When giving chances - i.e. interviewing a candidate, selecting a vendor, etc. - avoid this way of thinking like plague. Do you best to go with objectively best option, to the extent such determination is possible to begin with.
We are doing a disservice to our fellow man by not telling them this truth.
I'm not denying our moral agency, but it is often constrained by environment. Some people are lucky enough that virtuous choices are easier for them.
If I overstated my point, it's only because I was pushing back against the idea that education, employment, and a traditional family are equally attainable by all, and if someone has failed in any of these areas, it's because they lack virtue compared to other people (many of whom had more advantageous starting points in life, but supposedly that doesn't matter).
Or in simpler terms, "poor people are poor because they're bad and they deserve it". It's a sentiment that's been very useful for the ultra-wealthy class, and detrimental to everyone else, not just the poor.
Now there are many traditions around the world that works. Most cultures have man+women=family (as opposed to some form of polygamy), and there is reason to suspect this is important even if it isn't "in" to study why. (it isn't clear which non-traditional forms also would be fine and which would be a disaster)
Saying "poor are poor because they deserve it" is an accusation that I hear a lot more than I hear people who believe it. Some do believe it, but most accused of it do not and have better explinations of why they do things that the accusers don't like.
Not many people would openly say that poor people deserve to be poor. Those aren't the words that the parent commenter used, and maybe that wasn't even the intention. But this line of thinking can encourage people who feel this way, by giving their feelings a moral justification.
All I mean is, we should be empathetic toward people who have fewer resources than we do, and not be too quick to credit our accomplishments to our virtuous living.
I completely reject the notion that wealth is at all a factor in the intelligence or educational success of a child. Wealth is just a correlation. Neither does national educational systems or policies have more than a tiny effect on education success.
What matters for educational success is the genetical and cultural material of the children. If they are born smart, or are brought up in families who value intelligence or brought up in cultures which value intelligence. Even poverty and schooling become small factors if the child has any of these foundations.
All sorts of folks have lived in all sorts of places across time. Trappings and environments have varied. Attributing things to luck in and of itself is an illusion. There is nothing that is lucky or unlucky. You play the hand you are dealt.
Based on what, exactly? I think you have cause and effect inverted.
Picture two scenarios:
1. A loving unmarried couple, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or child bearing, lives in an affluent neighbourhood, in a rich country, have steady incomes, and decide to have a child. After ten years they decide “I love you so much. I don’t need a piece of paper to prove that, but let’s get married. It’ll be a great opportunity to connect our friends and family, and it’ll give us some legal and financial protection when one of us dies”.
2. In a poor neighbourhood, a woman who was mistreated all her life marries her high school sweetheart, who turn out to be abusive. He not only beats her, he rapes her regularly. Like too many victims of domestic violence, she’s afraid to move away. Eventually she becomes pregnant and has the child against her will.
Which of those do would produce the better outcome?
Being fatherless isn’t in itself the issue, but everything which came before to reach that point might be. There is a huge difference between not having a father because he abandoned you, or because he died, or because your mother as a single affluent woman with the means to do so decided to do in-vitro fertilisation.
I highly recommend “New Family Values”, by Andrew Solomon, to get a feeling for the different types of families which work. It goes way beyond “one mother, one father, married”.
https://andrewsolomon.com/books/new-family-values-audiobook/
Statement: Statistically, seatbelts reduce the chances you’ll die in a car accident.
You: But, what if your car crashes into a lake and you get trapped underwater?
Statement: Statistically, richer people die less in a car accident.
You (or GP): get rich and survive car accidents!
But all that is irrelevant because what I posted above wasn’t an analogy. It was… A thought experiment? A purposefully exaggerated example? Anyway, not an analogy. Analogies compare two different things via a third thing they have in common, but here I used examples which are directly related to the subject matter. The point was to make it clear, via extreme but realistic examples, that correlation does not imply causation.
That's why I'm saying you have cause and effect in the wrong order: children issues are tied to one or both parents not caring about them, and a symptom of that was having children before marriage, when marriage was "the only way" to a family. Nowadays things are different, and you can totally be a functional family without signing any contract on paper.
If we ignore almost all of human history save for the past 50 years, then yes. If we redefine marriage to not mean what most humans that have ever used the word meant by it, then yes.
But why would we do these things? If you call all relations between two human beings marriage, you gain nothing, you just lose a word.
Marriage is a covenant between two people, a man and a woman, with God, and incidentally, this covenant, not a piece of paper, it's also a precondition for two people to live together and in harmony. It's a commitment by both people to focus not on themselves, but on the family unit and the wellbeing of that family unit.
> You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common.
Children of married parents still have better outcomes, and the lower income people are, the bigger the advantage of having married parents are.
By your definition, are we all unmarried or living in disharmony?
If we consider what the word meant up until about 50 years ago, then yes. If we consider the new definition, of "you signed a piece of paper given to you by the government, and gave it back to the government". Then, sure, you are married.
I'm not trying to insult you or denigrate you, but again, if we use the word marriage for all relations between two human beings, then we gain nothing, we just lose a word.
Do you hold the same position for marriages in other traditions - for example, Shintoism, indigenous belief systems, Hinduism, paganism, etc? Many such religions don't have the same concept of a marriage as a covenant with God, yet have existed for quite some time.
And we don't need to use the word marriage for all of them.
> The legal recognization by a church or government is one version, but not the key ingredient.
The covenant with god has been a key ingredient for centuries.
In some cultures yes, but pair-bonding is a lot older than the idea of god
Flagging is a powerful tool in this small duckpond. Instead of abusing it, you can use HN to learn self restraint, so that when you one day achieve power over other people in real life you have learnt not to abuse it.
That's only the wimps that have nothing worthwhile to add.
But that's the only word we have for "lifetime-committed couple recognized by some authority". The meanings of words change and evolve. Tough luck.
We could use the secular "civil union" for all marriages performed outside of a church. But that would be unnecessarily clunky and pointless ("I got civil union-ed this weekend, it was great!"). And then of course people married under other religious traditions would object to the use of the word "civil" so you'd have to qualify every other union accordingly - "Jewish union", "Muslim union", "Hindu union", etc. Why?
You're basically arguing against free speech. I don't understand who it's helping. If the distinction is that important to you, just spell it out when talking about your marriage ("I was married in a church"). Leave everyone else alone.
Actions have a value which are seven thousand times more worth than words, so the covenant with God is automatic in that situation even if the people are ignorant and have never heard of God.
Yes. That's the kind of attitude that can build toward peace & harmony, and to live & let live instead of the hate against nonuniformity often shown by the religious extremists. Whether they are Christian or anything else. Hate is hate.
When an unmarried couple is completely faithful to each other until death, regardless of any other family, there's no way the average religious marriage can compare in that regard.
Not even close, zero is still a very small number.
Statistics are pretty accurate here. With the rate of divorce and unfaithfulness so rampant in religious marriage, it's only become more of a gamble over decades and decades of direct observation and interacton.
IIRC some cultures have shunned the idea of gambling since prehistoric times.
Others have it inscribed in scriptures almost as old, but not universally adhered to by the "faithful" just yet.
And it's been a while . . .
How strong is your commitment to this? If it's unflagging I think a lot of people can understand your disappointment then.
If you are well-acquainted enough with the USA, you are certainly aware that these have been one and the same for like . . . centuries now here.
Not just 50 years, what have you been doing about that the whole time?
Have you had any successful efforts to completely separate church & state yet, and have you even had 50 years to work on that so far?
It would be good to see a concrete sign that your advocacy is sincere.
If there's nothing so far, that is understandable, but most of us do not have 90 full years to figure this out, so no time like the present to get started.
This seems pretty narrow-sighted and Christian-oriented.
50 years ago was 1975.
I'm pretty sure there are examples of formalized marriage about as old as historic records.
but is the modern way better??? or people just don't want to be held accountable if things go south in traditional way????
I'd think they would be the poster children for the two-week marriages that Hollywood is notorious for, but they aren't.
Even in the most barren wastelands, flowers can grow.
If a couple lives together in harmony and have children together, they are married.
Quantifying something doesn't explain it, it just... Quantifies it, deeper inspection is needed to understand what the statistics says.
You are prescribing what needs to be done based on something that is, ultimately, descriptive.
Now you need to do the qualitative research to understand what are the causes for it, it could be that marriage is a signal for stable relationships, in that case marrying doesn't matter but a stable relationship does (which is quite self-obvious, it's just an example). Marriage could also have tax implications in some countries, which in turn could help the average to better outcomes, so on and so forth.
The data on this is enveloping much more than just "marriage" as a virtue, or any other moral aspect of it, you are using the data to imply that marriage is virtuous and is the cause for better outcomes which doesn't hold by just quantification...
