Your success isn’t down to free will – luck determines everything
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Sure, but we can do more than that. We can increase our compassion for our fellow humans.
I met someone recently who had a very tough childhood. Her mother didn't want her. She was physically and psychologically abused. Her parents discouraged everything she ever tried. She was neglected and abandoned and had to raise her younger siblings by herself. This is stuff you don't just "get over," and yet she's doing very well for herself.
All I could think was gosh, what a different upbringing than mine. The adults in my life kept me safe, made me feel loved, supported me, and inspired my confidence in myself. And while I can still be proud of many of the things I've done in life, it's grounding to put them in perspective and accept that the playing field is not level. It never will be. Having more compassion for others and more skepticism toward (and thus gratitude for) our own accomplishments is, in my opinion, a healthier and more fulfilling way to live.
Obviously the writer and the person referenced have taken the 'luck' angle to an extreme, there is an element of truth in there: you need a good sized dose of luck to get anywhere in life, whether it is an accident of birth or genetics.
Where free will enters the picture is that not everybody that was lucky at some point in their life ends up making it: you can easily annihilate your luck by working against yourself or by having other factors that negate your luck.
So it's an interesting viewpoint but a bit of a cop-out.
What do you think determines this? At what point can you say this magical thing called free will pops into existence? I don't understand how the laws of physics determine how the universe behaves but then those laws decide to step aside while someone is making decisions about their life.
Why? Who knows? Why are some people taller than others, or more athletic, etc. People are not all the same.
Genetics and environment.
Three key here is that collectively we have the power to fix things yet we do not collectively exercise it enough and build systems that make it harder.
If you're born with Down syndrome that's that. A predisposition for getting certain kinds of cancer tend to be born out by statistics. Having a body that works well for athletics is mostly a function of genetics and training.
No amount of collective work is going to make everybody athletes, the whole definition of an athlete is 'outlier'.
What we can change collectively is education and diet.
Genetics are not a life sentence either except in the most complex cases - genes are activated and regulated by the environment. Sometimes even environment in the womb.
Not just diet. Exposure to chemicals and mother's illnesses too.
Or main limitations here are ethics and lack of knowledge, both self imposed.
- Is the universe fully deterministic? We don't know the answer to that, and it's possible we might never know
- Are the life decisions that I make correlated with my success? That one is easier to work out: Even if the "decisions" turn out to be "pseudo-random" due to the properties of the underlying universe, they could still be correlated with success, therefore it's useful to devote resources into deliberately moving closer to that "success" (even if there are external/random factors) at play
But "devoting resources to deliberately moving closer to that 'success'" is just as much not-determined-by-you as everything else, whether it's fully deterministic in a classical physics sense, or partly deterministic, and part randomly quantum-influenced. The notion that you can influence yourself is true... your thoughts a second ago influence your thoughts now. So, through introspection, you can see that you're influencing yourself. But it's a mirage, because you're not at the root of the chain of causation going back to the first thought you had, so you don't control the thought you had a second ago, and you don't control any external factors (senses) that influenced you between your last thought and your current thought, so you don't control your thought now.
The reason you devote resources to moving closer to success isn't that you're "deciding" (from no prior state) to do that. Rather, your psychology is already such that you want to actively improve yourself, you don't have other psychological issues that would sabotage that desire, and you see a path to improve yourself. What better to do, then, than to move yourself along that path toward future success?
I guess the ideal way to put it is that I didn't mean "decision" necessarily in a "free-will, non-deterministic" way but rather in a more computational sense (like branches of an "if").
If ultimately free will turns out to not exist, that will affect us very little in how we live: perhaps morally we should be more forgiving towards other people's shortcomings
That's good practice anyway.
I still believe people make decisions and that those decisions have consequences, I just think the decisions can likely be traced back to the state of the universe and physical processes rather than poofing out of nowhere. Of course, even if quantum mechanics means that there are some random processes at play, that doesn't change much since it is still quantum mechanics at the root of those "poofs".
Only in the classical 'billiard balls' universe would there not be free will, in every other situation there has to be some element that allows us to make choices for good or bad.
