Success and luck
"A New York Times economics columnist explores the findings in recent years by scientists who have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life situations than most people imagine, showing how a more accurate understanding of this discovery could lead to better, richer and fairer economies and societies,"--NoveList.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
14mentions
4people
2016–2021years
86% recommend14% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Pertinent book recommendations:
Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, Robert H. Frank [https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvc77k7k] Great read, entertaining and insightful, many anecdotes, and also simulation results.
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, Michael Sandel (of Harvard ethics YouTube superstar fame) [https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/montage-michael-sand...] Still on my agenda. Podcast with the author and Sam Harris: [https://samharris.org/podcasts/221-success-failure-common-go...]
- Yes, not only good old Rawls, but many contemporary writers make arguments about the limits of meritocracy. Some books I can recommend:
Robert H. Frank: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167404/su...
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/06/28/book-rev...
Michael Sandel: The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/books/review/the-tyranny-...
- > quite confused at [broadly this is just luck], what studies?
I would recommend reading Success and Luck [1]; it's well-researched.
>> relying on this dynamic entrenches privilege
> this is quite ridiculous, this is only believable if you consider...
There are pretty good [2] papers [3] about it, which convinced me and might convince you.
> so? heard of 'lisa su'?
Your post uses a lot of anecdotal evidence, which is a fallacy [4]. I encourage you to build up a habit of diving deeper. Oftentimes our intuitions are wrong because they're influenced by our local experiences, which are very rarely representative. It's why we do things like run studies and experiments, because we've learned we can't trust our experiences and intuitions. This pattern is, unfortunately, widespread and leads to a lot of problems.
This is actually a great little microcosm of one such problem: income inequality is a huge problem in the US; societies with dramatic income inequality are historically corrupt and unstable. However, it's counter to a lot of people's intuitions and experiences. So whenever someone tries to rally people to address it, people like you toss out lots of unrepresentative anecdotes (and employ other common fallacies) to try and convince people either it's not a problem, or that it's a feature and not a bug. And it works, because these fallacies are common bugs in the way people think about things.
It's up to us to recognize these patterns in ourselves and others and work against them.
[1]: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167404/su...
[2]: https://www.nber.org/papers/w23733
[3]: http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race...
- Counterpoint: Luck (broadly seen, including your genetic disposition and where you’ve been born - you might not call it luck, but it’s certainly not something you’ve chosen or earned) plays a much bigger role than most people think it does.
Source and book recommendation:
Robert H. Frank: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167404/su...
> In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. In Success and Luck, bestselling author and New York Times economics columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success—and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy.
Good summary in his article in The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/why-luc...
- An insightful book that touches on these issues in more depth is Robert H. Frank's Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.
Good argument for the estate tax, by the way.
- I was going to suggest a some of those.
Dawkins: A lot of really interesting things in life are really weird and puzzling, such as sex. Literature and religion try to elucidate it, but fail to get to the bottom of it. The insights popularised by Dawkins really make a lot of sense of it.
Pinker: Absolutely. There is this notion that things were much better in the past. These books shred it to pieces. It's also worth looking at Pinker's Enlightenement Now, and Julian Simon's The State of the World, though that has a lot of libertarian propaganda in it. However, the statistics are sound.
Taleb: Not a huge fan of Taleb. The point about the role of chance is much better made, in my view, by Robert H. Frank in his Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.
Related
Economism
3 recommend · 20
The luck factor
5 recommend · 10
The winner-take-all society
4 recommend · 6
The secret of our success
20 recommend · 47
Progress and poverty
42 recommend · 129
Think and Grow Rich
81 recommend · 166
The success equation
2 recommend · 4
