Yeah, most people probably underestimate the effect that several things have on where they end up in life: education, self discipline, hard work, making good decisions, persistence, and, especially, chance. If you screw up majorly on any the factors under your control, you dramatically reduce your chances of “the good life.” But, even if you do all of them right, you are still at the mercy of chance. Get born in the wrong year or at the wrong place or into the wrong family or with the wrong genetics and that's all it takes to set you up for a hard life.
The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.
This whole thing is one of those fruitless arguments about a badly defined notion of "most people".
For instance the scope of the "especially chance" assertion has strange effects. Does "get born in the wrong year" include 300,000 years of human history? In that case chance has very little effect. You're overwhelming likely to grow up using stone tools, with a 1 in 3 chance of also having access to pottery.
But that would be silly and obviously wasn't the intended question. The intended question is one that's closer to home, a question that we care about. But how much closer to which home, and what exactly is the scope of the question? It can be made less about luck by filtering out the unlucky from the scope.
> education
eh, i kinda disagree on this. in the era of information being so abundant there's so much you can learn on your own.
sure you won't become a surgeon but there are so many other things you can learn and get a job.
and this is true even without having AI in the picture.
Most of life is luck, with regards to success and economic prosperity. We’ve built a system that ignores that for the benefit of a privileged few, using fairy tales around exceptionalism and faux meritocracy. We should build socioeconomic systems where luck is less a component for survival and living a good life, imho. I think we’re on our way there (support of democratic socialism and their candidates is at record highs, mostly around the young, and the old age out at a rate of 2M per year 55+ [higher support of capitalism because they were lucky under it]), but it’s going to take another decade or two to see the improvements (political cycles, electorate turnover, policy implementation lag, etc.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 (citations)