Re: [silk] Luck Matters More Than You Might Think

[Amit Varma]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 6:47 AM, Udhay Shankar N  wrote:

> Thoughts?


I'd written a column on just this a few months ago:
http://indiauncut.com/iublog/article/luck-is-all-around/

Luck is All Around

*This is the seventh installment

of Lighthouse
, my
monthly column for BLink
, a supplement of
the* Hindu
Business Line.

You are lucky to be reading this. When your father ejaculated into your
mother, somewhere between 300 to 500 million spermatozoa were released. One
of them held the blueprint for you. That one sperm cell made it through the
acidic furnace of the vagina, the graveyard for most sperms, and then
outlasted the survivors to somehow become a person. Taking into account the
fact that this was almost certainly not the sole sexual encounter between
your parents at the time, your chances of coming into existence were
probably a few billion to one. Given that your parents were born of similar
odds, and somehow managed to meet and hook up and produce you, it is even
more of a miracle that you exist. Indeed, consider that our specific
species should itself evolve and survive through the ages, on this one out
of trillions of planets (yes, trillions), and you get a true idea of how
remarkable your existence is. Don’t be under the illusion, though, that
this makes you special: everything around you is there despite similar odds
against it. However unlikely it is for a specific something to exist, it is
inevitable that some things will, indeed, be there. Congratulations.

While everything else pales into insignificance beyond the spectacular fact
of our existence, we’re still not satisfied. We spend our days striving for
this or that trivial little thing, and stressing out over small matters
like the maid coming late or the scratch on the car or the tax returns or
the in-laws or getting laid. (We are programmed to worry specifically about
that last one, but we are again uniquely fortunate, among species, to be
able to ignore our programming. Be a rebel, don’t fuck today.) Honestly,
just the fact that we are here should keep us in a constant state of
elation and wonder. But we get tripped up by vanity. We believe that we are
special (as a species and as individuals), and that we possess the
intelligence to make sense of the world, and to rule it. This vanity, in
the cosmic scale of things, is either comic or tragic, depending on how
seriously you take yourself. And me, I find it hard to take myself too
seriously when I’m sitting in a dark room in New Bombay playing cards with
a drunk builder who’s snorting cocaine as he asks me, “*Kya laga liya,
sirjee?*”

Four years ago I became a serious poker player. I did it to make money, but
ended up learning how little I knew about life. The most important thing I
learnt from poker was about the role of luck in the world. Poker is
essentially a game of skill, but only in the long run (which can be longer
than you imagine). In the short run, luck dominates. Every action has
associated probabilities, and you try to manouver your way through a poker
game in such a way that the probabilities are on your side. Keep getting
your money in as a 51% favourite, and in the long run, all the money is
yours. In the short run, you could get hammered again and again and again.
For that reason, poker players are constantly told not to be
‘results-oriented’. As Lord Krishna recommended in the Bhagawad Gita, just
keep doing the right thing, and all will be well. Eventually.

While I am an atheist, the Lord was on to something. In life, too, luck
plays a far bigger role than we realise. And as in poker, the management of
that luck is the key skill we need to learn. Let me turn to sports to
illustrate what I mean. In the last installment of Lighthouse
, I had written
about how luck plays a huge role in football, which is also a game of
probabilities. For example, Lionel Messi scores from a direct free kick 1
in 12.5 times. This is the bare number, over a sufficiently significant
sample size of free kicks. And yet, we cheer madly when he curls one in,
and groan and go ‘WTF is he doing’ when he flips one way over – even
though, in the larger scheme of things, *they’re the same shot*. While fans
and even most reporters don’t get this, managers do, working furiously to
maximise the probabilities in their favour. (Every action on a football
field has a probability associated with it.) But fans go by results, and
while those may even out in a league over a season, they never do in
knockout tournaments, much to the bemusement and frustration of the men in
charge. Maradona has won a World Cup, Messi hasn’t, what does that say to
me? Nothing at all. It’s luck.