Interesting aside: if an omnipotent being would exist and we'd live in a classical billiard balls universe that being would be able to predict the outcome of its own creation which would obviate the need for creating stuff in the first place.
So 'free will' is a central tenet of almost every religion, and according to that we are given choices and how we make those choices determines whether we are 'worthy' or not.
Obviously it doesn't require religion to have free will but I find it interesting that religions have caught on to this so universally.
Good, if somewhat large book that touches on this subject: The emperors new mind, by Roger Penrose.
I think you're saying that a 'billiard balls' universe is deterministic, even if it's far beyond our ability to either detect a given state or predict outcomes, and that otherwise in the 'quantum' view, there is true chance, or randomness, involved. I'm assuming that's what you're going from.
Given that, why do you believe that free will must come from a universe that has real chance in it? (If that's an accurate statement of your belief.)
How does free will necessarily flow from fundamental randomness?
The question then shifts to 'is the state of the universe at any point in time knowable', and if it isn't then you probably will have vector through which thinking creatures could have free will. And even if the whole string of chance encounters up to there did not exhibit free will the ability to choose an outcome would quickly become a selection criterion in any genetic mix that ends up laying out a nervous system. After all, the ability to react intelligently to an environment is a huge benefit.
In a 'billiard balls' (as you correctly infer, deterministic) universe it doesn't matter whether minds exist or not, the outcome will be identical. Having reasoning ability in a universe like that would be akin to a cruel version of being along for the ride without any ability to influence your environment. And I don't think we need to look very far to determine that our minds have very successfully influenced our environment so there is some evidence that it makes a difference.
Ah! says the proponent of the deterministic universe: but if it were deterministic it would be just the same! Which to me is just as much a cop-out as saying 'God did it'.
Randomness is a thing, entropy is a thing and quantum mechanics operates at a level that our brains are ill equipped to deal with. It appears to me that free will is real, and our whole society is built on that premise.
The subconscious mind controls everything and your idea of self and conscious choice is a ruse. It's been proven again and again in peer reviewed, reproducible studies over the last 30 years.
It also favors those who put themselves in positions to get lucky. Staying home all the time means you don't make connections and interact with people that you can help and who can help you. Thinking that you have no control over your success makes you less likely to take big chances or do things that will probably not work. You can put yourself in more positions to get lucky, and most of those behaviors aren't very costly and have huge upsides.
But luck means a lot more than just getting some big break. It means your genetics, parents, your friends and your teachers. It means your childhood environments. It means everything your senses have ever detected. It means toxins you've been exposed to, diseases, parasites, and microbiome. It means chance genetics that can lead to diseases.
Just because some people with difficult childhoods end up being wildly successful, and some people who were handed every opportunity (good schools, rich parents) end up making a mess of their lives, doesn't at all imply that the traditional notion of free will is at work. Even what little we understand about psychology suggests that it's because of difficult upbringings that some people are so tenacious at achieving success, and it's because of having things handed to them that someone you'd expect to succeed ends up an underachiever for life.
In other words, not having luck early in life can be its own luck in shaping your psychology, and having luck early in life can be its own bad luck in shaping your psychology.
I'm not sure what gave you that impression.
> If an otherwise fiscally responsible and decent person wins the lottery, they're set for life.
That depends. They might get ill or they might get robbed. As the parable says 'we'll see'[1].
> But luck means a lot more than just getting some big break.
Yes, obviously.
> It means your genetics, parents, your friends and your teachers. It means your childhood environments. It means everything your senses have ever detected. It means toxins you've been exposed to, diseases, parasites, and microbiome. It means chance genetics that can lead to diseases.
That was the point of TFA: it means everything and as soon as something means 'everything' it might as well mean nothing.
> Just because some people with difficult childhoods end up being wildly successful, and some people who were handed every opportunity (good schools, rich parents) end up making a mess of their lives, doesn't at all imply that the traditional notion of free will is at work.
It also doesn't imply that it isn't.
