Those who work hard, a positive outlook, maintain themselves and their families, are resourceful ... will likely be healthy and abundant.
The farmer who idles away doing not much will have a bad crop. The farmer who is responsible and diligent, mends his fences, ploughs well, keeps his equipment clean and proper and minds the livestock ... will likely do well.
Except in case of disaster of course, and then maybe some kind of metaphysical excuses might come into play!
> Except in case of disaster of course, and then maybe some kind of metaphysical excuses might come into play!
there's a particularly distressing variation of this kind of belief that, upon hearing news that a terrible disaster has stricken a distant country, killing tens of thousands, concludes that those victims must necessarily have deserved such a fate -- by not living life according to the well-understood principles, or not worshipping the correct god.
that conclusion is perhaps a reasonable and logical one given belief in enough axioms like "there is an omnipotent god", "if we live a certain way god will reward us", "the universe is generally fair".
This happens, but it's barely a thing.
I've never seen or heard of such a thing in real life, it's something you only hear about on CNN.
Services in mainline Churches don't really ever go into this kind of thing, the congregation would find it as wacky as you or I would.
Hard work combined with personal agency leads to success. Are you responsible for yourself? That is, are you taking responsibility for yourself? If so, you will find a way to make yourself successful. If you are looking for someone else to take responsibility for you, for your healthcare, for your retirement, for your general environment and well-being, then naturally you will be at the mercy of whoever happens to assume that responsibility.
Hard work results in being able to take advantage of more opportunities. But you still have to have those opportunities.
I think this is a case where people confuse correlation and causation. Hard work correlates with success, but it doesn't cause success.
Not true, hard work is a cause of success, just not the only cause. Luck (opportunity) is a factor, but a much more unreliable one at that. Genetics is also a factor (intelligence, passion, curiosity, playfulness).
I like to see this problem from the point of view of Reinforcement Learning - an agent playing a game in an environment, having to maximise rewards - which is the definition of success. The degree of success depends on many things, including:
- the environment (how complex it is, how many potential rewards it has for the agent)
- the internal structure of the agent (its ability to learn and perceive)
- bodily affordances (what the body can do)
- the exploration/exploitation strategy (will it try something new when it already has a strategy that is sort of ok)
- the amount of time it has to learn (life experience)
- if the agent exists as part of a multi-agent environment, then the strategies of the other agents count (cooperation/betrayal, tit for tat, forgiveness).
So there are many causes of success.
That requires a substantial amount of hard work but unlikely results in a measurable amount of success. Certainly one less than would be if the proper tools were used.
And I do agree with you that it is not the only factor. But this is why I differentiate cause and correlation. And the disagreement is likely to how we are using those terms. I am using "cause" in the colloquial sense (because context from above) of how most people do not see multivariate equations, but single factor (which is an unfortunate thing) ie. "cause and effect" (but we both know better). I am using "correlation" in the more rigorous manner meaning "related to; a statistical variable; or to be in association with".
And going back to your RL example, I think you mention one part which proves my point as well.
> the exploration/exploitation strategy
You may notice that many learning algorithms have a substantial amount of failure. After all, it is the failure that leads to success. BUT a key point is that it is not the effort put into the attempt that led to success, it is the adaptation of a new strategy after recognizing the failure. You could just as easily never visited that attempt method and thus your efforts would lead to a higher success/work factor. You could also never change strategies and your efforts would result in a substantially lower success/work factor. More explicitly "hard work" is a variable that is coupled with "strategy", and the value of "hard work" can be astronomically high but the value for success can be zero. And for this reason we say it is not "the cause" but rather "a factor" or "correlates with".
Also, as mentioned in a grandchild to my post, this is a saying which I gladly will admit does not cover the entire scope of what factors lead to success. Even the unpacking of implicit information cannot do that, as a full description of the path to success is rather cumbersome.
We could contrive an example whereby "working hard" allowed you to "create more widgets in less time than anyone else" and so you receive a promotion (success). But even then we know that your success isn't from just "working hard", but is instead from the result of doing so. Given the context of this thread, I think we can agree that "creating the most widgets in the least time" can be done without "working hard".
I would argue pointing to "hard work" as a cause of success is confusing how a causal factor was reached with the factor itself.
> Hard work correlates with success, but it doesn't cause success.
Absolutely, that's a key part, I think.
What if "luck" was actually just an individual's ability to perceive an opportunity... intersected with their own feeling that they have permission to act upon it?
>>Hard work results in being able to take advantage of more opportunities. But you still have to have those opportunities.
That's what is meant by "being able to take advantage of more opportunities. You are better able to see that they exist. You are also primed to look for them. You also believe that you can succeed at that opportunity. BUT a key thing is that they actually have to exist. There are situations where you can work really hard and there be no opportunities to be successful (financially. Because we can redefine what successful means but that doesn't consider context). As illustrated above you can work really hard in jail and that can result in no gained success.
But we're talking about sayings. Sayings are never exact but rather hold a generalization in a nice and easy to remember package. Sayings always include a lot of implicit information. We could quibble about finer details but whether you should or shouldn't depends on the context of the conversation and whether the context the saying is provided in contextualizes that implicit information.
