Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

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There is also the biggest luck factor of all, that being how/when/where you were born. Most of us were born in the US into a family. We did nothing to deserve that but it already makes us in the top 1% richest people globally. What would our path look like if we had been born in rural Nicaragua instead?

I'm not "woe is me" but I was raised in a super conservative family, taught to avoid risk and that a steady paycheck was the ultimate success. It has taken many many years to break out of that mindset and be willing to take calculated risks.

The really hard questions arise when you start talking about what people deserve. Who is to say? We all have a unique frame of reference and experiences that have shaped us.

In the end, the only middle ground we're likely to reach is the mindset of helping people help themselves. To me, the fairness question is more about the opportunity to improve you and yours. Having no opportunities is unfair and must be fixed. The question is always going to be who decides how much is fair?

This is a big point that Robert Frank makes in "Success and Luck" (the book this interview is about). Being born in a developed country is one of the luckiest things you can have happen to you. He talks about his time in Nepal for the Peace Corps and a man who worked for him, who was one of the most talented people he's ever worked with. He was also illiterate and living in a developing country, so his prospects were vastly reduced.

This is kinda a weird thing to call "luck" though. "You" could also have been born a duck, a 1000 years ago, in the future or in another universe (maybe). But then "you" would have been somebody else and hence, not "you" at all.

In other words, "you" had 100% chance of being you. No luck involved.

I definitely agree. The universe being almost certainly deterministic, there is also a 100% chance of everything that has ever happened happening.

It's still useful to think as if different people could have been born in different circumstances. You could think of it as a mental shorthand for the idea that differences between human beings are arbitrary, and it makes no sense to argue that a human inherently deserves an impoverished life over another human.

I still think you're making a categorical error. "being human" isn't a privileged class that inherently deserves something. That way of thinking becomes really messy fast in terms of drawing concrete rules.

It also seems a bit homo-centric coming from a human.

BTW, I think we do have genuine subjective probability, even though the universe is deterministic.

It's basically the _definition_ of luck: "the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual"

And what event or circumstance are you talking about? Nothing happened to you when you were born - because you are an emergent entity that is defined by your life.

This isn't like flipping a coin: it could come up heads or tails.

You must be thinking of some kind of immortal soul.

But doesn't that require us all to agree that life is provably better for people in developed countries? We have the highest rate of anti-depressent usage in the world, and also happen to be the richest nation in the world. I reject the concept that simply being born into a wealthier country or wealthier family automatically means your life is going to be "better" than someone who was born poor.

I think this thread was really about opportunity. The original comment was about whether people's opportunities for success were based more on "luck" or their hard work. "Better" is a lot like "fair", who is to say? People would be exchanging one set of problems for another to go from poor/undeveloped to rich/developed.

I've often heard that it's lucky to be born in a certain place to certain parents, but I think this is a really narrow view of luck.

It may be individually lucky to the person born somewhere (i.e. they had no involvement or choice in where they were born and to whom) but I'm not sure why you would isolate luck to the individual level.

That persons parents made decisions about when, where and how their child would be born. Some parents move countries in search of better opportunities, some were themselves "lucky" to be born where they were. When you zoom out a little it becomes a lot less "lucky" and more of the result of intergenerational decisions and priorities.

Someone else's decision is still luck, however - it's beyond your control.

Rawls suggests that you imagine yourself in an original position behind a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil, you know nothing of yourself and your natural abilities, or your position in society. You know nothing of your sex, race, nationality, or individual tastes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

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