It's a rich man's world, err... congress.Follow

Why? You don't think you were just lucky, do you?



That's not just luck though. Your odds of suffering fetal alcohol syndrome is kinda directly related to the likelihood that your mother consumed large amounts of alcohol while pregnant with you. That's not "luck". It's the fact that if you make good decisions, your children will benefit from them. That should be an incentive to make those good decisions, right?




Again, not luck. Your parents and other family members choose to provide you with a good environment which maximized your odds of success. That's not random, and it's not luck.



Again, not luck. You made good choices and thus had better outcomes. Why not take the credit for those choices instead insisting it was just random chance? I find that odd.



Still not about luck. Statistics are what happen after the fact. Choices make those things happen though. You're running the logic backwards.



And that was far far far more significant than the luck itself. Everyone gets opportunities in life. Not everyone takes them when they come. Saying after the fact that it was all luck is absurd. The guy who wasn't successful likely had just as many opportunities as you. He just didn't take them, or didn't put himself in a position to take them, or any of a number of choices that resulted in a lack of success.



Isn't it amazing how often people giving a hand up leads to success when those receiving it take advantage of that hand up? You get that right? You honestly think that people in prison, or with drug addictions, or other problems didn't have numerous opportunities to make different choices? You don't think that anyone ever tried to help them? That's crazy!



You're looking at it backwards. No one's guaranteeing that hard work will get you out of poverty, but it's more likely than if you don't work hard. That's the point. The odds of succeeding by sitting on your *** not doing anything is vastly lower than the odds of succeeding if you get off your ***, get a job, work hard, and seize every opportunity that comes along. Get it?



Sigh. Then it's not a lottery. If there's zero chance of success no matter what you do, then it's not a lottery. There's zero chance. If there is a chance to succeed, then that chance is always going to be based on your own choices. Period.



No one said that hard work alone guarantees success. We're saying that hard work is an important component to success. Lucky breaks are more likely to happen for the guy who's out there trying than the guy who's sitting on his couch doing nothing. Your odds of success are vastly higher if you're trying to succeed and actively making choices and taking actions to make that success happen than if you're just waiting around for a random event to drop success in your lap.



Yeah. Total False Dilemma though. Your argument is like saying that since not everyone will win a footrace that "running as fast as you can" has no effect on your odds of winning. Um.... It may not guarantee a win, but it's what will give you your best chance to. Similarly, while working hard to succeed doesn't guarantee success, it's what will give you your best chance at success. And it's frankly bizarre to me that people work so hard to argue against this (using really weird arguments to boot).

What's the point of making that argument? You want people to not try? How the hell does that help anyone?

You don't pick your family, how the **** is that not luck?

It isn't luck, because if those opportunities don't present themselves you can just go to the mines next door and have a better job given to you.

And if you are born to a normal family, leading a normal life, and work hard... but still aren't successful... What's that? A lie, you didn't really work hard?

You are comparing a person who works hard with a drug addict and saying "See, it's not luck!"

How about comparing a person who works hard with a person who works hard, where one person succeeds and is able to build wealth and retire at an old age, and the other stays working paycheck to paycheck, unable to save, until they die still working at a similarly old age.

Like the example of Mr. Van Halen. I wonder how many musicians practiced their *** off, but went no where... I would be willing to bet it is more than the number that practiced their *** off and succeeded.

Jesus your world view really is stuck in the 1980s

You're missing the point. Both of them are more successful than they would have been if they hadn't worked as hard as they did. I'm arguing against the idea that since success is just about luck that there's no value in working hard. That's simply not true. It's always better to work hard than to not. Everything else remaining the same, you will be better off.



Again, not the point. Mr. Van Halen was more successful in his career because he worked hard to be the best guitarist he could than if he had not. That's not to say that he might not have still been successful if he'd just slacked off but we have to believe that he would not have been as successful.

I think people are getting too caught up in trying to compare one person to another. It's not about that. It's about each individual maximizing their own success. Maybe the universal dice are just stacked against you and no matter what you do, you'll never earn more than a working class living, but there's still going to be some range of "success" that's available to you, and that range will be directly affected by your own choices and actions. So if how hard you work makes the difference between a living class existence and being homeless we can still say that your outcomes are better if you work hard than if you don't. It's not random, and it's not luck. You will do better if you work harder and try harder and make the best choices you can. Whether that results in more or less success than the guy next to you is irrelevant.


And, more to the point, we can't know what the cosmic dice are going to do, so we can't know what your best possible outcome will be. So there's every reason to work hard, to try to succeed, and to make the best choices you can, and no freaking reason in the world not to. So I guess I just always find it strange as hell when people make this "it's all just luck anyway" argument. What is the point? It only makes sense if you actually want to discourage people from trying in order to maximize their odds of failure. And that makes no sense at all.