What this saying packages is:
Though work highly correlated with success it does not necessitate it. There are opportunities for success frequently around us and frequently unseen. Hard work will not result in seeing or being able to take advantage of said opportunities, but rather it correlates with the ability to. Furthermore, hard work often correlates with improvements in skill, which grant access to new opportunities that previously were not obtainable. While there are a lot of things that lead to success that correlate with hard work and while success itself in turn correlates with hard work, success itself is not granted to all those that work hard.
I suspect luck is, in fact, simply the event of uncertainities crystallising favourably (or unfavourably if the luck is "bad"). Like it says in the dictionary.
Which is also why many people believe we make our own luck: because in many situations that people attribute to luck, we can influence the outcome, consciously or otherwise.
Unless you get hit by a truck. Or unless you have a stroke. Or unless you are otherwise unlucky.
Because we do not live in a just world.
As an employer .. if something can be automated, and you're paying someone to do it manually—do you deserve to get burnt?
That said, I was mostly pointing towards what I see as an explanation for the difference in attitudes regarding wealth and poverty and how it intersects with peoples opinions of personal responsibility, which I think does have a place in that scenario, even if it's not always the primary driver.
Yeah OP is way off on his God scapegoat. People in the West are far more likely to not return a lost wallet due to the wide variance in cultural identity. Japanese people have such a shared identity which promotes a level of empathy that only Americans in small towns could hope to replicate. Call it hospitality. Religion has nothing to do with it.
> The so-called Protestant Ethic then prevalent held that man was a sturdy and responsible individual, responsible to himself, his society, and his God. Anybody who could not measure up to that standard could not qualify for public office or even popular respect. One who was born "with a silver spoon in his mouth" might be envied, but he could not aspire to public acclaim; he had to live out his life in the seclusion of his own class.
In theory, but in practice that just means that those with inherited wealth expend some of it on building a personal myth of being self-made independent of their family legacy. It's often paper thin, but as long as they make the gesture to ritually acknowledge the norm, it seems to suffice in practice.
Obviously, no parallel equivalent exists in the other end of the economic scale.
This happens a fair bit in the UK. Due to the media's obsession with entrepreneurs, we see the wealthy gambling a bit of family wealth on a series of startup ideas that are clearly not made for the reality we inhabit but sound snappy and fin-techy (blockchain for banks, with no understanding of banks).
> Obviously, no parallel equivalent exists in the other end of the economic scale.
If you take away the spending of money bit, there is an equivalent at the other end of the economic scale.
There exists some person with inherited wealth that builds a personal myth of their inherited wealth not being responsible for their current wealth.
There exists some person in inherited poverty that builds a personal myth of their inherited poverty not being responsible for their current poverty.
The latter does happen.
Not really. Because the idea is "To become successful you must be hard working". And if we take that as "iff hardworking -> successful" then the reverse is true "if successful -> hardworking". That's why so many people think the rich are hardworking, even if they inherited their wealth (or a sizable portion).
It also comes down to it being easier to spot someone in poverty than to spot someone that's rich but hasn't worked for it themselves. That might explain most of it.
There's a sleeps-on-the-street homeless guy living in my neighborhood. I talk to him on occasion. A couple days ago he said he was bored off his ass, and that he was thinking of getting a part time job. I did not verbally respond to his potential quest for employment, but I did find myself wondering how he'd pull that off. He's perpetually drunk & unshowered. I doubt he could get a job if he wanted one. Are there any attainable jobs for an alcoholic who doesn't have a shower to use?
Dumpster diving (if it's still worth while, which it might not be).[1] If you're serious about it, it's not really any less of a job than those American Pickers guys.[2]
There's lots of jobs out there, especially if you widen your criteria for "job".
1: I had an interesting run-in with a homeless man at a taco truck almost two decades ago. He was in clean clothes, had a bike with a trailer, and was trying to sell a 49ers jacket. My friends and I started talking to him and he explained that he found a few of the jackets in a dumpster behind one of the big sports stores around, and had a few other things to sell too. He explained that he and a few friends actually had a fairly nice camp (carpeted areas, make-shift shower with water in the day through solar of some sort, DVD player with TV hooked up to solar trickle cell). He camped a little outside the stalled development of a local apartment complex, where they had an agreement with the developers that they could stay there and they would keep people from squatting in the partially completed complex so it didn't sustain damage. He said he was on disability from the military, and liked living outdoors, but would probably rent an apartment for the winter with his girlfriend and friend. Honestly, I left the interaction feeling a little envious of his freedom.
Possible he could find a job that includes access to a shower. I know of once case where that has occurred. It was a job in a warehouse and there were showers and change rooms he could use. I believe he was actually provided with an unused room tucked away somewhere where could stay overnight before someone higher up in the company found out about it and put an end to that arrangement.
"Perpetually drunk" is more difficult and likely a deal breaker.
A large part of how America sees work, poverty and wealth was historically influenced by the Protestant Work Ethic, and I think that lingers quite a bit today. I think it's why a lot of people view the poor as lazy (because obviously if they weren't lazy, they wouldn't be poor, right?).
If you fervently believe hard work will lead to success, how else do you explain the unsuccessful?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic