It's a classic story, your average millionaire tells their story of how they had a life of struggling and subsequently overcame such struggles and went on to become a (multi-)millionaire.  "What a great story" everyone says.  But why does it happen, and why does it happen so often?

The easy answer: Survivorship bias.  What happened to the rest of the regiment in the army*?  What happened to the other homeless people on the streets?  They all suffered, struggled and died out, or went on to live mediocre enough lives that they didn't write about their experiences.  Surely there are more millionaires that write about their "story" than people who went through adversity writing about their story...

But is that enough?  Does that explain it?  It certainly would explain a few millionaires.  Also what about your average not-suffering human.  Middle class, ordinary income, is there something about suffering and risk-taking that they should want to do?  Telling someone to give up their job and live on the streets for a month just to know what suffering "feels like", in the hope of going on to become a millionaire...  Sounds like a terrible idea!  And good luck selling a book with that kind of advice.

So what is it about suffering that we should care about?  What can we learn from all these stories if not "survivorship bias is a strong, show-stopping applause light"?

Coping Mechanisms

One thing that hardship gives you, other than a great story is the mental ability to say, "something really bad happened and I survived", and consequently, "I can survive the next really bad event".  The future is likely to have all sorts of ups and downs.  There will always be bad days with car accidents, days where you nearly get fired, or lose the big deal.  There will also be great days!  Days where you make the deal, every plan executes successfully, you get the rewards you were striving for, it seems like you were just lucky...

When you have a coping mechanism you can walk through bad days like water off a duck's back, then you can take the good days and use them to climb and grow as if the bad days weren't even there.

The next question is; How can one develop coping mechanisms without voluntarily undergoing hardship? (with exercises like CoZE, or voluntarily experiencing discomfort just to see what it feels like, but I don't think that's key)

What do you think?

*I disagree with some of the message in that link and hope to publish a rewrite soon.

Meta: this took 30 minutes to write, and I composed it as a private email to someone; I am going to try new writing methods in the hope of giving myself and easier path to writing.  I have been thinking about this the idea for months, and the problem with adversity-to-success stories.  Thanks to Sam and Seph for being two local lw'ers who influenced my thoughts on the idea.

My Table of contents contains my other writing.

Note: Eugine is at the downvotes again.

Thoughts inspired by Yvain's philosophical role-playing post.

Thomas Nagel produced a famous philosophical thought experiment "What Is It Like to Be A Bat?" In it, he argued that the reductionist understanding of consciousness was insufficient, since there exists beings - bats - that have conscious experiences that humans cannot understand. We cannot know what "it is like to be a bat", and looking reductively at bat brains, bat neurones, or the laws of physics, cannot (allegedly) grant us any understanding of this subjective experience. Therefore there remains an unavoidable subjective component to the problem of consciousness.

I won't address this issue directly (see for instance this, on the closely related subject of qualia), but instead look at the question: suppose someone told us that they actually knew what it was like to be a bat (as well as what it was like to be a human). Call such a being a vampire, for obvious reasons. So if someone claimed they were a vampire, how would we test this?

We can't simply ask them to describe what it's like to be a bat - it's perfectly possible they know what it's like to be a bat, but cannot describe it in human terms (just as we often fail to describe certain types of experiences to those who haven't experienced them). Could we run a sort of Turing test - maybe implant the putative vampire's brain into a bat body, and see how bat-like it behaved? But, as Nagel pointed out, this could be a test of whether they know how to behave like a bat behaves, not whether they know what it's like to be a bat.

I posit that one possible solution is to use the approach laid out in my post "the flawed Turing test". We need to pay attention as to how the "vampire" got their knowledge. If the vampire is a renown expert on bat behaviour and social interactions, who is also interested in sonar and paragliding - then them functioning as a bat is weak evidence as to them actually knowing what it is like to be a bat. But suppose instead that their knowledge comes from another source - maybe the vampire is a renown brain expert, who has grappled with philosophy of mind and spent many years examining the functioning of bat brains. But, crucially, they have never seen a full living bat in the wild or in the lab, they've never watched a natural documentary on bats, they've never even seen a photo of a bat. In that case, if they behave correctly when transplanted into a bat body, then it's strong evidence of them actually understanding what it's like to be a bat.

Similarly, maybe they got their knowledge after a long conversation with another "vampire". We have the recording of the conversation, and it's all about mental states, imagery, emotional descriptions and visualisation exercises - but not about physical descriptions or bat behaviour. In that case, as above, if they can function successfully as a bat, this is evidence of them really "getting it".

In summary, we can say "that person likely knows what it is like to be a bat" if "knowing what it's like to be a bat" is the most likely explanation for what we see. If they behave exactly like a bat when in a bat body, and we know they have no prior experience that teaches them how to behave like a bat (but a lot about the bat's mental states), then we can conclude that it's likely that they genuinely know what it's like to be a bat, and are implementing this knowledge, rather than imitating behaviour.