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lejend wrote:You're just making excuses. Whether I'm "privileged" is irrelevant and doesn't disprove anything I said.
I'm not making excuses. I'm trying to explain to you that there is a whole part of the picture which you are ignoring. And you are ignorant of this part because your privilige has sheltered you from it, and therefore you belie it not to exist. So you being priviliged is very relevant, because just like the guy in the story you seem to think it all comes down to your own hard work, and while that is definitely a necessary component for success, it's not and never has been sufficient. But thats something you cant accept because then youll have to adjust that precious self-image. You dont seem to realise that while its pointless to blame others for your (mis)fortune, that doesnt mean you cant acknowledge that they had any influence, which they undeniably did.
XeeleeFlower wrote:Wow, this thread has certainly derailed. Classic ESOC
@umeu and @lejend I see both points of view and I think that both can get along. Here's the thing, I was dealt a fairly shitty hand. I don't care to go into specifics so you'll have to take my word for it. Nonetheless, I worked really hard since I was 16, left home and all that I knew at 18, and eventually went to college, graduated, and am now doing okay. Bias can easily tell me that because I did it, anyone can. In fact, I once believed this. But the truth is, while I wasn't given much of a chance to make it in the real world, I lucked out in other ways. I also work(ed) hard. Someone else may have been given a shitty hand, still work hard, but not have any luck and/or privileges so they can't get anywhere, another person may be given a great hand, work hard, have luck and/or privileges so they get somewhere, etc.
To not place any responsibility on an individual is incorrect, just as to place all responsibility on an individual is also incorrect. That's how I feel anyway.
Thats pretty much precisely what i said a few posts back. Im not taking responsibility away, but lejenda is just telling that seme retarded fairy tale everyone but those who most definitely never achieved anything on their own but still are succesful believe. Its the story people like trump tell, that hes a self made man while inheriting a couple hundred million dollars
A post somewhat related to this discussion that I read a few years ago on another forum and find very true. It applies to a significant part of the population in my opinion.
[spoiler=long post]Here goes a book... and not because I need to defend myself, but because I think I have a perspective a lot of people can relate to but can't necessarily put their finger on. I don't look down on "ordinary" people. I am an ordinary person. I just have a general distaste for ignorance, laziness and entitlement. The last of which is all too prevalent on Wall Street, as well as other places. And your "average" person is all of the above. They are lazy from adolescence and beyond. They spend their formative years picking their nose and smoking pot. Once they reach a certain age they are forced to do something. Maybe they get a college degree, but most don't. They work in sales at a cable company, as a manager at a warehouse or in corporate offices at an electronics company. It has nothing to do with their job or what they do. In fact, they chose their particular profession because thats what happened to wander in their direction. This is all fine. I have no beef with it, nor should anyone really give a shit if someone does have beef with it. Everyone has their own priorities and makes their choices accordingly. There's nothing wrong with choosing a less financially lucrative career if that's just not as important to you as say spending time with your family or reading literature or traveling or even sitting on the couch watching college football. To each his own.
My issue is the lazy useless people -- who are a subset of the population, but are representative of the average person -- who have a feeling of entitlement and a 'what about me' mentality. This is why people are sued over stupid bullshit. This is why when someone wins the lottery or has some other windfall family/friends start coming out of the woodwork with their expectant hands out. Then you come to things like record oil company profits, wall street bonuses etc... the average American has absolutely no understanding of the actual issues and complexity surround them yet has a barrel full of opinions they're dying to express. Not because they contributed something that isn't being recognized or acknowledged... but because someone else is doing well and they are there to say "what about me, why am I not doing well? It must be because the system is unfair. I'm being exploited."
"Main street" as people call it, is still completely clueless to the fact that wall street "Bonuses" are not actual bonuses per se. Its largely a misnomer and what everyone refers to as a bonus is mostly accrued salary. No analyst is going to work 100 hrs a week for 50-70K a year. And no Senior banker is going to work for 300K where they could actually be making a multiple of that if they were working in another capacity, such as a C-level executive of a major corporation. Part of the bonus is in fact a bonus. But to be up in arms because someone made a "Bonus" in a non-profitable year is demonstrative of a lack of understanding of the industry. There has been an uproar about bonuses even before the financial crisis. It made the front cover of the news papers 2 or 3 years ago when GS had record bonuses. Yet I do agree that there are serious flaws in the system and share concern in some of the criticisms going around.
Wall Street compensation is what it is for a few reasons in particular:
1- it's a very competitive field with only the most accomplished (i.e. best schools, best grades, best experience) being hired
2- you make a significant lifestyle sacrifice, at ALL levels Analyst to MD
3- it's a high pressure job; most of the people on this forum don't realize the full magnitude of this because we are tuned to work in this type of field. Most people go through the motions expending minimal effort at work, it is IMPOSSIBLE to do that in this field.
4- There is a huge amount of risk to working in this field. There is a huge degree of volatility in hiring/firing, NOTHING is guaranteed. You have the least job security of any other professional field hands down. Even in an ideal economy from the day you start working, its only a 2 year program, then you're jobless again. Then you land another gig, but guess what thats 2 year program also, then you're jobless again. At a more senior level, obviously the finite programs aren't the case, but the lack of job security surely is.
