Luck is Other People's Work
[now available in audio, thanks to AskWho!]
No Will, Just Luck
When answering “why am I so fortunate?” some very intelligent folks (eg Sam Harris) come away with the answer “just lucky!” This then leads them to reject the idea of Agency entirely, proclaiming that “Humans don’t have free will.” Argument goes:
Did I choose my genes? Nope, I’m lucky and got the good ones that make me smart/attractive/healthy/etc
Did I choose my starting wealth? Nope, I’m lucky my parents made the median income (or better) in a developed country.
Did I choose to have good parents that raised me fairly well and cared for my education? Nope, no one chooses their parents, I’m lucky I got good ones!
Did I choose the formative experiences that molded me into the type of person I am, who is adjusted enough to modern society to live decently within it? Nope, most of those were imposed on me by others. The ones that I “chose” were chosen by a “me” that is defined by my genes, starting circumstances, upbringing, and previous experiences in life—none of which I chose! Anyone molecularly identical to me with identical circumstances and identical timeline would do the exact same.
Therefore everything is basically luck, and free will is a clever illusion because all those things were determined before I could make any “free” decisions.
The Super Secret Hidden Source of Luck
Let’s ignore that luck is a thing you can make more of for now and just focus on “why am I so fortunate?” I know exactly why I’m so fortunate.
When I was a few months old my parents quietly sold everything they owned, packed up a couple suitcases of clothes, and snuck across the border out of Soviet Poland, taking refuge in Germany. Years later they petitioned the American refugee program built for people escaping Soviet countries for admission. They twice abandoned almost everything they had and everyone they knew to start over in a foreign country, working menial labor. They then reskilled and re-leveled-up in their new country.
I had nothing to do with this, which one might say is “luck” for baby-Eneasz. But you’d only say that if you were intentionally blinding yourself to the risk, sacrifice, and grinding hard work that my parents put towards getting my ass into the country that rewards effort and value-creation more readily than any other country on earth, which just happens to be the richest country on earth as well. To say this was “luck” is an insult to my parents. Whatever other missteps they may have made in raising me, their decision to sink everything into getting us into the USA overwhelmed all of them combined. My “luck” is actually just the manifestation of their effort.
Early life experiences, physical environment, social environment—many of these were highly dependent on my parent’s choices too. That looks like luck only if one pretends my parents are directly causally responsible for huge swaths of this.
I may be lucky that I have these parents, but I don’t owe any of that to “luck”, I owe it to my parents.
Everyone else who considers themselves lucky because they had fortunate life experiences, physical environments, social support, etc… did you not have ancestors? Are you not descendant from a line of humans that created the conditions you find yourself in? Isn’t that sort of specific directed action by your predecessors the opposite of luck? Attributing it to “luck” is a denial of their struggle and even their very existence.
Yes, I have some good genes too. I’m several sigma above average in intelligence and height, and (allegedly) in general attractiveness, all of which is highly gene-dependent. But the genes I got are heavily influenced by the good judgement or good instincts of my ancestors when choosing mating-partners. I owe a great deal of my gratitude not to “luck” but to picky, well-discriminating ancestors! (Who also knew enough to not discriminate so hard that they ended up with no mate at all).1
To ignore the contribution of the people who set me up for a whole bushel of winning lottery tickets is kinda disrespectful. I suspect a heckin’ lot of people who find themselves in good places in their lives can attribute some fraction of that to “my (grand/)parent found him/herself a really astounding genetic prospect for mating and jumped on that shit with a quickness, possibly going to great lengths to secure it!”
Born In The USA
I was moved to the USA. Many people are just born here by default. It feels very lucky to be born in the richest country on the planet. It’s not like it was your choice or anything.
This, again, puts oneself as the center of humanity. “I’m so lucky to be born here” is an extremely ego-centric statement. It was lucky for the infant to be born in a rich country the same way it was lucky for the infant to be born to good parents — meaning that actually it’s just the result of a LOT of work by someone else that is conveniently ignoring this so the credit can be given to the quasi-supernatural entity of Luck.
I said earlier that America just happened to be both the richest country and the country that rewards effort and value-creation more readily than any other country. That was a lie. This isn’t a coincidence, it’s direct cause-and-effect. It’s the effect of having certain laws and customs that valorize effort and ingenuity, protect its rewards, embrace technology, more effectively allocate resources, and punish defection. America is rich because a lot of people in the recent past made some very good decisions (on net) about how a society & government should be run. Even those of us randomly born here aren’t here because of dumb luck, we’re here due to specific direct actions taken by our ancestors.
