted April 19, 2011 06:33 PM |
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I was just thinking about something.
passion will make you good at something, but it is unlikely to make you wealthy.
I mean, truely passionated people try to give their best, but they don't do it for money.
in another hand you often see complains on internet about the mediocrity of movies and video games and how people working on them are usually unwilling to take risks.
that makes me think of uwe boll. let's make movies about video games even if I don't know snow about them because it will earn me big bucks.
well, that is the question, who is more likely to succeed, hte passionnated guy, or the shark?
and when you try to do your best in a particular domain, but not to get the best results, but just to earn as much money as possible, is it mediocrity?
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del_diablo
Legendary Hero
Manifest
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posted April 19, 2011 10:05 PM |
bonus applied by angelito on 28 Apr 2011. |
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Quote:
Finally, I'd like to ask an important question: is talent innate? Perhaps starting with a definition of talent would be useful. To my mind, being tall is not a part of being talented at basketball.
Lets say talent is the ability to move towards something.
The performance can be increased via training, but there is a large inital paramters, like heigth, how likely your body is to build muscles, how good your brain are for spesific tasks, how well you started out due social enviroment, etc.
The fact that the initial enviroment needed to reach the goal may never be present in the first place means that luck is worth a lot more than hard work.
You need some degree of hard work in order to achive anything, but the degree needed is not even close to "hard work", so it should be called "recognize that you need to move your feet 3 steps forward in order to get anything done".
And as said: Even if you can work infinetly hard, it does not matter, because of the oppertunity is not present, all that hard work will be useless.
It does not matter if you have an idea that can revolutize the world for real, if there is noone there to finance it, or you can't even have a well paying enough job to start financing it, you can't actually realize it.
However, if you have luck, you can get anywhere.
To take the previous example: The fact that you have some friends who you can start sharing finance with to get the idea anywhere is luck. So is connections, and everything else.
Which means that luck outweights hard work, in all cases.
And if you really get lucky, hard work will only increase the reach of the dream, but it won't actually change it.
But to avoid further problems:
I am NOT advocating fullscale nihilisme, because nihilsme is really really silly.
I am merely pointing out that "Luck" is worth a lot more than the ability to work hard.
If you can't actually work, there is no point to work, but in order to not be able to "work" you need to be a vegetable. And since all human qualifies for the most parts as non-vegetables, hard work is overrated.
Fauch: It depends on the field.
If there are no inital field, then the idealists will build something quite great. Like what IBM was back in the days, or other idealistic firms.
However, if there is a field, the "sharks" will be around because there is nothing there that will kill them. And the idealists are willing to take the chance that might ruin them, which means that in the end the sharks WILL win because they play it safe.
What is not detestable is not the sharks, but how ridicully safe they play it. They are just sitting around and copying whoever brings innovation, instead of actually trying to innovate anything themselves.
*ugh*
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angelito
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posted April 21, 2011 10:06 AM |
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A good example for "hard work leads to millions of dollar" is Paris Hilton....
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Doomforge
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posted April 21, 2011 10:17 AM |
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And why miners, stonemasons and alike aren't rich? They are certainly working very hard 
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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Fauch
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted April 21, 2011 04:06 PM |
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A good example for "hard work leads to millions of dollar" is Paris Hilton....
I think some people may say she deserves it because his father (well, I think so) worked hard for it.
btw, who is willing to work hard for me, so that I become a billionaire?
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Doomforge
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posted April 21, 2011 04:38 PM |
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I think some people may say she deserves it because his father (well, I think so) worked hard for it.
Then take another pretty-faced celebrity that does nothing but look good (and has a massive department of people working on her/his image )
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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Corribus
Hero of Order
The Abyss Staring Back at You
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posted April 22, 2011 03:21 AM |
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Edited by Corribus at 03:38, 22 Apr 2011.
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First I want to say that I am very pleased by how this thread has played out. Some nice posts all around, and it has all been very civil. Great job, HC. 
I shall start with the first great post after my last lengthy response in this thread, and this comes from JollyJ.
Regarding the definition of "lucky" and "fortunate":
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When are you fortunate? Fortunate - when used in the luck area of mwaning - will used to describe situations when the odds aren't clear, but things turn out well. For example, you would describe a marriage as "fortunate", when everything the married do turns out well: they live happily with each other, their children have turned out well, and everything they try is successful. The word will be used in a comparable sense as "blessed".