The public sees Wall Streeter's making bank and they don't want to hear any of the above reasons. They bitch and complain when their boss asks them to stick around past 5:30 but they somehow see big Wall Street bonuses and feel like they're being had... like someone is taking THEIR piece of the pie.
I don't think I'm gods gift to earth because I work in IBD. I actually don't think there is anything exceptionally difficult about it, nor do I think it alone says anything about you. Anyone with average intelligence and above average ambition can do it. Some of the people I've met would even lead one to believe anyone even with below average intelligence, below average ambition and enough social pressure can do it. But regardless of whether I went into IBD, the Peace Corps, BigLaw, entrepreneurship, engineering, philosophy, academia, I would be just as passionate and driven in what I do and I would find it just as rewarding and if one day I woke up I didn't, I would not look for someone else to point the finger at. There are people who are college professors, grade school teachers, office secretaries, cab drivers, waiters, steel workers, train conductors etc... and they choose this path because they have a different set of priorities. I don't think I'm better than them because I make more money or because I wear a suit to work. I respect people who have self-respect and are true to themselves and aren't trying to sell themselves a bill of goods on why the world isn't a fair place (which its not, but this country is the best you'll get) and that's why they're not happy.
Your average person is unambitious. They spend their lives believing that they ARE different... they ARE smarter than everyone else, there is something special about them that makes them different. They go through the motions in life thinking '"I'm smart, I can do whatever I want to do if I really want to do it" then one day, they wake up... they're married to a spouse they partially resent and they have a job they absolutely despise... its then that they realize they actually CANT, they ARE like everyone else... and not because they were born that way, but because their choices made them who they are today. They are where they are because they spent the better part of their life being lazy and expecting something spectacular to happen to them because they 'deserve' it. Rather than embracing reality, they cling to crutches offered to them by politicians who want their vote and convince themselves that they COULD have achieved their dreams, but they were short-changed, they were exploited. It's a broken system run by corrupt thieves. The rich are getting richer at their expense.
That's my view. You can think its immature if you like. I have this view, among other reasons, because many of my best friends are of this persuasion, I know them well, I've known them well for a long time. We came from the same place, we ended up in largely different places... with the only difference being hard work.[/spoiler]
"Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, bait the hook with prestige." - Paul Graham
The comic i posted shows that two people working equally hard will not be equally succesful. So obviously hard work is not the only factor.
Lets take messi, no one can deny hes worked very hard to be the best, but he was also born with incredible talent. Nobody can deny he and his family made huge sacrifices to accomodate his success, yet had messi been born 50 years earlier, they couldve done exactly the same and he never wouldve succeeded because the technology needed for his surgery was not yet developed. So timing matters. Had his parents not been able or willing to sacrifice all for this kids hopes, for example because they had other kids or responsibilities, then messi may never have been. Had he been born into even less favorable circumstances and had to work day and night om a farm as a kid to survive, he may never have discovered his talent. So circumstances matter. Ofcourse all things being equal, as you say it was with your friends, then hard work will set you apart from the rest. But the point is all things are not equal. Some things are inherently unequal, granted, but some things are unecessarily so. And people who for some reason choose to ignore that are helping maintain that inequality.
Shit, just post some studies instead of comics if you want to make a point. Childrens' parental origins, including parental socioeconomic status, is an obvious determining factor in that child's life, including their own socioeconomic status and general well-being. Of course life isn't fair, le legenddddd, that's the fucking point of having more liberal social policies to help these individuals out.
Just type something along the lines of "parental income effect on child well being" or something into google scholar and you'll find quite a lot of studies on this topic.
I bought a pair of glasses from goodwill and punched out their lenses just so I can push them further up my nose as I post studies to a video game forum arguing about political policies that are ultimately pretty inconsequential.
Ah you are looking at it the wrong way. This is my training ground for when i ascend to politics, i will atleast have years of experience debating with noobretards!
umeu wrote:Ah you are looking at it the wrong way. This is my training ground for when i ascend to politics, i will atleast have years of experience debating with noobretards!
Can't be that fucking hard. I already fantasize how I would answer questions asked during presidential candidacy season in the US but they all eventual devolve into, "well I don't really know so that's why I'm better than the person who thinks they really know."
If I ever amount to anything it'll actually be entirely due to the privilege I've been born with. I'm not kidding. I'm an attractive, tall, Caucasian male born into upper middle class. I'll graduate college debt free. Anytime I've ever been in trouble with the law it's been a warning. Warnings here warnings there. I've received shitloads of warnings. I've been pulled over roughly six or seven times, I can't keep count. No tickets, not even after driving dangerously fast and even obviously under the influence. My life is so easy, people cut me so much fucking slack because I am who I am and I'm reasonably personable. I've had every late assignment extended. And that sentence alone encompasses the extent of the stress I experience. I've never been forced into a compromising situation. My worries are trivial. It's come to the point where I've started thinking the world actually works for me. I can't really think of any serious case of "rotten luck" I've had. Nothing has actually went wrong for me. I've never worried financially. My parents are a constant source of support that I could even abuse if I so chose to. My grandparents, as well. I was born with possibly one of the best hands that can be dealt. I can't imagine anything else. And surely I can't imagine starting from one of those truly rotten hands. Why wouldn't I want to share some of my absurdly easy lifestyle with those who's only shot in this short life is riddled with strife at every point? With people who can never catch a break? Who are blamed for their uncontrollable circumstances?
