Moving a comment away from the article it was written under, because frankly it is mostly irrelevant, but I put too much work into it to just delete it.
But occasionally I hear: who are you to give life advice, your own life is so perfect! This sounds strange at first. If you think I’ve got life figured out, wouldn’t you want my advice?
How much your life is determined by your actions, and how much by forces beyond your control, that is an empirical question. You seem to believe it’s mostly your actions. I am not trying to disagree here (I honestly don’t know), just saying that people may legitimately have either model, or a mix thereof.
If your model is “your life is mostly determined by your actions”, then of course it makes sense to take advice from people who seem to have it best, because those are the ones who probably made the best choices, and can teach you how to make them, too.
If your model is “your life is mostly determined by forces beyond your control”, then the people who have it best are simply the lottery winners. They can teach you that you should buy a ticket (which you already know has 99+% probability of not winning), plus a few irrelevant things they did which didn’t have any actual impact on winning.
The mixed model “your life is partially determined by your actions, and partially by forces beyond your control” is more tricky. On one hand, it makes sense to focus on the part that you can change, because that’s where your effort will actually improve things. On the other hand, it is hard to say whether people who have better outcomes than you, have achieved it by superior strategy or superior luck.
Naively, a combination of superior strategy and superior luck should bring the best outcomes, and you should still learn the superior strategy from the winners, but you should not expect to get the same returns. Like, if someone wins a lottery, and then lives frugally and puts all their savings in index funds, they will end up pretty rich. (More rich than people who won the lottery and than wasted the money.) It makes sense to live frugally and put your savings in index funds, even if you didn’t win the lottery. You should expect to end up rich, although not as rich as the person who won the lottery first. So, on one hand, follow the advice of the “winners at life”, but on the other hand, don’t blame yourself (or others) for not getting the same results; with average luck you should expect some reversion to the mean.
But sometimes the strategy and luck are not independent. The person with superior luck wins the lottery, but the person with superior strategy who optimizes for the expected return would never buy the ticket! Generally, the person with superior luck can win at life because of doing risky actions (and getting lucky) that the person with superior strategy would avoid in favor of doing something more conservative.
So the steelman of the objection in the mixed model would be something like: “Your specific outcome seems to involve a lot of luck, which makes it difficult to predict what would be the outcome of someone using the same strategy with average luck. I would rather learn strategy from successful people who had average luck.”
A toy model to illustrate my intuition about the relationship between strategy and luck:
Imagine that there are four switches called A, B, C, D, and you can put each of them into position “on” or “off”. After you are done, a switch A, B, C, D in a position “on” gives you +1 point with probability 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% respectively, and gives you −1 point with probability 80%, 60%, 40%, 20% respectively. A switch in a position “off” always gives you 0 points. (The points are proportional to utility.)
Also, let’s assume that most people in this universe are risk-averse, and only set D to “on” and the remaining three switches to “off”.
What happens in this universe?
The entire genre of “let’s find the most successful people and analyze their strategy” will insist that the right strategy is to turn all four switches to “on”. Indeed, there is no other way to score +4 points.
The self-help genre is right about turning on the switch C. But also wrong about the switches A and B. Neither the conservative people nor the contrarians get the answer right.
The optimal strategy—setting A and B to “off”, C and D to “on” -- provides an expected result +0.8 points. The traditional D-only strategy provides an expected result +0.6 points, which is not too different. On the other hand, the optimal strategy makes it impossible to get the best outcome; with best luck you score +2 points, which is quite different from the +4 points advertised by the self-help genre. This means the optimal strategy will probably fail to impress the conservative people, and the contrarians will just laugh at it.
It will probably be quite difficult to distinguish between switches B and C. If most people you know personally set both of them “off”, and the people you know from self-help literature set both of them “on” and got lucky at both, you have few data points to compare; the difference betwen 40% and 60% may not be large enough to empirically determine that one of them is a net harm and the other is a net benefit.
(Of course, whatever are your beliefs, it is possible to build a model where acting on your beliefs is optimal, so this doesn’t prove much. It just illustrates why I believe that it is possible to achieve outcomes better than usual, and also that it is a bad idea to follow the people with extremely good outcomes, even if they are right about some of the things most people are wrong about. I believe that in reality, the impact of your actions is much greater than in this toy model, but the same caveats still apply.)
In reality it has to be a mixture right? So many parts of my day are absolutely in my control, at least small things for sure. Then there are obviously a ton of things that are 100% out of my control. I guess the goal is to figure out how to navigate the two and find some sort of serenity. After all isn’t that the old saying about serenity? I often think about what you have said as an addict. I personally don’t believe addiction to be a disease, my DOC is alcohol, and I don’t buy into the disease model of addiction. I think it is a choice and maybe a disorder of the brain and semantics on the word “disease”. But I can’t imagine walking into a cancer ward full of children and saying me too! People don’t just get to quit cancer cold turkey. I also understand like you’ve pointed out, and I reaffirmed that it is both. I have a predisposition to alcoholism because of genetics and it’s also something I am aware of and a choice. I thought I’d respond to your post since you were so kind as to reply to my stuff. I find this forum very interesting and I am not nearly as intelligent as most here but man it’s fun to bounce ideas!
Yeah, this is usually the right answer. Which of course invites additional questions, like which part is which...
