Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

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Stated like this this assertion is unprovable and unfalsifiable. Another person could state that luck is too overrated, who is right, who is wrong, and how do you decide?

In a controlled setup though, like backgammon or poker, luck is definitely overrated. Just try to play a single game of backgammon with a professional player, and see if you stand a chance. You can play 100 games, and without fail you would lose all of them.

So, how can a professional player of a game of chance consistently win? By maximizing the win when they get a lucky roll, and minimizing the loss when they get an unlucky one. In the long run the number of lucky rolls is roughly equal with the number of unlucky rolls, but they will manage to get a positive expected value.

Maybe real life is similar to a game of chance. Maybe not? I don't know for sure. But my hunch is this: both Mark Zuckerberg and I were faced with a long string of random events in our life. Many, many, many. After each such event, we both had a number of ways to respond. Somehow Zuckerberg got richer pretty much every day of his adult life, and he now sits at #3 at the top of the world. I, on the other hand, made whatever choices I made and sit currently at #1e9 or #2e9 (not sure). I can think that Zuckerberg has been dealt a luckier hand in life, or I can think he was much better at playing what he was dealt than me. Nobody will ever know for sure. But my personal belief is that he was a more skillful player than me.

To be fair, you don't hear (as much) about all the Mark Zuckerbergs who weren't quite so successful. If you're going to look at some of the richest people on the planet, then of course you'll see a string of successes, because without a long string of successes they wouldn't have been the richest people on the planet. I also think that as the string of successes becomes longer (or you become richer), you have more of a chance at further successes as well.

Looking at the most successful people in any situation is not a good way to get a sense of the underlying probabilities involved. If you let 1000 people flip coins 1000 times and count the number of heads, you'll see an extraordinarily high number of heads among the most successful people.

The mere fact that there are really few people as rich as Zuckerberg indicates a big luck / network effect factor in my opinion. Zuckerberg is probably more skilled than the average person, but there are many more people like him in terms of skills (I believe), and the vast majority of them didn't get anywhere near as rich. Zuckerberg also didn't accumulate his wealth by lots of small repeated increments: he won big by Facebook becoming successful (and there was no guarantee of that, despite Zuckerberg's skills). Without that big win, I doubt that Zuckerberg would have ended up anywhere near #3.

> If you let 1000 people flip coins 1000 times and count the number of heads, you'll see an extraordinarily high number of heads among the most successful people.

Not really. If you do this experiment you are virtually assured that all the people will get between 400 and 600 heads. Not a single one will get 601 heads. Not a single one will get only 399 heads.

Zuckerberg is not one or two or ten standard deviations away from me. He's thousands of standard deviations away from me. Luck alone cannot explain his success.

Edit: For fun, here's a code snippet that shows the range of the number of heads that 1000 people get when flipping a coin 1000 times. I ran the experiment 10 times.

  import numpy as np

  for seed in range(10):
      flips = np.random.RandomState(seed).binomial([1000]*1000,p=0.5)
      print(min(flips),max(flips))

This is what you get:

You need to run this experiment many millions of times before you see a minimum less than 400 or a maximum higher than 600. As you can see most often the range is much tighter.

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