It's blindness by statistics, it's quite common when ascribing data as the sole truth. Data can guide you to investigate other aspects that will qualify why the data shows what it shows.
I have unfortunately not spent enough time at a university to follow this line of reasoning. Must be wild to be able to follow it. I'm of the yokel type that thinks if all data and tradition we have shows something works, then it's probably best to do the thing that works instead of trying things that we have no reason to think would work.
But in line with tradition, the underclasses in the west has always been the favourite laboratory for the cultural elites in the west.
Exactly, they correlate but there's nothing saying that just because traditionally it has correlated it means that getting married is the reason for it.
Traditionally only marriage was accepted as the means to form a family, even up to this day people will be shunned by their families for having kids out of wedlock, even in a loving relationship, don't you think being shunned by grandparents would also cause worse outcomes? Considering that some of these being shunned are also of younger age, less support from family members would mean worse outcomes.
Your data doesn't even discriminate about age groups, it's a blanket statement "marriage leads to better outcomes", leading to the question (which you could find data for): which groups? Are there other parameters/aspects that lead to better outcomes which are correlating with marriage rates? What about marriage exactly is causing better outcomes? It's not marriage itself since a lot of marriages end in divorce or an unhealthy home environment, so what is it?
Those are the insights that data can lead you into. Your take is just to do whatever has been done because it's been working, without even questioning why it might work, and what can be done to lead to better outcomes without requiring marriage.
> but we should continue to tell people that it's not necessary for them to do these things to have good outcomes as we have not done enough qualitative research to know what almost all of our forefathers have known, and it's best that people experiment more and see if maybe the right combination of unemployment, promiscuity and lack of education could not create equally good outcomes for them.
This is just moral grandstanding without substance, the world changes, traditions change (the tradition of marriage used to be about property, changing ownership of a woman from her father to her husband, for example), just blind belief in traditions is, at best, ignorant, and at worst produces this bigoted worldview.
You'd do much better if you believed in traditions while also questioning the "whys" behind it, at least to understand better why some tradition you believe might have created better outcomes, and how those processes can be applied outside of your tradition.
That is, if you are a good person and want everyone else to also have a better life even if living outside of what your view of morality is, and not only living life the way your morality prescribes to because that's, supposedly, the only way.
It's obviously always possible to make the best of bad circumstances (and make the worst of good circumstances!) but it's easier to "win" when you're dealt a good hand.
It is not reasonable to tell a child sold into slavery or forced to be a soldier to “make their own luck”, that “society, and the wider economy are for everyone to navigate”. A person in the eye of storm and another in calm waters cannot navigate the same way.
People who firmly believe they above all “made their own luck” are the ones who had such a large amount of it outside their control they don’t even realise how much of it they had, like a fish unable to perceive the water.
If you believe that you are a victim that nothing you can do will make a diference, and therefore don't even try then you will definitely not improve your situation!
Now if you are born in poverty as an albino in Africa, orphaned at a young age, sold to slavery and then to a witchdoctor for organ trafficking are you fucked? Probably but that does not change the point. [I am pushing your reply ad absurdum to highlight that it is not a counter-argument...]
It’s the narrative of least resistance.
That is what all societies are finding out right now. Before, they could count on women having babies providing a need to hope, but now that children are optional, societies don’t seem to have a replacement mechanism.
It's just that silly ideas get to live around for a long time, and simply proving them false has little to no effect.
That seems overly dismissive of the contribution of our ancestors, fighting against entropy, who paid it forward to their offspring, creating the civilization we now inherit.
I personally would prefer other formulations, because while I agree with the core, I think this idea should just reduce frustration if you don't succeed, while I am afraid it can be used as an excuse for not trying.
Yes, you need luck, but if you never get out of your room/street/neighborhood/city/country, you might have less opportunities for luck than otherwise.
But best things in life come from opportunities that you cannot prepare for in advance. Just willingness to accept it.
It's why the quote has survived since 1854.
> "dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés" ("In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind")
Often, being at the right place at the right time is more of a matter of predicting the places to be and arriving there in advance of said right time.
There's lots of similar quotes throughout time, all about what you say in your list line: to be lucky you need to create as many opportunities as possible to get lucky. You can't win at dice if you never roll them.
Show up + embrace awkwardness + be kind and courteous and luck will follow.
