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Robin comments on Rationality Quotes December 2014 - Less Wrong
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"Don’t let anybody discourage you or tell you that intelligence doesn’t pay or that success in life has to be achieved through dishonesty or through sheer blind luck. That is not true. Real success is never accidental and real happiness cannot be found except by the honest use of your intelligence."
Ayn Rand
Too strong.
Nobody EVER got successful from luck? Not even people born billionaires or royalty?
Nobody can EVER be happy without using intelligence? Only if you're using some definition of happiness that includes a term like "Philosophical fulfillment" or some such, which makes the issue tautological.
I don't think you're applying the negation correctly; "not every success was from luck" means "at least one success was not from luck." Similarly, if you broaden your viewpoint to before the moment of someone's birth, it seems silly to claim that it's an accident that they were born a billionaire or royalty; it's not like their ancestors put no planning into acquiring their wealth or their titles.
Not really; this is a nontrivial empirical claim that turns out to be correct. People with solid philosophical grounding are measurably happier (on standard psychological surveys of happiness) than people without.
I didn't read that as a negation of "success in life has to be achieved... through sheer blind luck" but rather of "real success is never accidental". Both, of course, are descriptively false (at least for values of "real" that don't bake in the conclusion), though as a normative statement I'd rate the former as much more problematic.
That was the impression I had. Yes, Rand is making the normative claim that 'accidental' success is not 'real,' and that 'happiness' acquired in ways other than 'honest use of your intelligence' is not 'real,' but those seem like fine normative claims to me.
They sound like no true Scotsman to me. And they make the whole thing tautological. Would you consider it worth quoting if she said "nobody ever achieves anything by luck, except for the times they get lucky"? Or "happiness is only achieved through honest use of your intelligence if it's achieved through honest use of your intelligence"?
Some people hold the view that all normative claims are either tautological or false. Does that describe you, or can you provide an example of a normative statement that you consider true and non-tautological?
In the second case, I'm happy to discuss underlying value systems and the similarities or differences. In the first, I don't think I'm interested in discussing whether or not value systems should be communicated through normative claims.
Did you read what you linked to?
Where is the counterexample? Success refers to an abstract concept. Luck and success are different things. Luck usually contributes to success, but luck usually implies undeserved success. So successful people get lucky, but on average everybody gets lucky sometimes. The quote encourages people to focus on the things in which luck plays a minor factor. That's what intelligence is for, intelligence is not for optimizing luck.
And yes, that does make it tautological. So what?
The counterexample is the many people who have succeeded through luck. Everybody gets lucky sometimes, but they might not get lucky on the really important things. If you're born to a poor family in Africa, the law of large numbers is not going to make up for this setback.
Given what I know if Ayn Rand, I'm inclined to think that the quote is suggesting that successful people deserve to be successful, so you shouldn't take their money and give it to unsuccessful people.
That's not an example, it's a claim with no evidence to support it. Give me an example of a person who has succeeded with only luck. There are about seven billion candidates so it shouldn't be hard to select one.
What is really important is subjective.
Time will tell. African people often have different values than non-African people. Their value of success probably isn't the same as your's.
It seems like what you know about Ayn Rand comes from textbook propaganda. Nothing you've said has convinced me you've read thousands of pages of what she wrote.
This isn't an unreasonable assumption. But it's incorrect. Money is just one factor in success. Ayn Rand realized that, which is why her books are still read today and why most authors of her day (all of whom are now dead) don't have books which sell in large numbers.
James Harrison is the first example that leaps to my mind. His blood plasma contains a unique antibody which can be used to treat Rhesus disease, which seems like a near-perfect example of pure luck: neither he nor his parents nor anyone earned those antibodies in any useful sense of the word. He just coincidentally discovered that he had them. His lifetime blood donations are estimated to have treated two million children.
Now, James Harrison surely gets some credit for his. He has, after all, donated blood a thousand times, which is far better than most of us. And he made a pledge to start donating blood before he learned about his antibodies!
But a thousand blood donations, if you don't happen to have unique biology, will be multiple orders of magnitude less effective at helping people than James Harrison was, for the same effort. To find people as successful in their goal of helping others as James Harrison, you have to look far beyond "people who donate blood regularly". Perhaps Bill Gates, having become one of the richest men alive and then dedicating his life to charity, can claim to have accomplished more?
When blind luck can put some random guy in the same league as the world's top altruist, it seems unreasonable to claim that literally nobody succeeds primarily through luck or by accident.
So? Whatever you subjectively consider really important, you can get unlucky on those things. Also, some things like "not starving to death" or "not constantly being in pain" are subjectively important to basically everyone, and some get unlucky on these too.
The annual US GDP per capita is $55,036. For Somalia, it's $145. I cannot give you a specific example of someone who succeeded by luck, but I can assure you that successful people are not born in the US by chance.
As of 2005, there were 2.6 billion people who lived on the equivalent of under $2 per day [source]. What possible values could they have where that could be considered success?
But not everybody wins sometimes the lottery.
Is that supposed to be funny? The fact that you have a computer means you have won something. I'd be willing to guess that more technologies will emerge and you'll use them. That's like winning a lottery. But you don't get more successful unless you make intelligent decisions. Stupid decisions are punished, there are exceptions to this...
But seriously, lottery is a loaded term. It's often used as a metaphor for 'capitalist trick' (which smart people avoid).
The idea that thing average out depend on the assumption of success being due to a lot of independent events.
Computer simulations of markets with trades of equal skill have no problem to produce the kind of difference in financial results that the traders we observe in reality produce.
The fact that some authors write books that are more popular than the book of other authors is explainable without difference in skill or book quality.
in a Pickwickian sense everybody does, only their payoffs varies