Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

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> People intuitively like the idea of reducing inequality and hate the idea that the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.

It goes other way round too. It might just be that the your higher salary is not rational, you got lucky or got unfair advantage.

Like, in the bottom of your comment, you made up situation that might just not apply. Or might just not counteract anything

Or, might be directly damaging - agreeing with everyone makes you popular, but causes a lot of damage in the long term. Lying about important stuff makes you popular, but causes damage to company and everyone else.

People go out of their way to rationalize and defend unfair or damaging systems.

My point was that the "you got lucky or got unfair advantage" narrative that people use to explain why other people are successful and they are not is motivated reasoning.

So it's far more likely these comments are over-indexing on the "its all luck/unfairness" explanation than the "it's all rational" explanation given there's 100X more people who will have their egos protected by the former positioning (the ratio of executives to worker bees is like 1:100).

Nah I think that almost everything is luck based.

It’s more that the “i work hard and hustle everyday” narrative from successful people is to protect their little egos from the realisation that 90% of their success is pure luck / chance / chaos.

You didn't confront my core assertion.

Yes, both parties use motivated reasoning to protect their ego.

But there's 100X more of the worker bees than there is of the uber-successful.

Therefore any discussion like this one will over-index on the luck explanation.

We're obviously not at risk of assigning too much agency to successful people here on HN, an internet forum filled with frustrated leftist upper middle class last men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man

And my point was that "no he was not lucky, it was entirely fair with no luck or advantage (and no fraud, lies etc)" narrative is frequently motivated reasoning too.

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