My son's Scout troop was lucky this year. They just sold more than $60k worth of pop-corn in two weeks. How? Each kid walked up to hundreds of complete strangers at grocery stores and asked politely - albeit awkwardly sometimes. The exponentially lower-success approach is to sit behind a table waiting for people to hand you money.
The result? Almost 40 lucky kids get 11 all-expenses-paid camping trips and a fun summer camp all for just eight hours of walking and talking. Doesn't matter how much money their families make; every kid gets to fully participate.
Are you saying that no one of color in that era made any worthwhile contribution to the world? Or are you saying that every white person of the era should hold themselves to the standard of achievement of Thomas Jefferson since that is the power of the privilege they held?
It's just silly to paint yourself as this hard worker that got back what you put in, whilst ignoring the ills that you put in. I'm sure he did good stuff because of work he personally did, but it's laughable to think he could get to where he did, if he wasn't born into the planter class.
And no, that doesn't mean if you were culturally disadvantaged you couldn't do anything, it's just a lot harder and you had no free will in that. Every opportunity (and decision, really) is just a consequence of where and when you are, and should be taken not as a personal character assessment. I guess you could argue that means Jefferson is morally fine because that's just the kinda life he was born into so how would he know different, or maybe he just lacks some empathy :P
So all you’ve really done is subsumed any discussion of the merits of the idea itself into a hand-wringing fest about privilege that was inevitable from the beginning and could equally apply to any famous quote from history. I really don’t see the value in this kind of hand-wringing.
For example, would slave women have done the hard work of having and raising slave children if they had the agency to not have them?
Would you work hard at doing something that doesn't scale if you know the federal government will simply reduce the purchasing power of your earnings to maintain asset owners' position in society?
Does it make sense to work hard if there is a high likelihood you will never own land, and hence will always have increasing portions of your winnings taken by a rent seeker? Seems like a bad trade.
In Poker, luck plays an integral role in the outcome of any specific game or match, but skill does show up when collected over a large enough sample (that's why they say you can't prove something is due to skill over chance until you've collected a sample of 10,000 - 100,000 played hands of poker - at least if you're playing online).
You could also be a very good poker player and have bad luck on one important occasion (say in the finals of the WSOP), where the outcome hinges purely on luck. Similarly, you could be a subpar player and "luck out" and strike it big purely because of the right sequence of cards at a big event. But generally, most people who succeed at Poker are not there purely based on luck; you can be lucky once or twice, but you're unlikely to make it through a whole Poker career just by being lucky.
I think similarly in life - you have a certain hand you're dealt, and if you play it to the best of your ability (and make opportunities for yourself), you increase your odds of winning the hand / the tournament / life; but ultimately even with your best efforts the outcome could still be decided by luck.
You get to take swings every day and luck plays a role there. So keep moving forwards, flipping the coin in life.
It's easy to assume it would be in our control, but if you're just tired all day every day because, say, your hormone balance is off and no one can tell you why, you might statistically accomplish less than others.
You can go to the doctor. You can move somewhere with better jobs. You can learn stuff online.
Obviously any of these things are harder or easier for some people, but no matter what level you are at you need to avoid learned helplessness.
Philosopher John Rawls made this a key point for this thinking:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck_egalitarianism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls#A_Theory_of_Justice
When I see this line of reasoning, it leads me down the road of determinism instead. Who is to say what determines the quality of choices people make? Does one's upbringing, circumstance, and genetics not determine the quality of one's mind and therefore whether or not they will make good choices in life? I don't understand how we can meaningfully distinguish between "things that happen to you" and "things you do" if the set of "things that happen to you" includes things like being born to specific people in a specific time and place. Surely every decision you make happens in your brain and your brain is shaped by things beyond your control.
Maybe this is an unprovable position, but it does lead me to think that for any individual, making a poor choice isn't really "their" fault in any strong sense.
There are children who are actively taught by the people they should be able to trust that belligerence, lying, and stealing will get them what they need in life. On the other side of the coin, there are children who are taught to assume that everyone else has the up-bringing and or at least the natural intelligence needed to enable good choices every time a moral dilemma is presented. Both - it turns out - are equally short-sighted.
What's worse is that many of us assume that others can easily change their entire worldview on a dime. In the middle of my life, I'm coming to accept that I need more years that will be available to me to fix all the broken parts of my psyche and intellect.
I personally know handful of extremely lucky people who spent their entire lives doing the exact opposite of this
There's a sort of "freeloader" problem, though, which is that the ones who get "lucky" don't themselves have to be making positive choices. In fact, being a selfish individual in a group of generous ones can be an easy way to get ahead - as long as you can get away with it without being noticed or punished.