I have no truck with that at all. In fact, you highlight the important phrase yourself: when odds are not clear. That's just alternate language to describe what I've already noted: luck is a matter of perception. Human psychology is innately built around the idea of the future being a matter of probability - the implicit belief that while multiple things could potentially happen, only one thing will happen. We don't usually know what the relative probability of these various possibilities are (assuming there are probabilities at all), and furthermore we (without even thinking about it) assign subjective values to all of these possibilities. When a positive outcome occurs, we assume (perhaps wrongly) that this happened as a matter of complete chance because causal pathways are often obscured, and thus we label it as a "fortunate" occurrence. The inverse is, of course, an unfortunate occurrence. Keep in mind that one person might evaluate a state as being fortunate while another might evaluate it as being unfortunate. One person's opinion might even change as a function of time - what is initially perceived as being fortunate might eventually be looked upon as unfortunate by the same person. The value of an outcome is completely a matter of value perception, and this evaluation is often filtered through a person's perception of chance. (i.e., something that is perceived to have a low-probability of occurring will add weight to the "fortunate" or "unfortunate" label). That's all psychological algorithm.
I'd like to add that the word "fortune" is based on the same premise. When we speak of getting our "fortune" told to us, we are speaking of prognostication. A person predicts our future by telling us our "fortune". We inherently neglect the idea that prediction may actually have no meaning if the universe is completely deterministic. We assume that the future is a matter of chance. The degree to which we have ability to shape our futur¨ is also often a matter of perception. People who go to fortunate tellers must, to some degree, believe that the future is already written - else why go to someone to figure out what it is? "Shaping our future", incidentally, is just another way to speak of the concept of work. We cannot change a trajectory in physics without applying some force (energy). In any case I have said before and I'll say it again that I think the fact that wealth is referred to as a "fortune" in the English language is an interesting window into how the human mind perceives the flow of time and causality - "fortune", after all, refers not just to the positive quality assessment of wealth, but also the apparent majority consensus that the future is determined largely through random events. My guess is that this is a sort of coping mechanism to deal with ignorance of events we cannot possibly observe.
One thing I'd be curious to know is whether the people here who believe that wealth is 100% a matter of chance, with no relation to work or human activity at all, also believe that we also have free will. To my mind, a world view based on both beliefs contradicts itself. In other words, if you believe in free will, then you must believe that you have control over the future and that wealth is, at least partially, determined through human choice and at the expense of work. If you believe that wealth (and let's not fixate just on wealth - let's broaden that to a general futuristic state of being) is determined ONLY through random events completely independent from human action, then how can you possibly believe that a person's choices affect the future? Now, you might argue that it's possible to have free will AND have a universe whose future doesn't depend on human choices - i.e., a human is free to choose, but his choice doesn't really make a difference. To me, that doesn't really fly - if two paths lead to the exact same outcome, did you really have a choice at all? Hmmm... something to ponder.
In the end, it seems to me that a completely probabilistic world is as much a prison as a completely deterministic one. Of course, it's possible that we might be in prison. 
More JJ, on whether a person did something to deserve a victory based on odds which are "beyond his or her control":
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It's just a matter of perspective. If something with low odds is beyond your control, but you happen to profit from it, what DID you do to deserve or earn it? Nothing.
The real question is whether you can use work to change your odds. I'm not denying that chance plays a role in the future. I'm arguing over the contention that humans have no ability to influence which outcomes are more likely than others.
I mean, it's very difficult to predict the weather, but just because you don't know exactly when and where a hurricane is going to hit doesn't mean you shouldn't build your house on stilts if you live near the beach. (Also note that while weather might appear to be random, it really isn't - the rules of physics which govern the atmosphere are so complicated as to obscure the underlying patterns. As alluded to in the last section, humans are all-to-ready to mistake high complexity for randomness, just as we mistake extraordinarily rare events for magic or miracle. The human mind does not do well when confronted by statistical extremes.
Related to JJ's poker analogy:
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In fact, you CAN compare [life] quite well with poker,
That's an interesting analogy.
I won't quote everything you wrote. But I will address it in a few ways.
(1) Poker, like life, does have an element of (apparent) chance.
(2) In poker, the cards you start with - apparently randomly determined - do influence the quality of your outcome. (Note: I wrote "influence" not "determine").