I was a cricket journalist for a few years, and 

Re: [silk] Luck Matters More Than You Might Think

[Danese Cooper]

Exactly

> On Apr 19, 2016, at 5:11 AM, Charles Haynes  wrote:
> 
> Strongly agree. I'm smart, but my success, such as it is, is more luck than
> skill.
> 
> That said - luck favors the prepared, and "the more I practice, the luckier
> I get."
> 
> -- Charles
> 
>> On Tue, 19 Apr 2016 at 11:18 Udhay Shankar N  wrote:
>> 
>> This strikes a chord. I work with early stage technology entrepreneurs, and
>> have done for over 2 decades (this includes the dot.com boom, a period
>> that
>> has special relevance to this topic) I have come across several people who,
>> through some confluence of circumstances, have made a lot of money. The
>> temptation (including for the people involved) is to imagine this is
>> because they were smart. This is almost certainly not true, as can easily
>> be demonstrated by the fact that there are always many other people who are
>> demonstrably at least as smart who have not succeeded.
>> 
>> Thoughts?
>> 
>> Udhay
>> 
>> 
>> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/why-luck-matters-more-than-you-might-think/476394/
>> 
>> Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think
>> 
>> When people see themselves as self-made, they tend to be less generous and
>> public-spirited.
>> 
>> ROBERT H. FRANK  MAY 2016 ISSUE   BUSINESS
>> 
>> I’m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good
>> fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was
>> playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell
>> psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I
>> complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying
>> motionless on the court.
>> 
>> He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my
>> chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained
>> to do. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless
>> with no pulse. Very shortly, an ambulance showed up.
>> 
>> Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than
>> five miles away. How did this one arrive so quickly? By happenstance, just
>> before I collapsed, ambulances had been dispatched to two separate auto
>> accidents close to the tennis center. Since one of them involved no serious
>> injuries, an ambulance was able to peel off and travel just a few hundred
>> yards to me. EMTs put electric paddles on my chest and rushed me to our
>> local hospital. There, I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to a larger
>> hospital in Pennsylvania, where I was placed on ice overnight.
>> 
>> Doctors later told me that I’d suffered an episode of sudden cardiac
>> arrest. Almost 90 percent of people who experience such episodes don’t
>> survive, and the few who do are typically left with significant
>> impairments. And for three days after the event, my family tells me, I
>> spoke gibberish. But on day four, I was discharged from the hospital with a
>> clear head. Two weeks later, I was playing tennis with Tom again.
>> 
>> If that ambulance hadn’t happened to have been nearby, I would be dead.
>> 
>> Not all random events lead to favorable outcomes, of course. Mike Edwards
>> is no longer alive because chance frowned on him. Edwards, formerly a
>> cellist in the British pop band the Electric Light Orchestra, was driving
>> on a rural road in England in 2010 when a 1,300-pound bale of hay rolled
>> down a steep hillside and landed on his van, crushing him. By all accounts,
>> he was a decent, peaceful man. That a bale of hay snuffed out his life was
>> bad luck, pure and simple.
>> 
>> Most people will concede that I’m fortunate to have survived and that
>> Edwards was unfortunate to have perished. But in other arenas, randomness
>> can play out in subtler ways, causing us to resist explanations that
>> involve luck. In particular, many of us seem uncomfortable with the
>> possibility that personal success might depend to any significant extent on
>> chance. As E. B. White once wrote, “Luck is not something you can mention
>> in the presence of self-made men.”
>> 
>> Seeing ourselves as self-made leads us to be less generous and
>> public-spirited.
>> My having cheated death does not make me an authority on luck. But it has
>> motivated me to learn much more about the subject than I otherwise would
>> have. In the process, I have discovered that chance plays a far larger role
>> in life outcomes than most people realize. And yet, the luckiest among us
>> appear especially unlikely to appreciate our good fortune. According to the
>> Pew Research Center, people in higher income brackets are much more likely
>> than those with lower incomes to say that individuals get rich primarily
>> because they work hard. Other surveys bear this out: Wealthy people
>> overwhelmingly attribute their own success to hard work rather than to
>> factors like luck or being in the right place at the right time.
>> 
>> That’s troubling, because a 

Re: [silk] silklist Digest, Vol 77, Issue 6

[Madhu Menon]

*groan* Puns.

