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Re:Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are tal... by david927 on Monday August 08, 2022 @11:21AM (#32386541)
He went to a fancy private boarding school as a boy and his family had connections.

> how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer

That's faulty, a posteriori reasoning.

Re:Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are tal... by astrange on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @03:06AM (#32395026)
I don't believe Elon had any more undue privilege than any other Stanford graduate. (Which is not none, but it means none of the emerald stuff matters.)

There's no need for any such influence anyway, getting rich from PayPal is already pure luck and you should be satisfied complaining about that!

Re:Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are tal... by philwelch on Monday August 08, 2022 @12:14PM (#32387407)
What I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis. If being born to rich parents, having connections, and going to boarding schools is the sole reason people get rich, then we would expect that people with richer parents and more connections who went to better boarding schools than Elon Musk would be richer, and people who grew up in similar conditions to Elon Musk would be equally rich. This is not true.
Re:Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are tal... by david927 on Monday August 08, 2022 @12:22PM (#32387538)
> What I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis

That is not what you are doing. You are picking a winning lottery number and saying why did this number win and others not? That's faulty logic.

Re:Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are tal... by philwelch on Monday August 08, 2022 @12:59PM (#32388044)
No, I’m looking at two “lottery tickets” with the exact same numbers and asking why one of them one the jackpot and the other one didn’t. The only conclusion: it’s not a lottery and what you have picked out as the winning lottery numbers are not that.
Re:Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are tal... by endisneigh on Monday August 08, 2022 @08:48PM (#32392904)
To be fair you'd have to compare people who had the same circumstances and desires, not simply both being rich.
Re:Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are tal... by david927 on Monday August 08, 2022 @01:22PM (#32388372)
You're really bad at logic but you're confident in it; that's not a good combination.