> Some people work their asses off starting a company, and it never takes off, and some dude who barely knows how to program runs into someone at a party and gets hired for a million dollars to build a dumb website.

This should be written somewhere with huge letters and be the final end of that otherwise endless discussion.

People in HN are really baffling to me in how they underplay luck and overplay effort all the time. And I've seen what you said, on both extremes, like 50 times in my life so far at least.

It hurts the ego to admit one’s personal success is due to luck and not by effort.

Yep, more or less. There's also this phenomena (that I have no doubt has a name in Wikipedia but I don't know it) that leads to our brain conflating "I made it! I made money!" with "I am super good at EVERYTHING!".

I don't why that is. A lot of us know that the ego is our brain's top priority but nobody really knows why is that the case.

This also leads to rich people producing various misguided essays in which they are asserting stuff that's way outside their area of expertise -- but since they are rich and popular, many people gulp them as a holy gospel and repeat them ad infinitum...

Eventually we go full circle and start seeing what is the topic of the OP: that there are a lot of widely believed adages without them ever being well-supported by any evidence.

You are the perfect audience for The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols. He covers all of this.

Not really, the premise of the book seems like it's aimed at a very different problem.

I agree. Except you cant say that in Jobs Interview. Nor does mainstream media wants to acknowledge this.

True. That's why critical thinking that's freed from what's popularly believed is such a crucially important skill to have.