It's an obvious case of possessing simple empathy.
deleted_user wrote:If I ever amount to anything it'll actually be entirely due to the privilege I've been born with. I'm not kidding. I'm an attractive
Yeah they are touching on origins here, and make the point that all this information in the universe is either random or came from some place outside of it. That is a good point, but to me it doesn't show that our universe isn't deterministic. To me it shows that there is something beyond our universe. I don't necessarily agree that the amount of information in our universe is increasing, but if it is then that new information is coming from outside of it.
If the info in our universe is increasing (and let's go with the theory of the dude in the vid): if quantum states are theoretically unpredictable to any entity in this universe because the information simply isn't there, which I suppose is possible, I would argue that the information is being inserted from somewhere outside of our scope of reality. Imagine a computer simulation of a universe. As a human in that universe, would you ever be able to know that all you are is code? No. If we were living in a simulation, we would never know, and the information contained in the big bang will seem entirely random to us while in fact it is not. Now what if that running code is inserting new information into the universe as we speak? What if QM is where we see this happen? We cannot predict it because the information is coming from a place we can't observe. And what if the inevitable pattern (after all, it's deterministic) this program uses is what governs the way atoms interact with each other, ultimately creating all of our laws of nature?
And what if this state of existence that we are part of is just one of the possible ways to be? What if, in reality, everything exists? Every possible set of information is there, but when you measure it you can only see one?
I'm not saying either of these things are the case, just that there are ways a deterministic universe still fits.
@Goodspeed I didn't actually mean to discuss whether quantum mechanics it is true or not, because I can't. Our discussion began by me saying that I find your determination that the universe is deterministic susprising, since the mainstream belief among physicists is that it is not. You then said that you didn't think that was the mainstream belief, and that I am probably confusing it with perceived randomness, which is why I wrote that post, to explain that the belief of a universe driven by randomness is indeed the mainstream belief.
@Gendarme Right, fair enough, although I'm not sure 2 dudes represent the entire scientific community. Besides, if their thesis is true, a deterministic universe is still possible. See my edit
umeu wrote:The comic i posted shows that two people working equally hard will not be equally succesful. So obviously hard work is not the only factor.
Lets take messi, no one can deny hes worked very hard to be the best, but he was also born with incredible talent. Nobody can deny he and his family made huge sacrifices to accomodate his success, yet had messi been born 50 years earlier, they couldve done exactly the same and he never wouldve succeeded because the technology needed for his surgery was not yet developed. So timing matters. Had his parents not been able or willing to sacrifice all for this kids hopes, for example because they had other kids or responsibilities, then messi may never have been. Had he been born into even less favorable circumstances and had to work day and night om a farm as a kid to survive, he may never have discovered his talent. So circumstances matter. Ofcourse all things being equal, as you say it was with your friends, then hard work will set you apart from the rest. But the point is all things are not equal. Some things are inherently unequal, granted, but some things are unecessarily so. And people who for some reason choose to ignore that are helping maintain that inequality.
I haven't read the whole thread, but I thought the discussion was about getting out of poverty, in which case I believe hard work and not making stupid decisions (having a kid at 15) are the only factors. I don't tell this from personal experience, but from the very few cases I've seen.
Being successful is very subjective, to me a homeless guy at 15 (trying to survive surrounded by drug addicts) who manages to get a decent paying job/build a family years later is more successful than the privileged guy who went to private schools his whole life and got a prestigious job. Note that there are cases who manage to be homeless at 15 and get prestigious jobs.
About your point, I don't think anyone would disagree with it since it's rather obvious. Indeed, it's easier to become rich/what could objectively be considered successful when you come from a privileged background. It's also easier to exploit your talents when you have support and time to allocate to it, even though you could argue that truly talented people will always find a way to be successful. However the majority of kids do not have to work day and night to survive, even in relatively poor areas.
"Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, bait the hook with prestige." - Paul Graham
"Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, bait the hook with prestige." - Paul Graham
Yeah im not convinced. What about intelligence? Is that also a useless and mystifying concept? When you take certain greatest of all times in some extreme sports such as diving or langlaufing, they could do what they did because somehow their body absorbed more oxygin thats a natural ability. They were born with that, ofc they also trained. But a normal human being cant achieve that result even with training. His article is all fun but its honestly bs afaik. Hard work trumps talent most of the time because people either dont have a talent/natural ability thats decisive enough, or its applied wrongly or in the wrong area. But this isnt always so.
An inherent property of randomness is that it can't be described. After all it's not deterministic, there's no cause, you can't say "X leads to Y leads to Z."