In this, you are correct, that random chance plays a role in whether you win or lose (or have a favorable/fortunate or unfavorable/unfortunate outcome - note that these labels apply to you and not your opponents; i.e, though probability is not a matter of perspective, luckiness of outcome, influenced by probability, is).
However, in Poker, as in Life:
(3) Smart play can change your likelihood of getting favorable hands at the expense of unfavorable hands. For instance, if you know all the cards which are possible in the deck, and you keep track of which cards have been played, you can bend the odds in your favor. Card counting takes (a) intelligence, (b) knowledge and (c) work. At the very least, (c) is not a matter of chance. Thus the outcomes of Poker are not completely randomly determined.
(4) This also completely neglects the factor of wagering, betting and human interaction (bluffing, etc.). Almost none of that relates to luck at all. Skill at human interaction, cunning, ability to hide and manipulate emotions, intelligent wagering, etc., are all important skills to succeed in life and amass wealth, and all are at least partially under our direct control.
(5) Over long periods of time, the hard-working player will tend to beat (have more favorable outcomes) than the lazy player who makes his decisions randomly and relies only on chance to bring him winnings. This is, of course, pure statistics. Certainly, a great hand can be absolutely ruined by a crappy draw. And a bad hand can be made amazing by a lucky draw at the end of the hand (completing a royal flush, say). In that sense, luck has a roll. However, nobody plays just one hand of poker, and these statistical anomalies play themselves out over long periods of time for single players and - even more important - averaged over lots of players. (See figure at end of post.)
Also, just for the sake of fairness, unlike poker, in life
(6) The cards you're dealt are not completely random.
And unlike life, in poker
(7) You don't have to give up some of your winnings to help out the other guys at the table. There is no altruism - voluntary or compulsory - in poker.
Even despite (6) and (7), I actually think you¡¦re analogy fits rather well. In fact, I think it fits my view better than what I am thinking yours is, and certainly it fits mine better than Doomforge's, where every human's state of being is determined only through luck. To analogize that, you¡¦ll need a different card game: War.
[Aside: Staying with this idea for one more moment, I am struck by the fact that DF's "luck only" model of human wealth contradicts itself. The very fact that he'd try to correct it by the application of work (that is, redistribution of wealth) is, in itself, a violation of the premise that brings it into being in the first place. I mean, suppose you take money from a rich man and give it to a poor man, under the premise that, because all wealth is learned through luck only (not work), it's unjust (not fair) that some people are rich and others poor. Now, did the poor man (now much wealthier) earn that redistributed money through luck? Of course not. It wasn't luck that caused redistribution - it was human work! Therefore, the poor man earned money through work, a violation of the premise which caused you to redistribute the wealth in the first place!]
On Altrusim
JJ:
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I think, this [poker] analogy is QUITE good. I thin k further, it makes sense to give people, as long as they stick to the rules, at least the minimum ante to play the next round.
Why does that make sense? If I give someone an ante so they can play the next round, that doesn't help me at all. Not in poker. The best I could hope for would be to win my ante back. The worst is that this person could get lucky and take all my money on a freak hand. Helping someone in poker can only lead to loss on my part.
Of course, in real life, as opposed to poker, there are ancillary benefits to altruism. These range from a more stable society and lower crime rate (allegedly) all the way to eternal salvation in heaven if you believe in that sort of thing. However these things certainly aren't scientifically proven, and so there is little legal basis, in my mind, to compel people to be altruistic.
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Now we move to a few nice posts from DoomForge. It seems DoomForge doesn't want to go into metaphysics, and I understand why. However it's going to be hard to deal with his contention that what parents you are born to is a matter of luck without doing so.
So we'll skip the metaphysical aspect and move to
On the relationship between talent and luck
DoomForge:
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Imagine me training football 8 hours per day, and imagine Lionel Messi training football 8 hours per day. We both have good coaches, we both are determined. In the end he's a star player of Barcelona, and I'm at best having fun for free in an amateur team of friends.
TALENT is luck based. It either is there, or not. Genetics aren't an answer since a lot of talented people came from completly pathological parents with no signs of talent at all. Of course you need to discover and develop it, but for Messi, it lead to Barcelona, for me trying to mimic him, it would lead nowhere.
My apologies, DoomForge, but your example does not prove your point. Your example says nothing about talent. All it shows is that work does not ensure success, and I've never argued that it does. All I've said that people who work more tend to be more successful. This argument leaves room for people who work hard and fail, and people who don't work and succeed. It's a matter of correlation. (See figure at end.)