> Even what little we understand about psychology suggests that it's because of difficult upbringings that some people are so tenacious at achieving success, and it's because of having things handed to them that someone you'd expect to succeed ends up an underachiever for life.
That's the core of the parable. Everything in your life that happens by chance can be 'good' or 'bad', it all depends.
> In other words, not having luck early in life can be its own luck in shaping your psychology, and having luck early in life can be its own bad luck in shaping your psychology.
Exactly. But the people that make 'good' decisions tend to do better all things considered than the people that make 'bad' decisions, and that's where free will comes in. Even if statistically speaking some of the good decisions will lead to bad outcomes this is not the majority of the cases.
We'll have a simple example: smoking is bad for you. Decide not to smoke and you will likely live a healthier and longer life and your reproductive chances go up. That's a decision that's all yours and even if your personality make-up is a big factor in whether or not you will take up smoking and if you do you may quit or not depending on your genetics again - all due to luck - in the end you consciously decide whether or not you wish to continue to smoke or not.
So you can reduce everything to luck but it doesn't help you at all, it's a nihilist approach.
http://www.inspirationpeak.com/cgi-bin/stories.cgi?record=31
Can you expand on that? I think I understand what you're saying, but I'd like to be sure.
> in the end you consciously decide whether or not you wish to continue to smoke or not.
Citation needed. The genetic and environmental precursors to addiction are pretty well documented these days.
Hope that's expansion enough:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SharpshooterFalla...
> > in the end you consciously decide whether or not you wish to continue to smoke or not.
> Citation needed. The genetic and environmental precursors to addiction are pretty well documented these days.
Absolutely. And yet, a percentage of the people that have all the 'wrong' bits set ends up not smoking. They have a harder time of it resisting the pressure but in the end it is a conscious decision. It's just that the odds are stacked against them and more of them will end up smoking. But not everybody. And then there are such things as compensating environmental factors as well.
How would we know that all of the 'pro-smoking' bits are set? Are we aware of all the possible bits?
I've always been ardently anti-smoking, even as a kid, even though I was surrounded by smokers. (I'm not claiming that YOU are claiming those are even close to all of the relevant bits, just stating background.)
So now I'll make something up: perhaps I was going to become a smoker, except as a toddler, something really bad (from my toddler perspective) happened to me while I was pondering the people smoking around me. And that alone setup sufficient neural pathways that over-rode all of the 'pro smoking' bits, present and future.
I believe that the relevant 'bits' are so numerous as to be effectively random.
I understand your assertion that free will can't be a thing in a fully deterministic universe, that randomness is a requirement.
At the same time, I'm still not convinced that randomness necessarily leads to free will.
I honestly don't think that humans have the linguistic or cognitive tools necessary to rigorously discuss or even consider this question.
Is there an effective difference between having and not having 'free will' when the playing field is so many orders of magnitude more complex than our ability to quantify or understand it?
A sufficiently advanced bot in a sufficiently advanced game, even when using a completely deterministic pseudo random number generator, should be fully able to convince us that it has free will.
I'm pretty anti smoking too. I grew up around smokers, people with yellow fingers and I absolutely hated the smoke. Still, genetics being what it is if that had not been the case I probably would have tried it at some point (ditto alcohol) and given my addictive nature I probably would have been hooked.
So we're pretty much in the same boat there.
> I believe that the relevant 'bits' are so numerous as to be effectively random.
A large number of bits does not automatically - or effectively - imply randomness. It's all about patterns and independence, you could have millions of bits that change in lockstep (think 'game of life') and it would be totally deterministic.
> A sufficiently advanced bot in a sufficiently advanced game, even when using a completely deterministic pseudo random number generator, should be fully able to convince us that it has free will.
It wouldn't because you could set up a second bot with the same initial seed and the fact that both of them would act exactly the same way to within the limit of observation would be proof that they were deterministic.
We are pleasantly and politely talking past each other, which is pretty fun and interesting, but not conducive to substantive progress.
In the end, I guess I'm saying that whether we have free will is effectively unknowable, that the underlying complexity is way too high for us to grok. Thus, there isn't a realistic difference between having it and not having it.