This is my least favourite silk thread of all time. And the subject
line is just the cherry on top.

Re: [silk] Introducing myself

[Shenoy N]

Welcome to the list, Hari! You have lowered the average age and increased
the average IQ of the Shenoys on this list :D



On 18 April 2016 at 13:49, Ramakrishna Reddy  wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 12:11 AM, Hari Shenoy  wrote:
> > Hello everyone!
> >
> > I'm Hari and I was introduced to this list by Mohit (the Just one).
> Thanks
> > Udhay for having me on here!
> >
> > I'm originally from Mysore and I live in Hyderabad, but in the past
> twelve
> > years I've also lived in Bangalore and Gurgaon. I've worked in a bunch of
> > places, having done a few things such as writing code and selling chai in
> > an F start-up for a living. Currently, I sell ads online.
> >
> > When I grow up, I want to be a polymath. Seeing as I turned 33 last week
> it
> > seems like it will remain a distant dream. However, I'm interested in and
> > enjoy quizzing, music, books and travel.
>
> Been to your quizzes and borrowed your books back in the day :)
>
> > I'm happy to be part of Silk and I'm sure there's plenty of familiar
> people
> > on here already! I look forward to getting to know the rest of you.
>
> I always though you were a part of Silk.
>
> regards
> Ramky
> --
> Ramakrishna Reddy   GPG Key
> ID:67E226F5
> Fingerprint =  BA51 9241 72B9 7DBD 1A9A  E717 ABB2 9BAD 67E2 26F5
>
>


-- 
Narendra Shenoy
http://narendrashenoy.blogspot.com

Re: [silk] Luck Matters More Than You Might Think

[Shenoy N]

Acknowledging that most, if not all of your achievements would never have
been possible had it not been for generous doses of luck is a lovely
practical philosophy and it is not difficult to see how it will result in
humbler and more compassionate individuals. However, there is the danger
that it could - and I've seen this in several members of my immediate
family - lead to a complacent "what will happen will happen"  view on life
which tends to dissuade anything in the nature of enterprise. So,
double-edged, imo, as most practical philosophies tend to be

On 19 April 2016 at 09:41, Charles Haynes  wrote:

> Strongly agree. I'm smart, but my success, such as it is, is more luck than
> skill.
>
> That said - luck favors the prepared, and "the more I practice, the luckier
> I get."
>
> -- Charles
>
> On Tue, 19 Apr 2016 at 11:18 Udhay Shankar N  wrote:
>
> > This strikes a chord. I work with early stage technology entrepreneurs,
> and
> > have done for over 2 decades (this includes the dot.com boom, a period
> > that
> > has special relevance to this topic) I have come across several people
> who,
> > through some confluence of circumstances, have made a lot of money. The
> > temptation (including for the people involved) is to imagine this is
> > because they were smart. This is almost certainly not true, as can easily
> > be demonstrated by the fact that there are always many other people who
> are
> > demonstrably at least as smart who have not succeeded.
> >
> > Thoughts?
> >
> > Udhay
> >
> >
> >
> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/why-luck-matters-more-than-you-might-think/476394/
> >
> > Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think
> >
> > When people see themselves as self-made, they tend to be less generous
> and
> > public-spirited.
> >
> > ROBERT H. FRANK  MAY 2016 ISSUE   BUSINESS
> >
> > I’m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good
> > fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was
> > playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell
> > psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second
> set, I
> > complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying
> > motionless on the court.
> >
> > He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my
> > chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained
> > to do. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless
> > with no pulse. Very shortly, an ambulance showed up.
> >
> > Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than
> > five miles away. How did this one arrive so quickly? By happenstance,
> just
> > before I collapsed, ambulances had been dispatched to two separate auto
> > accidents close to the tennis center. Since one of them involved no
> serious
> > injuries, an ambulance was able to peel off and travel just a few hundred
> > yards to me. EMTs put electric paddles on my chest and rushed me to our
> > local hospital. There, I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to a
> larger
> > hospital in Pennsylvania, where I was placed on ice overnight.
> >
> > Doctors later told me that I’d suffered an episode of sudden cardiac
> > arrest. Almost 90 percent of people who experience such episodes don’t
> > survive, and the few who do are typically left with significant
> > impairments. And for three days after the event, my family tells me, I
> > spoke gibberish. But on day four, I was discharged from the hospital
> with a
> > clear head. Two weeks later, I was playing tennis with Tom again.
> >
> > If that ambulance hadn’t happened to have been nearby, I would be dead.
> >
> > Not all random events lead to favorable outcomes, of course. Mike Edwards
> > is no longer alive because chance frowned on him. Edwards, formerly a
> > cellist in the British pop band the Electric Light Orchestra, was driving
> > on a rural road in England in 2010 when a 1,300-pound bale of hay rolled
> > down a steep hillside and landed on his van, crushing him. By all
> accounts,
> > he was a decent, peaceful man. That a bale of hay snuffed out his life
> was
> > bad luck, pure and simple.
> >
> > Most people will concede that I’m fortunate to have survived and that
> > Edwards was unfortunate to have perished. But in other arenas, randomness
> > can play out in subtler ways, causing us to resist explanations that
> > involve luck. In particular, many of us seem uncomfortable with the
> > possibility that personal success might depend to any significant extent
> on
> > chance. As E. B. White once wrote, “Luck is not something you can mention
> > in the presence of self-made men.”
> >
> > Seeing ourselves as self-made leads us to be less generous and
> > public-spirited.
> > My having cheated death does not make me an authority on luck. But it has
> > motivated me to learn much more about the subject than I otherwise would
> > have. 

Re: [silk] Luck Matters More Than You Might Think

[Charles Haynes]

Strongly agree. I'm smart, but my success, such as it is, is more luck than
skill.

That said - luck favors the prepared, and "the more I practice, the luckier
I get."

-- Charles

On Tue, 19 Apr 2016 at 11:18 Udhay Shankar N  wrote:

> This strikes a chord. I work with early stage technology entrepreneurs, and
> have done for over 2 decades (this includes the dot.com boom, a period
> that
> has special relevance to this topic) I have come across several people who,
> through some confluence of circumstances, have made a lot of money. The
> temptation (including for the people involved) is to imagine this is
> because they were smart. This is almost certainly not true, as can easily
> be demonstrated by the fact that there are always many other people who are
> demonstrably at least as smart who have not succeeded.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Udhay
>
>
> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/why-luck-matters-more-than-you-might-think/476394/
>
> Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think
>
> When people see themselves as self-made, they tend to be less generous and
> public-spirited.
>
> ROBERT H. FRANK  MAY 2016 ISSUE   BUSINESS
>
> I’m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good
> fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was
> playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell
> psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I
> complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying
> motionless on the court.
>
> He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my
> chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained
> to do. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless
> with no pulse. Very shortly, an ambulance showed up.
>
> Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than
> five miles away. How did this one arrive so quickly? By happenstance, just
> before I collapsed, ambulances had been dispatched to two separate auto
> accidents close to the tennis center. Since one of them involved no serious
> injuries, an ambulance was able to peel off and travel just a few hundred
> yards to me. EMTs put electric paddles on my chest and rushed me to our
> local hospital. There, I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to a larger
> hospital in Pennsylvania, where I was placed on ice overnight.
>
> Doctors later told me that I’d suffered an episode of sudden cardiac
> arrest. Almost 90 percent of people who experience such episodes don’t
> survive, and the few who do are typically left with significant
> impairments. And for three days after the event, my family tells me, I
> spoke gibberish. But on day four, I was discharged from the hospital with a
> clear head. Two weeks later, I was playing tennis with Tom again.
>
> If that ambulance hadn’t happened to have been nearby, I would be dead.
>
> Not all random events lead to favorable outcomes, of course. Mike Edwards
> is no longer alive because chance frowned on him. Edwards, formerly a
> cellist in the British pop band the Electric Light Orchestra, was driving
> on a rural road in England in 2010 when a 1,300-pound bale of hay rolled
> down a steep hillside and landed on his van, crushing him. By all accounts,
> he was a decent, peaceful man. That a bale of hay snuffed out his life was
> bad luck, pure and simple.
>
> Most people will concede that I’m fortunate to have survived and that
> Edwards was unfortunate to have perished. But in other arenas, randomness
> can play out in subtler ways, causing us to resist explanations that
> involve luck. In particular, many of us seem uncomfortable with the
> possibility that personal success might depend to any significant extent on
> chance. As E. B. White once wrote, “Luck is not something you can mention
> in the presence of self-made men.”
>
> Seeing ourselves as self-made leads us to be less generous and
> public-spirited.
> My having cheated death does not make me an authority on luck. But it has
> motivated me to learn much more about the subject than I otherwise would
> have. In the process, I have discovered that chance plays a far larger role
> in life outcomes than most people realize. And yet, the luckiest among us
> appear especially unlikely to appreciate our good fortune. According to the
> Pew Research Center, people in higher income brackets are much more likely
> than those with lower incomes to say that individuals get rich primarily
> because they work hard. Other surveys bear this out: Wealthy people
> overwhelmingly attribute their own success to hard work rather than to
> factors like luck or being in the right place at the right time.
>
> That’s troubling, because a growing body of evidence suggests that seeing
> ourselves as self-made—rather than as talented, hardworking, and
> lucky—leads us to be less generous and public-spirited. It may even make
> the lucky less likely to 

