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Comment by jartelt | Hacker News Reader

First off, congrats on getting to where you are today. It sounds like your hard work is really paying off. I would just note that one of the points of the article is that it is difficult for a successful person to recognize the lucky events in their life. Perhaps in one of your job interviews you hit it off with the interviewer because you went to the same college or were both from "redneck-ville." Another person with equal skill and work ethic could have not gotten that job because they weren't form the same background and didn't have the rapport with the interviewer. I think you can say in that scenario one person got lucky and the other was unlucky. No one is saying it is bad to be lucky. It just helps with empathy when you take the world view that not every outcome is completely fair and logical.

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I don't see anybody really saying that "every outcome is fair and logical" though. My issue is just all this luck talk is counter-productive. I mean, if you convince a group of people that life is nothing but luck, how have you helped them? Why bother working hard at all, if you don't believe it can possibly pay off?

Because people working hard in aggregate can improve the situation of _all_ people in the system if the system equally distributes rewards. The problem is we don't live in such a system. So I (and others in this thread) will continue to try to convince people to have more empathy until we do have such a system.

"the system" doesn't have to distribute rewards equally for people to work to improve the situation of all (or most) people.

So I (and others in this thread) will continue to try to convince people to have more empathy until we do have such a system.

I see those as orthogonal concerns. You can have empathy even if you don't have a "everything is luck" mentality.

Sure, you can have empathy with that mentality. But, when you assume everyone less successful than you is less smart and/or doesn't work as hard as you, it's not as likely that you will.

Sure, the system doesn't _have_ to be that way for people to work together. But sooner or later they'll come to the same conclusion you have - what's the point if they're not seeing equal returns? Who knows what will happen at that point - I'd rather fix the system before we get to that point.

And sure, you can have some empathy even if you don't have all of the empathy. But those are definitely not orthogonal concerns. Being able to empathize fully with someone's situation IMO includes recognizing that everything truly is luck. Like down to your genetic makeup. Hell, being alive is lucky.

Being able to empathize fully with someone's situation IMO includes recognizing that everything truly is luck. Like down to your genetic makeup. Hell, being alive is lucky.

That seems like a content-free and useless definition of "luck" to me. What value do we gain from pointing out that "being alive is lucky"? We're deep into "shit nobody can do anything about" territory here.

Again, I don't dispute that different people start from different positions in life, but my position is that we should focus on doing things to broadly expose opportunities for everyone, and then providing support for the the truly unfortunate who are not able to take advantage of any opportunity. But I have NO problem with unequal returns in terms of relative achievement between people who start in similar positions. Some people simply do work harder, and create more value. I don't see any reason they shouldn't benefit from that.

what's the point if they're not seeing equal returns?

I don't see why anybody should expect equal returns, especially not in terms of lockstep "moment in time for moment in time" comparison. Success won't come at the same time for everybody. We should also keep in mind that "success" is not a binary operator... it's more of a continuum - not to mention somewhat personal and subjective anyway.

The talk about luck is meant to encourage empathy and understanding. If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful. Some would argue this is the wrong world view and that we should acknowledge that many unsuccessful people work really hard and just got dealt a bad deck of cards. These different world views lead to different priorities in public policy among other things.

If your world view says that success is based only on your work ethic, then you will assume that all people who are not successful did not work hard. With that logic it is pretty easy to conclude that we should not help people out or support unsuccessful people because it's solely their own fault that they were not successful.

I'm not saying anything about you specifically, but that sounds a lot like a kind of "anti-libertarian" straw-man argument I hear a lot. Certain people like to claim exactly that libertarians believe "that all people who are not successful did not work hard", which is far from true.

I think everybody understands that some people work very hard and still fail to achieve "success" (depending on how you define success). But what I think should be taken into account is that:

Some people who fail to achieve "success" do so because they didn't work hard enough.

Hard work, good decisions, etc., do play an important role in the amount of success you attain.

Obviously reality falls somewhere in between "luck is everything" and "hard work is everything", but I get the sense that some people promoting the "it's all luck" mindset have an agenda in terms of denigrating the fundamental idea that effort and initiative count at all. Again, not saying that's you, and I'm probably just over-sensitive on this subject.

This thread is very important to the discussion, because it highlights an apparent opposite mindset of the article.

As I posted elsewhere in this thread already, I think the real issue is that the ideas of Robert Frank are not about these "regular" cases in the middle income range at all. (At most, I'd conclude that the interviewer asked questions that would touch persons in that range, too, and who likely form the majority of the site's readers.)

If you are doing OK-ish on the upper end or OK-ish on the lower end of the middle income strata of a Western (!) society, your "lot" should be quite tolerable. And nobody would deny that with extremely hard work and discipline you can move from the lower end of middle income to the upper end of middle income. However, if you are doing really bad and are below the poverty line or really well and are in the top 1% range, that certainly requires a good portion of (possibly: bad) luck. It already starts at conception, with your "birth rights". And the aim of the article (or rather, of Mr. Frank's theories), as I interpret it (them), is pointing that out that we need to find measures how to smooth those extremes, not about figuring out if some middle income person had a bit more or less luck, or if it even mattered.

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