I recently came across a clip of Sam Harris arguing that so-called ‘self-made’ individuals, who believe their wealth is solely the result of hard work, do not truly exist. According to Harris, success is fundamentally influenced by chance. This led me to spend my entire lunchtime contemplating how to reconcile notions of merit, generosity, and justice. Coincidentally, I stumbled upon your post shortly thereafter and was amazed by the way you utilized a simple narrative to delve into this issue.
I find myself leaning toward the idea that no one inherently ‘deserves’ their life outcomes. However, I struggle to see how this fact justifies a system of forced generosity. It’s intriguing that the ants’ second response in the story reflects one of the very thoughts I had during my reflection. For me, the greatest challenge in establishing a ‘bad luck’ correction system (one that assists the grasshopper who saved for winter but lost everything in a flash flood) is for it to be strategy-proof, that is, a system where agents maximize their expected utility by behaving as if such a system didn’t exist. The story beautifully encapsulates this difficulty, almost as if it had already influenced my thinking before I even read it.
I also find it interesting how insurance companies attempt to address this problem by spreading the risk that their clients are unwilling to bear individually. Could we possibly generalize this concept to mitigate the risk of being born into adverse circumstances? My intuition suggests that a solution might involve decentralized repositories of information, since part of the compensation mechanism relies on proving that the insured party’s damages were not caused by incompetence or negligence. Storing relevant information in a decentralized manner would make falsification more challenging (almost impossible actually). However, the question remains: How could we possibly record and store such pertinent information? This idea seems far-fetched, but I wanted to share it anyway, hopefully somebody else comes up with a more intelligent thought.
I recently came across a clip of Sam Harris arguing that so-called ‘self-made’ individuals, who believe their wealth is solely the result of hard work, do not truly exist. According to Harris, success is fundamentally influenced by chance. This led me to spend my entire lunchtime contemplating how to reconcile notions of merit, generosity, and justice. Coincidentally, I stumbled upon your post shortly thereafter and was amazed by the way you utilized a simple narrative to delve into this issue.
I find myself leaning toward the idea that no one inherently ‘deserves’ their life outcomes. However, I struggle to see how this fact justifies a system of forced generosity. It’s intriguing that the ants’ second response in the story reflects one of the very thoughts I had during my reflection. For me, the greatest challenge in establishing a ‘bad luck’ correction system (one that assists the grasshopper who saved for winter but lost everything in a flash flood) is for it to be strategy-proof, that is, a system where agents maximize their expected utility by behaving as if such a system didn’t exist. The story beautifully encapsulates this difficulty, almost as if it had already influenced my thinking before I even read it.
I also find it interesting how insurance companies attempt to address this problem by spreading the risk that their clients are unwilling to bear individually. Could we possibly generalize this concept to mitigate the risk of being born into adverse circumstances? My intuition suggests that a solution might involve decentralized repositories of information, since part of the compensation mechanism relies on proving that the insured party’s damages were not caused by incompetence or negligence. Storing relevant information in a decentralized manner would make falsification more challenging (almost impossible actually). However, the question remains: How could we possibly record and store such pertinent information? This idea seems far-fetched, but I wanted to share it anyway, hopefully somebody else comes up with a more intelligent thought.