Edited, Jan 14th 2014 8:01pm by gbaji

Or, he may have been able to be just as successful (or even more!). There are plenty of successful musicians who put a lot less effort into their careers than others who have failed.

In the grand scheme of things, there are people who are more successful than yourself who put a lot less effort into their lives than you. There are people who are less successful than yourself who put a lot more effort into their lives than you. Seems to suggest that there is a lot more to success than just trying harder.

Edited, Jan 14th 2014 11:08pm by TirithRR

Case in point. It's not about comparing one person to another. We're discussing whether a person is better off if they work hard versus if they don't. All that matters is that individuals outcome. Other people don't matter in the comparison at all. So let's be honest. It's incredibly unlikely that Van Halen would have been more successful if he'd worked less hard at playing guitar. Certainly, he would not have been a more successful guitar player. Ergo, he was better off for working hard.

Guess what? Everyone is. Again, I'm not saying that you will be better off that that other person over there. I'm saying you will be better off than you would have been otherwise. That's it. Other people's success rates should not even enter into the discussion.



At the risk of repeating myself, that simply doesn't matter in this discussion. It really doesn't. If that guy over there is going to be a millionaire even if he sits around and does nothing all day, and the best you will ever do is earn enough to pay your rent on a crappy apartment in the low rent district you are still better of working harder than not. That's the point. I find the idea that someone should not try as hard because he doesn't think he'll be as successful as some effortless millionaire somewhere completely ridiculous. You should try as hard as you can to be as successful as you can and not worry about that other guy. His success doesn't affect you.



Sigh. Wrong. Your success level will always be a function of how hard you work. Period. Don't worry about someone else. That's just silly.

Ha ha. Funny...


Jokes aside, can we agree that everything else being the same, your own outcomes will always be better if you work harder to succeed than if you don't? And to be clear when I say "work harder", I'm not talking about sweating more (cause I just know that some knuckleheads going to come at me with the "but you'll make more money trading stocks than digging ditches" bit). I'm talking about making an effort, making good choices, taking opportunities that come along, and otherwise "doing things" that increase your odds of success rather than slacking off, making poor choices, blowing off work/oppportunties, etc.


It really shouldn't matter if someone else may or may not have a better success to effort ratio in his life. Who cares? Life isn't fair, and it's never going to be fair. But what we can do is (and should do) is try to make our own lives as successful as possible and not worry that someone else out there maybe got a better deal. I just don't see what the value is in sitting around crying about that. Again, what's the point?

Sure. I think we disagree on the frequency with which the difference is based on a different dice roll versus different amounts of grit and determination.


I also think that some people grossly simplify this issue and conflate some radically different things in order to minimize the value of hard work. I don't deny that there are going to be some people who will work as hard as they can, and as smart as they can, and do everything they can to succeed but simply won't succeed despite their best efforts. But that does not mean that I should ignore the sheer frequency with which the guy who doesn't succeed just happens to have made a whole series of bad choices in his life and continues to make bad choices and insists that he just can't possibly do anything at all to affect his own outcomes and that's why we should all pony up to help him out. It's never his fault. It's always someone else that did it to him, and the system is rigged against him.

I'm sorry, but I think that by perpetuating the whole "lottery" BS we're just giving people excuses to not bother trying. Put another way, if the universal dice are just going to ***** someone over, it's going to happen and we can't change it. But for the other 99.999999% of the people for whom their efforts will affect their outcomes, we're doing them a disservice by convincing them not to try. Saying "it's all just luck anyway" has no positive effect at all, but can have a negative effect.

So why do it? What is the value of convincing people that their own choices have no impact on their own outcomes? How can that possibly help anyone?

Edited, Jan 14th 2014 8:47pm by gbaji

Well, yeah. that was sort of my point.

I think it's so we can illustrate excluded middle fallacies.

From what I gather reading gbaji's posts here his view of the implication of the "It's luck" argument is that regardless of what Person A does, Person A's outcome is set. That Mr. Van Halen would have done the same regardless of whether or not he had practiced. But that's not the point of the "it's luck" argument. The point is that if Person B does the same thing as Person A, regardless of Person A's success in doing so, Person B can (and does) still Fail. Frank didn't succeed, even though he tried just as hard as Mr. Van Halen.

Not to off topic and even worse, go political, but this is my issue with "spread the wealth", "fairness" and all that bs. In my mind, it absolutely can not work because Person A simply isn't person B. Giving both equal incomes will never ensure equal outcomes. The entire premise is flawed and can only do harm.