I use the term “ancestor” a bit less technically here. I was born in Poland, my lineage doesn’t go anywhere near the US. But in taking the USA for my new homeland I have adopted the people who created and shaped this nation as my cultural/intellectual ancestors, as they provided me with the world I now inhabit. I owe gratitude to them directly.
Likewise for anyone born in a developed country. Your country isn’t an accident, it is the result of labor and striving and tears.
Ancestor Worship Had Some Merit
Obviously ancestor worship was taken too far in many cases. But we’ve gone beyond just not worshipping our ancestors. We have done our best to erase them from our spiritual narrative2 entirely. We have gone so far that we attribute the wealth of our society to “being lucky in birth” rather than acknowledge the labors of our predecessors. We’d rather say “I was lucky to be born to loving, attentive parents” than to say “my life is good because my parents sacrificed and made some good choices and I venerate them for this.”3
We’ve gone so far that the most good and caring among us don’t even see that they’re doing this. They honestly and with goodness in their hearts believe that the most moral position, and the factually correct position, is to proclaim their unbelievable luck, that nothing separates them from the less fortunate but the whims of chance, that all are equally humbled before God, and this is what makes them Not Superior to anyone else.
When we humbly proclaim we are as nothing but for luck, we are desecrating our ancestors. Some of them are still here to watch it happening. We don’t owe everything to older generations, some of us may owe them very little indeed, and we certainly must strictly refuse the eternal guilt of infinite debt… but at the very least we owe them the acknowledgement that they helped create all the luck we currently wallow in. Some of them deserve to be cursed for the bad luck they carelessly heaped upon their children. Others of them deserve to be venerated for the good luck they gifted us with. Both the curse and the veneration of forms of worship, and we could stand to bring back just a bit of ancestor worship into our lives.
[Edit: There is now a follow-up post - The Lies of Rawls]
Also the expression of my genes is based at least in part by choices my parents made (again) to prioritize my nutrition and health above almost everything.
Recall that spirituality is the sense and fact of being part of something greater than one’s individual life. It is being a part of something that is physically large, stretching across space, and temporally large, stretching across time. To remove one’s ancestors is to cripple the temporal aspect of spirituality by ripping out a major integration into past generations of time.
Caveat - of course blind luck is still a major force in all our lives. We do get crap genes sometimes. We do randomly run into people who turn out to change our lives forever in a fluke encounter. We do or don’t get cancers with very little control. I’m not saying luck literally doesn’t exist. It’s real, and it’s important, and you can create it some amount of it. I am thankful for all the luck was created for me by others. I wish to continue this cycle by creating luckier conditions for others, especially in my future.
I have a friend or two who believe in manifesting. Once or twice, I have gotten them gifts, and they have said something like, "I manifested this." And every time they have said this, I have looked them in the eye and said, "No, you jerk--I did," if only to remind them that my thoughtfulness and care had perhaps a liiiiiiiittle something to do with it.
So I take your point about giving credit where credit is due, and attributing outcomes to "luck" can definitely be a way of failing to acknowledge hard work, intelligence, care, thoughtfulness, productive social and cultural values, effective social institutions, etc.
On the other hand, I'm extremely skeptical of your views of causality here, and I think that "luck" is not incompatible with a more realistic view of causality. Take feedback loops like technological lock-in, for example. In the 80's, VHS tapes beat betamax tapes because they had only a slight edge on the market (including, importantly, an edge in video-rental stores) which quickly compounded into an extremely large edge. Perhaps this slight initial edge had to do with the business savvy of VHS-makers, or maybe they just happened to know the right people whereas the makers of betamax did not; in either case, these VHS-makers (and assumedly their ancestors) benefitted significantly from this slight advantage due to lock-in, a phenomena over which they had no control and, I imagine, did not consciously anticipate in their decision-making.
Examples of technological lock-in abound--and I assume that first-past-the-post effects operate very similarly--and I imagine that at least some of the people (and their ancestors) who reap the rewards of these phenomena owe these rewards more to luck than to intellectual or motivational virtue.
Again, I'm not against giving credit where credit is due, but I think we should be very skeptical of falling prey to the fundamental attribution bias when thinking about where to give credit for any of the supposed "luck" we currently enjoy (whether individually or socially). Even more so, I think that "luck" is a useful concept if we use it to refer to the rewards that we and our ancestors enjoy for reasons that are at least partially beyond them exercising their intellectual, motivational, and/or socio-cultural virtues.
I know you address this in your caveat, but I think a lot of what people mean when they talk about luck is luck compared to people for a very similar reference class. Why did this podcast / webfic / noodle shop blow up and become popular compared to dozens of others on which people work equally as hard.
AI reading of this article:
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/luck-is-other-peoples-work-by-eneasz