So it works, sometimes, on limited populations.
One can paraphrase the Summary of the Law (Luke 10:25-37) as, Seek the truth; face the facts; seek the best for others as for your self.
Sure there's luck in whether or not you get an opportunity but spending the whole day on twitter complaining about _ isn't going to give you any ....
On the other hand, if you received nothing in return for your work, would you do it?
You’ve written one reasoning-in-absurdum, now write the opposite side.
If you accept that the world is not "just" (just-world-fallacy), then you will also believe that rewards are indeterministic. It follows that rewards are attributed to luck, while effort and results are (by definition) not.
There is no accusation of dishonesty in this argument, and no need to feel accused of scamming.
(One point is that people who persist longer, receive more awards because the "area" under their luck-curve is larger. And people who have lots bad luck in the beginning get discouraged and stop trying ...)
I like the thought experiment of considering how much of your current life's comforts and liberties you would still have if you lived as a hermit in the woods. Nobody tells you what to do there, but you'd quickly find out how much your luck depended on society.
Being able to buy my food at the supermarket instead of having to go hunt and forage for it every day gives me a lot of additional energy and time to exercise other freedoms.
It doesn't guarantee anything, you can still be smart and fucked. But you can _try_ to change things.
But take, for example, smoking. You're flipping where the best outcome is zero, and the worst is cancer. Minimize the number of those flips.
I am naturally pessimistic I think I lost a lot of opportunities because of it. Thankfully I also get those periods where I am blindly all-in on something. Some of those made me very good at useless things but some resulted in very good opportunities and then outcomes.
Energetic optimists who avoid very dumb choices do very well in life in my experience. People who talk about luck a lot usually can't produce a decently long list of things they tried or keep making blunders (smoking, alcohol, associating with destructive and apathetic people).
“Chance favors the prepared mind”
- Jean-Luc PicardI know that quote is reductive, but I do find it is relevant to my life and what I observe in others. The opportunity part is what we usually call luck. Preparation is another matter, though. Many people just aren't prepared to take advantage of situations which present to them.
The just world fallacy is strong in communities, especially for artistic and creative endeavours like writing, art, music, filmmaking, game design, etc.
Does that mean that effort is worthless? Of course not. Does that mean you should just say "well, I'm not successful, I guess that's just life?". Again no.
But you do need to be humble and accept that in some ways, both your successes and failures were affected by external factors as well as your own efforts. That for how tempting it is to look down at people, that it could just have well have been your life circumstances that didn't work out well, your bets that didn't pay off and your efforts that didn't amount to anything in the end.
Also, the research is in. Grit is the single biggest predictor of economic success. Anyone who is lacking in economic success can be reasonably assumed to lack grit. Whether you label that “lazy” or not is semantics.
And how do you become that? Exactly, by being lucky.
Lots of people pass or aren't prepared to do what is neccessary when opportunity presents itself. The people who are, are called "lucky"
I was born from two parents that cared about me. Luck
In a country where most people have a decent shot at life. Luck
I'm lazy, but I was granted a body that never failed me, and was pushed by people around me to try stuff. Luck
I'm lazy, but my laziness is somehow useful in this computer driven world. Luck
All this luck compounds, and thanks to the activities I was pushed to do, the schools I was pushed to go to, I was lucky to meet great friends, an amazing girlfriend, and have a cushy job, a nice house in a beautiful place. Luck. Luck. Luck. Luck
I have no ambition, I was never prepared for anything, but all I've had was luck.
That's what you call luck, and a lot of people try to convince themselves everything good that happens to them is because they somehow deserve it. Because they were "ambitious" and "prepared", and an "opportunity" struck at the right time, and obviously they seized it, and everyone that didn't just didn't deserve it as much as them.
Obviously some people weren't as lucky as me, and actually had to work hard, and managed to seize an actual opportunity that wasn't gifted to them. But that's not all luck, only a little part is. And those people are quite rare.
Classic survivorship bias BS.
The privileged always think the people on top got their through their hard work and ambition, and those on the bottom just lacked the strength of character to succeed and give no consideration whatsoever to the structural / systemic conditions created by those on top to ensure they remain there, and no consideration paid to how said conditions disproportionately negatively impact those on the bottom.
Must be nice to sit all the way up there on high and look down on the world with such a smug sense of superiority.
This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.