It brings to mind an argument I had with a creationist a long time ago, that asserted that the universe was only a few thousand years old. I convinced him that it looked much older than that, and the response was that perhaps God made it, a few thousand years ago, look billions of years old.
My response: "What's the difference between a universe that is billions of years old and a universe that, in every detail, only appears to be billions of years old, even if it is in fact much younger? If God made it look billions of years old, it's still very worthwhile to study and learn from it."
I view the whole free will question in a similar way: whether we do or don't have it, it seems like we have it, and so studying it is worth while.
Persistence has its limits and is easily exploited. To know your limits takes a special kind of training and sensitivity. Moore so to figure out limits of others.
(That's not even starting with how accurate anyone's knowledge and perceptions are.)
My version had one axis for "things you can do", and another axis for "number of people who know about the things you can do". The theory being - the larger the area, the luckier you'll be.
It came out of recollections about people I've met. One or two working on amazing projects at home and telling almost no-one, and others networking like crazy but with little substance behind it (as far as I could tell anyway) - both seemed like thin surface areas.
Since I'm not responsible for my birth, I am not responsible for anything I do after I was born, no matter how noble or horrendous.
So their reasoning goes, and if upheld in the courts nobody could be blamed for anything, but as the popular saying goes, "tell that to the judge."
I'm still gonna kill the bear, though.
It is probably adaptive as in helps survival die to fostering group cohesion when present in enough individuals.
(1) deterrence is still possible even without free will, and
(2) it's important to remove potential repeat offenders from society so they don't have the opportunity to offend again.
The only aspect of the criminal justice system that it removes is the vindictive element-- it no longer makes sense to send people to prison to punish them and 'get back at' them, because they may not have been truly in control of their actions.
That being said, we probably have to behave as if there was free will if we want (is that a pun?) any kind of society.
There is no moral or ethical failing in refusing to give to those who will waste what is given.
Yours? Mine?
When they get help, that buys time. May not buy it as efficiently as it could, but that's a nit.
Given time, their luck can change. Help can get them there.
People, society are not machines.
There are costs, risks, balances to be made.
And of course, productive from whose point of view? I value helping people far more than I do actualizing peak efficiency, and I do that because the human costs are generally undesirable.
there seems to be a distinction between Free Will (the ability to act in the moment, I don't believe it exists) and Self Awareness (the ability to consider your-self & your actions in the past or future, which apparently does exist for me).
To me, it seems we have no choice about what to do in the moment. But the moment afterward, we begin to reflect on our experience, replay those sensory signals & imagine our different responses or outcomes, and rewire our brain for the next opportunity to automatically respond in a "free-will" scenario.
if luck causes everything, we might as well call it circumstance.
as luck would have it, I thought the article was total garbage... it raises no questions and offers no valuable insights beyond: historic circumstances exist.
No they're not, they are not even close. They are only good rough models of the brain if you want to look at the brain in the most over-simplified way. I blame the 'blue brain' project for myths like these.
When reasoning about an HTTPS connection I don’t start delving into details about how light bounces around in a fiber optic cable. It’s irrelevant. Free will to me is ultimately the same thing. While understanding how gluons hold stuff together is beautiful, it doesn’t change that I think that people should take ownership of their actions. Besides, say that we lived in some other world where consequence was fundamentally indeterminable in order to embue our existence with “true free will” or some such. Would it be a better world? I like that our world is coherent and understandable. I don’t need magic voodoo to have a soul. My soul is made up of stuff that I can understand.
The entire point of the article was to say if you work harder, your propensity for hard work is the result of luck (or 'the sum of external circumstance and genetics that led to your being a hard worker'). If you are good at taking opportunities when they arise, the thing that makes you be that kind of person can be described as 'luck' (because if not, what is it? Where does it come from? Intuitively people put it down to some kind of magical inner 'you-ness' but that's ill-defined and wishy-washy).
