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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

The article suffers from the just-world fallacy.

    You only need to be slightly better than your 
    competition, but if you are able to maintain
    a slight edge today and tomorrow and the day
    after that, then you can repeat the process of
    winning by just a little bit over and over again.

A 1% advantage doesn't mean 1% "better" if it is the result of network effects or historical accident. It's certainly plausible that accumulative advantage leads to winner-take-all effects, but if being "better" was the only factor, Betamax would have beaten VHS.

Succeeding means securing advantage. Those who expect to succeed only by being "better" are doomed fools.

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"Better" is circularly self-defining, because it really just means "More successful in a given niche."

You don't really know what's going to be more successful in a given niche until it becomes obvious.

As you say, there's no reason it has to mean "Worked harder", "Was technically superior", "Practiced more", or any of the other things it would mean in a less arbitrary world.

You can often increase your odds of success with all of the above, but a 1% change - whatever that means in practice, and however you're supposed to measure it - is always going to be swamped by effects outside your control.

That's just circular reasoning, your King because your father was the King who'd was King because his father was the King... But, the reality is someone is King because of their ancestors actions and accidents of birth etc.

Further fitness is defined by inheritable traits. You can have a billion descendants with blue eyes you can't have a billion descendants who are all kings of England at the same time.

PS: A useful rule of thumb is a justification sounds like a value judgement something else is going on.

>, but if being "better" was the only factor, Betamax would have beaten VHS.

Betamax was "better" than VHS if you only compare 1 dimension such as "picture quality". However, if one also compares other dimensions such as:

+ recording time: VHS records 2-hours vs Betamax 1-hour

+ licensing fee: JVC less expensive than Sony royalties

... to combine pq+capacity+price into a composite score, VHS was "better".

Monopolists win through regulatory capture. Are they "better"?

"Better" connotes a value judgment. The author of the article takes the neutral concept of "accumulative advantage" and inappropriately ascribes moral value to it, corrupting the insight of the Pareto principle.

I didn't read that from the author's article. I never heard any moral value being ascribed to the principle. If anything, the author seemed to be speaking about it in a fairly detached way, and describes it more as an emergent, amoral property of nature.

Where did you infer moral value in the author's words?

He implies over and over that it's all very innocent: the 1% are "better", but unfortunately the rewards for being "better" are in a feedback loop that makes them ultra outsized.

This way, it basically removes culpability and replaces malfeasance with a technical bug.

It's a very moralizing article.

That sounds more like the reader ascribes a moral perspective to the 1%, and a neutral position subtracts from that.

The ideologue aligned with the mainstream always wants to believe that their perspective is non-ideological and objective.

Funny that you think the article pushes a "neutral position" when it repeats the word "better" over and over.

The neutral position is that people who are better at something even by relatively small amounts will receive outsized rewards for it. Are you trying to claim that people are not legitimately better than others at a variety of activities? There's nothing moralistic in observing that - it's really just a fact. Some people are, for example, "better" swimmers than others. Some sports franchises are better than others, etc.

That is the sense the author used the word "better" in - to describe the initial cause that results in a power law distribution. He never praises people for accumulating wins and outsized rewards, he merely observes that it is the case. "Better" in this sense is not being used to describe classes of people, it's being used to describe small advantages.

If anything, the author is probably doing the opposite of your claim here, in that he would probably agree a lot of the reward is due to initial luck. If I observe that people who inherit wealth are more likely to accumulate more wealth, am I implicitly defending that phenomenon?

EDIT: For whoever is doing so - I don't mind if you downvote me, really. But several of my comments have just been downvoted once or so without any actual reply. If you disagree, you should consider engaging in a proper response. Letting my comments stand may as well be conceding the point, and if you actually have a persuasive counter it's certainly not going to help the discussion (or your stance) by keeping it to yourself.

"The neutral position is that people who are better at something even by relatively small amounts will receive outsized rewards for it. Are you trying to claim that people are not legitimately better than others at a variety of activities?"

One consequence of the system is that people born to wealthy family with a trust fund get money they did nothing to earn. They were simply born to a family with money. The people managing their fund will work to ensure the money keeps coming in or grows. The beneficiary can use that money to all kinds of advantages.

Receiving more and more of the pie isn't happening because the beneficiary is better. It's happening because the system is structured to move that money toward the beneficiary. We could also move it somewhere else (eg taxes), make beneficiary work for it (eg incentivize helpful investments), or some other tradeoff.

Indeed. You wouldn't say that someone is "better" if they succeed due to "initial luck". They do have an "advantage", though.

The difference between the two analyses is moralizing.

One is forward-looking, predicting the outcome (winning) by looking at current data (objective comparison). The article tries to twist this around to be backwards-looking: if it won,it must be better.

Which is a sickening and illegitimate argument.

The author never makes that claim. Where did you read that, specifically?

I think the author is trying to explain naturally-occurring feedback loops, not necessarily trying to justify them as a positive thing. Understanding that these are natural phenomena that occur due to hard physical or natural factors is crucial to being able to formulate a plan that accounts for them.

A spoon is "better" for drinking soup than a fork. That's a morally neutral statement but it is a value judgement based on the functional properties. No need to overreach by corrupting the author's insights. We'll get farther with a more charitable interpretation.

> Betamax was "better" than VHS if you only compare 1 dimension such as "picture quality".

It's a myth that Betamax had better picture quality than VHS. They were virtually identical on that metric. It seems that people confuse Betamax with Betacam, a professional format using the same size tape that was superior to VHS in picture quality.

Betamax was better in visual quality in practice because it's a function of tape speed, and Betamax wouldn't let tape run as slow as VHS would, which is also why VHS had longer runtimes.

Not true. As recently as 2013 I was using VHS, Betacam, Betamax, and others (DV Cam, DV Mini, occasionally even 16mm film, blah blah) in a commercial role.

VHS was a last resort, because the image was absolutely awful. Even fresh VHS recordings were lower quality than many of our older Betamax recordings. (Side note: We eventually had little choice but to digitally capture the whole stock, so if you were to go to my previous employer, which unfortunately you can't, you would be able to do a side-by-side comparison.)

> but if being "better" was the only factor, Betamax would have beaten VHS

This is stupid: Betamax was significantly more expense at virtually every level than VHS, not to mention its production was (overly?) restricted by Sony.

It gets worse: Betamax did win, just not in the consumer space. Professionals used (and continue to use to this day) Sony's "Beta" format because they could afford to, and it was technically superior (if more expensive).

For most things in life, there is no way to define "better", because life (and products) are multi-dimensional, "better" in same areas and "worse" in others. Thus, it's impossible to say that the "best" product won (or didn't win), Betamax/VHS included.

"Better" also applies to marketing.

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