Re: [silk] silklist Digest, Vol 77, Issue 6

[Bruce A. Metcalf]

On 04/18/2016 09:30 PM, Udhay Shankar N wrote:

On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 10:36 PM, Dave Long  wrote:

There is no Hari to achieve things


Is Deepatience dee mother of virtue?


​De Pontification is the outcome of virtue, usually.​


If we digitized the Pope, would that result in virtual virtue?

Cheers,
/ Bruce /

Re: [silk] This is what the Singularity looks like.

[Thaths]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 2:33 PM Thaths  wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 12:56 PM, Udhay Shankar N  wrote:
>
>>
>> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25068-wikipediasize-maths-proof-too-big-for-humans-to-check.html
>>
>> Wikipedia-size maths proof too big for humans to check
>>
>> 17:38 17 February 2014 by Jacob Aron
>>
>> If no human can check a proof of a theorem, does it really count as
>> mathematics? That's the intriguing question raised by the latest
>> computer-assisted proof. It is as large as the entire content of
>> Wikipedia, making it unlikely that will ever be checked by a human being.
>>
>
> Speaking of proofs that are unlikely to be checked by human beings:
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/science/possible-breakthrough-in-maths-abc-conjecture.html
>
> On Aug. 30, with no fanfare, Shinichi Mochizuki, a mathematician at Kyoto
> University in Japan, dropped onto the Internet four papers.
>
> The papers, encompassing 500 pages and four years of effort, claim to
> solve an important problem in number theory known as the abc conjecture.
> (No, it does not involve the alphabet; it has to do with integers and prime
> numbers, and the letters represent mathematical variables used in
> equations.)
>


Two+ years later, here is a nice longform piece on the current state of
Mochizuki's proof and where Mathematicians are with respect to
understanding it :

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151221-hope-rekindled-for-abc-proof/

Earlier this month the math world turned toward the University of Oxford,
looking for signs of progress on a mystery that has gripped the community
for three years.

Play: In new window

 | Download


Subscribe: iTunes

 | Android
 | RSS

Audio Player

The occasion was a conference on the work of Shinichi Mochizuki
, a brilliant
mathematician at Kyoto University who in August 2012 released four papers
 that were
both difficult to understand and impossible to ignore. He called the work
“inter-universal Teichmüller theory” (IUT theory) and explained that the
papers contained a proof of the *abc* conjecture, one of the most
spectacular unsolved problems in number theory
.