More importantly, as in the poker example above, my model of success does not discount chance (i.e., luck) as a factor. Sometimes luck does play a role, as in your example of being a coach and getting Barcelona players. Whether or not that¡¦s actually chance or only the perception of chance (i.e., hidden causal factors that you do not see) is a separate issue - either way, you could appropriately call it luck because what matters in luck is perception. Whatever the case, we can call it a factor outside of your control.
The point is that while environment certainly plays a role in shaping your future, averaged over time and for millions of people, environmental factors tend to cancel each other out. The average person is no better off or worse off than anyone else - and the great separator (again, on average) between the successful and the unsuccessful is labor, or input of energy to either directly achieve a desired outcome or, at the least, bend the odds of random processes in your favor (deciding how to gamble or counting cards, respectively, to maintain the poker metaphor).
In essence, DoomForge, in your posts you are cherry-picking examples to prove a point, but you're focusing on trees rather than seeing the forest. Taking a global view, the hard workers tend to be more successful than the lazy. Sometimes it's hard to see that above the noise when you're looking at things from ground level. You need to get up high and stop looking at the issue through the lens of your personal situation or local environment.
Anyway, back to talent:
Why did Messi succeed and you did not? First, to conclude it is only a matter of talent would be fallacious. Talent at football soccer might have something to do with it, but it could just as well be (a) money, (b) connections, (c) charm, (d) any of hundreds of other factors. Consider: there was a football running back here in US named Barry Sanders who played for the absolutely woeful Detroit Lions for a number of years in the 1990s. He was an absolutely amazing player, probably one of the best natural talents in the NFL ever. And yet he never attained legendary status like Emmitt Smith or other contemporaries. Was it lack of talent? No - success is not always in our control, and it's not just because of talent or lack thereof.
Let me ask you something. What is talent?
DF says: Or you can be born average.
How can you say what skills you are born with? Are your skills predetermined?
How about this: is talent only physical? And is it only genetics?
Actually, let's consider it from a different angle. Mozart has been mentioned by Salamandre. We all can agree, I hope, that Mozart was a musical genius. Do we believe that Mozart's genetics made him a musical genius? Was his skill at the piano born into him? What about his skill at writing music? Supposing for a moment that Mozart had gotten diphtheria and died at the age of 4, well before he ever laid a finger on a piano (harpsichord?), could we still say today that he was a musical talent? Of course, nobody would have known about this talent, if it existed, but did it exist before he became famous? Did Einstein have a talent for science when he was a baby? Did Monet have a talent for painting when he was a fetus? Or is talent developed through hard work and introspection? Does a person have any choice about what he is talented in? We aren't born with the knowledge (are we?) of what me might be good at. And some of us never find what we're good at. Some of us know what we're good at but choose to do something else. Can you be talented in something and not know about it? I might have uncanny ability at synchronized swimming. How could I know without trying it.
Elodin makes some good points, actually, on the subject of talent:
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1) To find out what talents you have you have to try new stuff.
2) Talents are nurtured and developed. That takes EFFORT which may even be considered **gasp** WORK.
I think, DoomForge, that you neglect the fact that talent alone does not ensure success. It can help, but there are many talented failures out there. In fact, talent alone does not ensure that you will even know what you are talented at. Can we equate talent with skill? Can we develop talent as we do skill? Is it possible to be talented in something yet unskilled? Is it possible to be skilled in something and be untalented?
Elodin's point #2 is especially astute. Even if we ASSUME that talent is innate, and even if we ASSUME that genetics is completely luck based, does it not take WORK to discover what our talents are? It's not as if we just wake up one day and say, "Hey, I'm pretty good at playing the ukulele." And then make millions of dollars doing it. It takes work to find a talent, takes work to hone a talent, and work to profit from a talent. And perhaps a bit of luck or fortuitous circumstance.
To my mind, talent is defined as the relative ease with which one can becomes skilled at something. That might involve genetics to some extent, or even entirely. Importantly, it is not talent that influences success, but skill, which are related but different concepts. I think anyone can become skilled with low natural talent, but it's harder to become successful without skill. And skill takes work, and the amount of work is attenuated by the amount of talent. By trying lots of things, we find the things that we can learn quickly or excel at. And while luck may influence the number of things we can try, or how easily it is to succeed with smaller amounts of skill, work certainly always will improve our likelihood of success, natural talent or not.
