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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

The post clearly ignores the use of any form of sensitive language, which in this case I thought helped to illustrate the points quite well.

Personally, I can’t imagine calling somebody a loser, but in my head I have a very clear idea of what a loser is. To me a loser is anybody that, in spite of the opportunity to do so, doesn’t take any control over their own life, doesn’t take responsibility for themselves, and blames others for their failure/lack of success. Such people can become marginally successful, but they’ll always be losers, because they’ll never get what they want from life. To me, this idea seems very similar to what he was getting at.

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The notion of control over one's life is elusive. Our futures can be wrought by trauma, poverty and the lottery that is our DNA, and by extension, our brain. Given the randomness/contingency Graham acknowledges explains his and others' success, and by implication the various dependencies en route to that success, I'd just ask for a bit more compassion for those, whether through birth or circumstance, find themselves constitutionally unable to make the most of their lives in the sense you probably mean. Something as simple as a deficit in executive function can wreak havoc on one's ability to self-motivate, just as an example.

You’re massively misinterpreting what I said.

> in spite of the opportunity to do so

I am talking about people who have opportunities they don’t take, so the spiel about circumstances is pretty off topic. In my comment I also made no reference to outcomes. I was specifically describing an approach to life. Anybody, even the most low agency circumstances, can choose how they approach life.

> Anybody, even the most low agency circumstances, can choose how they approach life.

That is a very common ideology around these parts (and also in the US), but it is simply not true. We are constrained by our mental health in how we can choose to approach life, and our mental health is partly due to genetic lottery and partly due to environmental circumstances outside of our control. This is not my opinion, scientific studies are massively (as you would say) in agreement with what I claim here.

The American obsession with "winner" and "losers" is just an excuse to be selfish and cruel. Its fruits are extreme economic equality, school shootings and people dying of easily curable diseases because they don't have money for the treatment (or even the ambulance to the hospital).

Please don't add nationalistic flamebait to HN. It leads to nationalistic flamewars, which we're trying to avoid here.

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