Within days it was clear that Mochizuki’s potential proof presented a
virtually unprecedented challenge to the mathematical community. Mochizuki
had developed IUT theory over a period of nearly 20 years, working in
isolation. As a mathematician with a track record of solving hard problems
and a reputation for careful attention to detail, he had to be taken
seriously. Yet his papers were nearly impossible to read. The papers, which
ran to more than 500 pages, were written in a novel formalism and contained
many new terms and definitions. Compounding the difficulty, Mochizuki
turned down all invitations to lecture on his work outside of Japan. Most
mathematicians who attempted to read the papers got nowhere and soon
abandoned the effort.

For three years, the theory languished. Finally, this year, during the week
of December 7, some of the most prominent mathematicians in the world gathered
at the Clay Mathematical Institute at Oxford
 in the most
significant attempt thus far to make sense of what Mochizuki had done. Minhyong
Kim
,
a mathematician at Oxford and one of the three organizers of the
conference, explains that the attention was overdue.

“People are getting impatient, including me, including [Mochizuki], and it
feels like certain people in the mathematical community have a
responsibility to do something about this,” Kim said. “We do owe it to
ourselves and, personally as a friend, I feel like I owe it to Mochizuki as
well.”

The conference featured three days of preliminary lectures and two days of
talks on IUT theory, including a culminating lecture on the fourth paper,
where the proof of *abc*is said to arise. Few entered the week expecting to
leave with a complete understanding of Mochizuki’s work or a clear verdict
on the proof.  What they did hope to achieve was a sense of the strength of
Mochizuki’s work. They wanted to be convinced that the proof contains
powerful new ideas that would reward further exploration.
[image: Shinichi Mochizuki]

[silk] Silk for Silklist

[John Sundman]

Last Thursday I gave a talk at the Silklab at Tufts University.

The reason for the Lab’s existence is that silk is a remarkable substance with 
remarkable properties and remarkable potential that is only beginning to be 
explored. They are doing wacky stuff with silk at the SilkLab, everything from 
making biodegradable coffee cups to artificial bone to implantable devices for 
delivering drugs. 

Here’s a link to the Silklab page:

http://ase.tufts.edu/biomedical/unolab/home.html 


And here’s a TED talk by the Silklab’s founder and director, Fiorenzo Omenetto, 
on “Silk, the ancient material of the future”:

http://www.ted.com/talks/fiorenzo_omenetto_silk_the_ancient_material_of_the_future?language=en
 


Here’s a TEDx talk on what it is to be a “Fab Labs and Global Learning" by 
Jean-Michel Molenaar, who until recently ran a maker lab in Grenoble, France:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCH6F87Rbps

Perhaps the list would like to extend an invitation to a few people of the 
Silklab? I think, for example, that profs Omenetto and Molenaar would be worth 
additions. 

Regards,

jrs

P.S. The lab has decided to create a small seminar series (which they’re 
calling “Cocoon”) to encourage discussion about “What’s Next?” Because a few 
people at the lab are fans of my novels, I was the first invited speaker. I 
attach the flyer below. 

Re: [silk] silklist Digest, Vol 77, Issue 6

[Udhay Shankar N]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 10:36 PM, Dave Long  wrote:

There is no Hari to achieve things
>>
>
> Is Deepatience dee mother of virtue?


​De Pontification is the outcome of virtue, usually.​

​Udhay​
-- 

((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))

[silk] Luck Matters More Than You Might Think

[Udhay Shankar N]

This strikes a chord. I work with early stage technology entrepreneurs, and
have done for over 2 decades (this includes the dot.com boom, a period that
has special relevance to this topic) I have come across several people who,
through some confluence of circumstances, have made a lot of money. The
temptation (including for the people involved) is to imagine this is
because they were smart. This is almost certainly not true, as can easily
be demonstrated by the fact that there are always many other people who are
demonstrably at least as smart who have not succeeded.

Thoughts?