As to DF's attempts to find a way to get rich with NO WORK:
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Lottery
you have 56 million dollars atm in jackpot at PowerBall, for instance
You can find the ticket on the street. There you go, no work at all
or, if you want a more ridiculous example for no-work-get-rich:
A diamond gets carried away by tornado and falls into your hand.
The first and second examples are no good, because you had to go out to buy/find the ticket (not to mention, work for the 1 dollar to afford the ticket). As for the diamond example, well yes it¡¦s rather ridiculous, but even so, someone had to work to unearth the diamond in the first place, you had to work to extend your hand, etc. True, it's an absurdly low amount of non-directed work, to the point of triviality. It's not like you could effect that kind of result by "working", either. By which I mean, you can't expend effort to get a diamond to land in your hand. (Thermodynamics warning) In thermodynamics parlance, we'd talk about something like this as driving a chemical end by putting heat into the system. Heat is a random, low order (entropy) form of energy that can cause things to happen but not in a directed manner. (I.e., heating up a gas created molecular motion in random directions - you have to use a directed form of work to get all molecules to go in one direction.) Anyway, the point is that nothing happens without some form of energy or work. Even seemingly random events require some form of work - possibly not even human work - to get them to happen. Perhaps there's a fair amount of chance involved as well, but the point is that this is a continuum, not a this-or-that situation when it comes to work and chance.
On ethics and morality
Regarding ethics, Raelag has this to say in his nice post:
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I disagree with the voice commonly echoed through the thread that either the possession (or prosecution) of wealth equates that it was ethically gained and possessed.
Ethics is another facet of the argument but it doesn't really change anything. Whether or not a fortune is ethically/legally achieved does not change the fact that work was required to acquire wealth. Stealing takes work, as does embezzlement, fraud, lying, cheating and all other shady methods of attaining wealth. They do, often, take less work, per unit of wealth, than more legitimate methods, but they still require planning, skill, talent, and effort. They also, of course, incur more risk (both legal and, possibly, spiritual). And of course you generally hurt someone else in the process, so they may not be moral in addition to being unethical. I.e., rather than making wealth, or fairly trading for your wealth, you're taking someone else's wealth. (Of course, in my opinion, this is nothing other than overly burdensome taxation on a smaller scale, but ethics, too, is often a matter of perspective, so there you have it.)
Anyway, I don't really want ethics to get in the way of this discussion, because it's something of a red herring. It's contentious and clouds the issue, when it fact it doesn't really make much difference. Obviously, I advocate a moral and ethical means of attaining wealth, and I in no way equate possession of wealth with morality (nor do I equate lack of wealth with immorality). Note that there is a tendency to assume that, because I advocate a model where work correlates positively with wealth, I feel that poor people are all lazy slobs prone to all sorts of depravity. For one thing, I don't really place a moral value on laziness or sloth, as some moral systems do; for another, while there might be some sort of a correlation between morality and wealth, I hesitate to speculate because (1) morality is not a monolith and (2) the correlation overall would likely be fairly weak. My gut feeling is that there are more lazy poor people than lazy rich people, and possibly more immoral poor people than immoral rich people, but that certainly does not ignore the reality of there being many lazy/immoral rich and many hard-working, moral poor. It's all speculation in any case.
<<break>>
Ok, this is getting cumbersomely long, so I'll conclude this post with a figure which I hope will illustrate what I'm trying to convey by tendency and trend, or general correlation, when it comes to success and luck.
On the left is the caricature of my model that is being put forward by those who seem to think my arguments imply that there is no such thing as a hard-working poor man and a lazy rich man. I.e., when I claim that more successful people tend to work harder, it is a one-to-one correlation between the two factors, and that if only poor people would work, they would automatically get rich.
This is not what I'm saying at all. My viewpoint is captured in the figure at the right, which shows that while there is a general trend that harder work leads to more wealth, there is considerable variation around this mean. (I don't know if the trend is really linear, but this is just for illustration.) Some people who work hard are poorer than others who work less. In (A) we have a person who does almost no work but is pretty wealthy. Maybe this person inherited his money, maybe he won the lottery, or maybe he is a thief who stole a fortune. In (C) we have a person who works really hard but is comparably poor. Maybe he's a farmer and weather ruined his crops. Maybe he got caught in the stock market crash. Maybe he¡¦s a gambler who lost a fortune because of bad cards. Or maybe he has twelve kids to feed and send to college. (C) is your run of the mill person who works reasonably hard and has a nice house, drives a nice car, and owns a Playstation 3 with a few games. Your average middle-class Joe.
