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Comment by losteric | Hacker News Reader

Does that matter? Do you take pride in what you've accomplished, or is the focus on who's better?

I'll never "catch up" to Musk, but I'm better than most people simply by trying my own business ideas.

I don't know, doesn't the outcome matter? Trying is admirable, but if a person tries and fails and I never try; at the end of the day we're both in the same place, no?

> if a person tries and fails and I never try; at the end of the day we're both in the same place, no?

What a bizarre statement. This is a generalisation that can easily be shown to be false. If I try and win Gold at the olympics, but fail (only winning silver), I am in a completely different place from you who never tried. There's a million other counter examples.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who considers winning a silver medal to be failing - but yes, failure is subjective. The original premise was about a person who tries being "better than" someone who doesn't try - my argument is simply that the act of trying doesn't automatically make you better.

> at the end of the day we're both in the same place, no?

I think it depends on how you fail though. If you learn something from the experience, your odds of succeeding on the next try increase. Many goals are achieved through a succession of failures.

I agree with your statement - my point is that there seems to be this prevailing idea that you can't learn unless you try to build something by yourself which ignores reality. Sure, if you try to start a business/project/idea you're going to learn a lot along the way, but if you don't strike out on your own you're still going to have experiences and learn.

Not exactly, most of these arguments also assume "free will" is a real thing. Some people might be more genetically inclined to "trying". Overall most things are based purely on luck and genes.

If you're genetically gifted with a talent and genetically driven to "train" you'll be much better off than someone with only one trait.

This ties in with the "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" article that's currently on the frontpage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16184255). In my experience, I discovered that when I first learn about something and then try to do it, I usually find that a lot of the things I've learned were irrelevant, and a lot of the important things weren't even on my radar when learning. That's why, I believe, a mixed approach is more efficient than just blindly trying, or just blindly learning.

no because what you’ve learned by trying, you can tell other people. causality is complex, and it’s path-dependent not event-dependent.

Sure, but this implies that you don't learn things while "not trying". Of course you learn things while "not trying", albeit different things.

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