There are a great many things beyond our control. But we will never stop trying to figure out that one thing we can do by choice that makes some kind of difference -- the more difference, the better.
Except there's a lot more going on here and a lot more at stake. Beliefs about the world, specifically beliefs about, long story short, why bad things happen to good people, can dramatically affect policy decisions and what a given culture considers acceptable. Someone feeling good about themselves is absolutely not a good enough reason to mangle reality. And that seems to be all that this whole mess is about. You want to believe you are in control of your life so you bury everyone else with you when that's absolutely not what we need right now to actually understand why things happen.
Rejection of the influence of randomness means we do not examine or account for said randomness. It means we think safety nets are worthless. It means we vote against free healthcare. It means we leave people to fend for themselves because we convince ourselves that it logically makes sense. If people control everything and if their determination is all they need, then we do not need to help them.
For a large slew of events that can randomly hit a person, there is often a very non-random source. But we are so focused on an individual-based rhetoric that we cannot admit that sometimes people affect others and that is a much bigger lever to pull than trying to convince every individual person to be some sort of a superhero who has no problems.
Otherwise, I'm not sure what you were aiming at with the lottery ticket example, given that it's pretty much nobody's choice even if they believe in luck.
I worked hard at solving my problems and eventually got myself off the street.
There are lots of people who seem to apply that same general mentality to life. We know that diet and lifestyle are huge factors in health outcomes, but many people don't really take that seriously. The connection between eating right and better health isn't immediate and obvious enough.
I write about issues like homelessness and I generally look at both pieces of the equation -- what the individual can do for themselves in spite of society not being helpful enough and what society needs to do differently.
I see zero reason to assume that encouraging individuals to not engage in learned helplessness should be an excuse for society to not offer a social safety net or work on improving the one that exists.
Pocketputer.com should get you to both Street Life Solutions (About page) and San Diego Homeless Survival Guide (Links page).
My Patreon link is in my profile as well.
There's more room here than learned helplessness, in fact, I think that doesn't derive from the "luck is important" mindset at all. See my post here since I'd just be repeating the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17535786
1. I wasn't talking about you in specific.
2. It's a relatively brief forum comment. It's not reasonable to assume it needs to cover all possible use cases as if it were, say, a scholarly paper.
3. It's entirely possible to engage someone in discussion and say "Ah, well, that sounds like a dichotomy that I don't fit." or something like that without being attacking or dismissive of the basic point the person was trying to make.
4. I don't like talking to people who come across as hell bent on shooting down everything I say rather than trying to understand my point. So I think I'm probably done replying to you in this thread.
I am just going to note that you're doing a very similar thing with statements like these:
> I see zero reason to assume that encouraging individuals to not engage in learned helplessness should be an excuse for society to not offer a social safety net or work on improving the one that exists.
So you may not be getting the results you're expecting because you're generating strawmen in your posts to which naturally the other poster is going to be inclined to reply in the somewhat less understanding manner.
It's not always easy to keep these discussions fully level and polite, and I absolutely fail in that all the time, but, like, pot, kettle.
nodnodnod
> Rejection of the influence of randomness means [...] people control everything and if their determination is all they need, then we do not need to help them.
Well, it is complicated and gets very subtle. For every person who is struck by catastrophe through sheer bad luck, there is at least one who is struck by catastrophe after a series of terrible personal choices.
Deciding which is which is not an easy choice. For example, imagine a bush-walker standing at the bottom of a cliff - a rock falls, and kills them. Looks a lot like bad luck. However, in the Australian mining industry, workers are essentially forbidden from standing near cliffs because that sort of thing is /actually quite likely/. Because they deal with the risk all the time, they see it as a choice to made.
Not mangling reality cuts two ways. Just because a choice isn't obvious doesn't mean that decisions don't play a role. In addition we can't attribute success solely to luck. Success strikes randomly in a small pool of people who have the capacity to be successful. That pool is small, and the people in it shouldn't be made responsible for the vagaries of the universe at large.
This one will get complicated since it's effectively a discussion on free will. :) I will say that trying to examine why people do what one could call stupid or terrible choices is an interesting exercise.
Consider, for instance, the act of smoking in a smoking-dominated country. I have grown up in such a country and I did not pick up smoking because I considered it bad. But I am also a significant outlier for other reasons (let's say I didn't have a lot of friends growing up). From a 3rd party perspective, especially one originated in a country that doesn't smoke a lot, picking up smoking seems like a very terrible idea, and it seems very straightforward to judge those people.
But consider it from the dynamics of the country: what does it mean to be a smoker, what does it mean to be a non-smoker, in such a country? Are there consequences to each? Why do most people end up smoking? What would they have to give up to not do it? Is a decision of an outlier like myself relevant/useful? What is the breaking point after which a culture switches from an activity being mainstream vs not?
If we say smoking is a terrible choice, we'd be forced to conclude that people in countries that smoke a lot must be worse people in some sense than people in countries that do not smoke a lot. A similar conclusion was once made by Milgram. But I think by now we realize that these conclusions are definitely not the right ones, so we need some other explanation.
> For example, imagine a bush-walker standing at the bottom of a cliff - a rock falls, and kills them. Looks a lot like bad luck. However, in the Australian mining industry, workers are essentially forbidden from standing near cliffs because that sort of thing is /actually quite likely/.
This, for example, doesn't sound like a choice from the perspective of the walker or worker, because they don't have the information. So on that level it looks to me to still be random. It's like choosing a career when you don't know anything about the market or what makes a good career - it's basically random from your perspective, even if there are deterministic paths all around. After all, most physical luck (i.e., accidentally tripping) is also deterministic internally, but it's luck to us because we can't tell.
It is not random for the whoever manages the Australian mining industry, because they have the information. One way to reduce randomness is having more information, which can be extended to educating people more.