If you're using the idea that your success in life is due to your personal flavour of 'free will' being 'better', you're arguing for something supernatural, causeless and which originated somewhere other than The Big Bang. I'm not saying you're wrong but you've got quite a lot of arguing to do as philosophers have been trying to prove free will exists for centuries. The best argument for it that I've read is from Daniel Dennett in 'Freedom Evolves' where he suggests free will is a kind of emergent behaviour which while not being real is 'real enough'. Obviously I'm nowhere near doing it justice as it's an entire book by a proper philosopher but it's a great read if you're interested in this stuff.
I'm not saying I like the idea that free will doesn't exist (I don't!) but I can't come up with an argument for it being non-deterministic (and if it's pre-determined then it's not free will). It's essential to our sense of self. It seems like an obvious thing when you think about it in floppy ways but as soon as you start trying to define it properly as anything other than a 'ghost in the machine', emergent behaviour of a deterministic system, it moves further and further away from you. Hence the long-standing philosophical musings!
I realize many are very accomplished so they don't want to devalue/dismiss their own efforts.
Success is the intersection of luck, and being prepared to embrace the opportunities that arise as a result of that luck. If you aren't prepared to take advantage of a good opportunity, nothing happens. There's not a lot of cases where people find success without expending any effort at all.
Can you expand on that?
Must have just got lucky. If luck is an explanation for everything, it explains nothing.
That's my problem with this explanation as well.
It could be reduced down to "you could have been hit by a car this morning, just the fact you're alive means you're lucky".
Great, so everyone's lucky. Now what?
Some research has been done on this in terms of whether people have an internal or external locus of control - i.e. do they have control over their life, or is it random chance? There is an article that explains the differences here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moments-matter/20170...
However, the article doesn't even rise to my low expectations: it boils down to a freshman-year philosophy major's denial of free will, smeared across various aspects of life. Fine, whatever.
But we have NO OPTION but to treat people as if they have free will, since we have no free will in the matter. And, furthermore, talking and writing is pointless, since we have NO ABILITY to control what we think.
Unfortunately, the author can't choose not to write. I must say, I have no option but to wish sincerely that he could.
ETA: The more interesting question (to me) is how this changes how we judge people, if at all. If a person is an asshole, obviously that’s because of genetic and environmental influences. Do we excuse it either way? (In which case you literally can’t ever hold anyone morally accountable for anything). Do you excuse people only when the causes are environmental? Only when the environment is extreme or the genetic difference is considered a “disease”? But what justifies the difference?
But 5 years ago, I also bought a bit of fake Internet money, and it somehow became 10x more valuable last December with zero effort involved whatsoever.
I on the other hand read about it and didn’t even pick up a single bit
Lucky bastard
Luck certainly plays an outsized role in life. That said, it may not be a productive belief even if it is true.
Whether you go do a thing is still your choice (within universal limits, of course). Your success in it will partly be luck - but if you don't go do the thing you will definitely not succeed. And if you prepared for it your odds will be better.
What's the point of this article? Give up and accept whatever comes your way? That any influence you could possibly exert on the world is just pure chance? What a load of crap.
The point of article affect policy level. If the correlation between effort and outcome is probably weaker than what people assume, it has effects to the society.
This gets right at "blame yourself" type policy.
We all could need help. Thinking of it as such, understanding luck plays a bigger role than we would like will boil down to more humane policy.
That will raise standards of living and improve society, all of which will improve your personal luck.
In the end, though, even the most entitled and pampered aristo-plutocrat has to get out of bed or at least eat food and drink liquids to stay alive.
If the universe is deterministic you can’t have a preference.
Luck determines everything, but the author still writes a paid article, just in case the check doesn't magically fall from the sky.
The main reason that people get off their ass is to improve their life. People that have everything are constantly offered amazing opportunities just for existing. You may not have ever seen this because you don't fall in the category but it happens all the time.
To benefit from luck, one must roll the dice in the first place. The more times you "roll the dice", the more shots you have at getting lucky, if nothing else.
(struggles in handcuffs as police arrest him)
TFA simply redefines everything such that the root cause must always be some kind of random allocation of resources/capabilities, or "luck". Then essentially concludes that there is effectively no free will.
Sophistry. With zero useful explanatory value or application in the real world.
I want my 2min back