Udhay

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/why-luck-matters-more-than-you-might-think/476394/

Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think

When people see themselves as self-made, they tend to be less generous and
public-spirited.

ROBERT H. FRANK  MAY 2016 ISSUE   BUSINESS

I’m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good
fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was
playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell
psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I
complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying
motionless on the court.

He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my
chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained
to do. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless
with no pulse. Very shortly, an ambulance showed up.

Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than
five miles away. How did this one arrive so quickly? By happenstance, just
before I collapsed, ambulances had been dispatched to two separate auto
accidents close to the tennis center. Since one of them involved no serious
injuries, an ambulance was able to peel off and travel just a few hundred
yards to me. EMTs put electric paddles on my chest and rushed me to our
local hospital. There, I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to a larger
hospital in Pennsylvania, where I was placed on ice overnight.

Doctors later told me that I’d suffered an episode of sudden cardiac
arrest. Almost 90 percent of people who experience such episodes don’t
survive, and the few who do are typically left with significant
impairments. And for three days after the event, my family tells me, I
spoke gibberish. But on day four, I was discharged from the hospital with a
clear head. Two weeks later, I was playing tennis with Tom again.

If that ambulance hadn’t happened to have been nearby, I would be dead.

Not all random events lead to favorable outcomes, of course. Mike Edwards
is no longer alive because chance frowned on him. Edwards, formerly a
cellist in the British pop band the Electric Light Orchestra, was driving
on a rural road in England in 2010 when a 1,300-pound bale of hay rolled
down a steep hillside and landed on his van, crushing him. By all accounts,
he was a decent, peaceful man. That a bale of hay snuffed out his life was
bad luck, pure and simple.

Most people will concede that I’m fortunate to have survived and that
Edwards was unfortunate to have perished. But in other arenas, randomness
can play out in subtler ways, causing us to resist explanations that
involve luck. In particular, many of us seem uncomfortable with the
possibility that personal success might depend to any significant extent on
chance. As E. B. White once wrote, “Luck is not something you can mention
in the presence of self-made men.”

Seeing ourselves as self-made leads us to be less generous and
public-spirited.
My having cheated death does not make me an authority on luck. But it has
motivated me to learn much more about the subject than I otherwise would
have. In the process, I have discovered that chance plays a far larger role
in life outcomes than most people realize. And yet, the luckiest among us
appear especially unlikely to appreciate our good fortune. According to the
Pew Research Center, people in higher income brackets are much more likely
than those with lower incomes to say that individuals get rich primarily
because they work hard. Other surveys bear this out: Wealthy people
overwhelmingly attribute their own success to hard work rather than to
factors like luck or being in the right place at the right time.

That’s troubling, because a growing body of evidence suggests that seeing
ourselves as self-made—rather than as talented, hardworking, and
lucky—leads us to be less generous and public-spirited. It may even make
the lucky less likely to support the conditions (such as high-quality
public infrastructure and education) that made their own success possible.

Happily, though, when people are prompted to reflect on their good fortune,
they become much more willing to contribute to the common good.

Psychologists use the term hindsight bias to describe our tendency to
think, after the fact, that an event was predictable even when it wasn’t.
This 

Re: [silk] silklist Digest, Vol 77, Issue 6

[Deepa Mohan]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 1:34 AM, Thaths  wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 3:07 AM Dave Long  wrote:
>
>> > There is no Hari to achieve things
>> Is Deepatience dee mother of virtue?
>>
>
> Long have I waited for such a thread. Da've been few such ones in silklist
> for a while.

Thaths true, I must say.

Re: [silk] silklist Digest, Vol 77, Issue 6

[Thaths]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 3:07 AM Dave Long  wrote:

> > There is no Hari to achieve things
> Is Deepatience dee mother of virtue?
>

Long have I waited for such a thread. Da've been few such ones in silklist
for a while.

Thaths

Re: [silk] silklist Digest, Vol 77, Issue 6

[Dave Long]

There is no Hari to achieve things


Is Deepatience dee mother of virtue?

-Dave