The variation along the idealized trend line shown in this figure could be due to a lot of things, including random chance. Luck may explain a lot of it - not just actual chance but the perception of chance. Maybe genetics explains some. Or talent, or skill. That's a lot to try to capture in a single figure. Or freak hurricanes, earthquakes, unexpected pregnancies, religious beliefs, heredity, alien abductions, and ten billion other things.
But what's important is the general trend. More work tends to yield more rewards. Note that these dots are always shifting and changing position, and I, at least, believe that you have some control over which way your dot will go. Work hard, and you might push it up and to the right. Work less and you might push it down and to the left. Do nothing and you might push it up and to the left, but if you want to go up, statistics favors work.
Importantly, JJ, says in a fine post on this page:
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You cannot say, that IF you decide to do youz homework properly the chances of success are bigger than in the case you read comics. It may be the other way round, since it may lead to you become a comic artist later instead of an unhappy accountant.
This is very true, at it underscores that work is also useful only if it's put toward the right task. I may work very hard in medical school only to fail because it's not suited for my talents. However, if I had put a fraction of that work into playing the piano, I might have become a world-famous pianist. Who is to know? How could I have ever known that I had talent as a pianist in the first place? Or maybe I knew I had talent but my parents felt that, because being a doctor was generally more lucrative than being a pianist, I should become a doctor, and they exerted force to ensure that happens. Thus it's important to keep in mind that work in and of itself is not a solution, and I don't necessarily mean hard, physical labor when I speak of work. Work is also finding out what your talents are and developing the courage and conviction to pursue them. Work could be introspection, indulging in hobbies, exercising, social networking or making friends. That all feeds into success. I think if we speak generally, work of any kind is better - more often - than no work at all.
In finality, I just want to point out that wealth and success means different things to different people. For some people it might be amassing a fortune. For others, having loving children and a caring wife. For others, good health. For others it might be a cool beer on a summer afternoon. Part of the problem with this whole discussion is that it's predicated on the assumption that success equals wealth, but because every individual's goals are different, it might take different amounts of work to achieve success for different people if only because they're after different things. Even though a rich man may do very little to maintain his lifestyle, he may very well be unhappy. Is he therefore success? If his measure of success is a woman who cares nothing for money, he might have his work cut out for him to find HIS measure of success. I urge people to be careful in assuming that the wealthy have to do very little to be successful. In fact, they may have to work harder than anyone else to be happy, because they're often mired in the society's collective assumption that money buys happiness, and they don't know where else to look for fulfillment.
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Salamandre
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
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posted April 22, 2011 04:20 AM |
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Do we believe that Mozart's genetics made him a musical genius? Was his skill at the piano born into him? What about his skill at writing music?
What else? Maybe he had an unknown connection with GOD (or whatever concept may be) and spread his word through sounds. Maybe talented people see or hear things the common guy can't. Or their brain is able to make more complex connections between phenomenons, express the order of it, what we know?
All is about our brain, and how he understand things. Musical talent is not in the ears, science talent is not in the eyes. Some people are born with an exceptional brain, others with a common one. Matter of luck at first. But take an exceptional brain and put it in isolation, without access to culture and history (tradition), he will never make it. A beautiful flower will never raise in unfriendly ground.
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Supposing for a moment that Mozart had gotten diphtheria and died at the age of 4, well before he ever laid a finger on a piano (harpsichord?), could we still say today that he was a musical talent?
I don't see your point. Surely many talented people died before knowing or developing skills, but others just lived and became known. Talent is potential, not instant done work.
Or is talent developed through hard work and introspection?
Then what is introspection? Are we all capable of it? Without talent (abilities) one can introspect himself for hundred years, if he has no message to pass, he will not.
Anyway, talent without hard work, is a wasted thing, as it is hard work without any talent, when it is required. Mozart worked 18 hours/day, since he was 4. Today he would be just a mediocre kid because of social protections which survey parents and their education style. And I had hundred of hard working students, but none was able at any moment to make it exceptional, if no good brain or whatever we call this thing. It was so unjust to see a few which worked so little do it much better than others who spent on all their time.
That's why the jealousy is a such common behavior in our world.
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