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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of whether you can actually affect an outcome, believing you can affect the outcome is crucial. Maybe you're just "lucky" to have that belief, but of course you can choose to believe something or not, can't you?

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.

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You don't see the point because you are looking it from individual point of view. How individual should change their actions based on this news is not the point.

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.

Bingo.

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.

I always explain it comparing to watching a movie. Even when you start looking at the screen, the movie is already written and recorded. But that doesn't mean you know what will happen, and you will still feel something watching the movie. And you watch is because it's fun, it makes you think, you simply don't have anything better to do, etc.. As long as you personally feel your life has any meaning, your "actions being already decided" does not constitute any problem. What you feel in your life might be real, and in that case, rationally analyzing your life without taking those emotions into account is actually quite irrational and unfair. As another commenter says, you might be important for other people, make their lives better, and you can still feel and live all that. As long as you don't know where your decisions will lead you, them being "written" or not is irrelevant. If you have a defeatist perspective based on the results of your previous decisions, that's another thing, and it's likely your life will continue that way, but it's also possible you change over time (and the movie actually ends like that). Not due to free will, but still due to thinking, and reading, and caring about what other people —with as much free will as you, none— thinks and says.

Accepting that I don't have free-will does not stop me from understanding I am an agent of change. Even if I can't alter the laws of nature to be an free agent, I can use the laws to my best interest.

Yes, all those professional athletes, Nobel Prize winners, CEO's, top lawyers, all of it was pure luck. Not a single individual decision mattered. </sarcasm>

It's luck that they happened to be hard-working individuals, duh. And purely by luck they decided to spend their time productively instead of party it away.

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