With addiction, I also think it is a mixture of things. For example, trivially, no one would abuse X if X were literally impossible to buy, duh. But even before “impossible”, there is a question of “how convenient”. If they sell alcohol in the same shop you visit every day to buy fresh bread, it is more tempting than if you had to visit a different shop, simply because you get reminded regularly about the possibility.
For me, it is sweet things. I eat tons of sugar, despite knowing it’s not good for my health. But fuck, I walk around that stuff every time I go shopping, and even if I previously didn’t think about it, now I do. And then… well, I am often pretty low on willpower. I wish I had some kind of augmented reality glasses which would simply censor the things in the shop I decide I want to live without. Like I would see the bread, butter, white yoghurt, and some shapeless black blobs between that. Would be so easier. (Kind of like an ad-blocker for offline world. This may become popular in the future.)
Another thing that contributes to addiction is frustration and boredom. If I am busy doing something interesting, I forget the rest of the world, including my bad habits. But if the day sucks, the need to get “at least something pleasant, now” becomes much stronger.
Then it is about how my home is arranged and what habits I create. Things that are “under my control in long term”, like you don’t build the good habit overnight, but you can start building it today. For example, with a former girlfriend I had a deal that there is one cabinet that I will never open, and she needs to keep all her sweets there; never leave them exposed on the table, so that I would not be tempted.
Moving a comment away from the article it was written under, because frankly it is mostly irrelevant, but I put too much work into it to just delete it.
How much your life is determined by your actions, and how much by forces beyond your control, that is an empirical question. You seem to believe it’s mostly your actions. I am not trying to disagree here (I honestly don’t know), just saying that people may legitimately have either model, or a mix thereof.
If your model is “your life is mostly determined by your actions”, then of course it makes sense to take advice from people who seem to have it best, because those are the ones who probably made the best choices, and can teach you how to make them, too.
If your model is “your life is mostly determined by forces beyond your control”, then the people who have it best are simply the lottery winners. They can teach you that you should buy a ticket (which you already know has 99+% probability of not winning), plus a few irrelevant things they did which didn’t have any actual impact on winning.
The mixed model “your life is partially determined by your actions, and partially by forces beyond your control” is more tricky. On one hand, it makes sense to focus on the part that you can change, because that’s where your effort will actually improve things. On the other hand, it is hard to say whether people who have better outcomes than you, have achieved it by superior strategy or superior luck.
Naively, a combination of superior strategy and superior luck should bring the best outcomes, and you should still learn the superior strategy from the winners, but you should not expect to get the same returns. Like, if someone wins a lottery, and then lives frugally and puts all their savings in index funds, they will end up pretty rich. (More rich than people who won the lottery and than wasted the money.) It makes sense to live frugally and put your savings in index funds, even if you didn’t win the lottery. You should expect to end up rich, although not as rich as the person who won the lottery first. So, on one hand, follow the advice of the “winners at life”, but on the other hand, don’t blame yourself (or others) for not getting the same results; with average luck you should expect some reversion to the mean.
But sometimes the strategy and luck are not independent. The person with superior luck wins the lottery, but the person with superior strategy who optimizes for the expected return would never buy the ticket! Generally, the person with superior luck can win at life because of doing risky actions (and getting lucky) that the person with superior strategy would avoid in favor of doing something more conservative.
So the steelman of the objection in the mixed model would be something like: “Your specific outcome seems to involve a lot of luck, which makes it difficult to predict what would be the outcome of someone using the same strategy with average luck. I would rather learn strategy from successful people who had average luck.”
A toy model to illustrate my intuition about the relationship between strategy and luck:
Imagine that there are four switches called A, B, C, D, and you can put each of them into position “on” or “off”. After you are done, a switch A, B, C, D in a position “on” gives you +1 point with probability 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% respectively, and gives you −1 point with probability 80%, 60%, 40%, 20% respectively. A switch in a position “off” always gives you 0 points. (The points are proportional to utility.)
Also, let’s assume that most people in this universe are risk-averse, and only set D to “on” and the remaining three switches to “off”.
What happens in this universe?
The entire genre of “let’s find the most successful people and analyze their strategy” will insist that the right strategy is to turn all four switches to “on”. Indeed, there is no other way to score +4 points.
The self-help genre is right about turning on the switch C. But also wrong about the switches A and B. Neither the conservative people nor the contrarians get the answer right.
The optimal strategy—setting A and B to “off”, C and D to “on” -- provides an expected result +0.8 points. The traditional D-only strategy provides an expected result +0.6 points, which is not too different. On the other hand, the optimal strategy makes it impossible to get the best outcome; with best luck you score +2 points, which is quite different from the +4 points advertised by the self-help genre. This means the optimal strategy will probably fail to impress the conservative people, and the contrarians will just laugh at it.
It will probably be quite difficult to distinguish between switches B and C. If most people you know personally set both of them “off”, and the people you know from self-help literature set both of them “on” and got lucky at both, you have few data points to compare; the difference betwen 40% and 60% may not be large enough to empirically determine that one of them is a net harm and the other is a net benefit.
(Of course, whatever are your beliefs, it is possible to build a model where acting on your beliefs is optimal, so this doesn’t prove much. It just illustrates why I believe that it is possible to achieve outcomes better than usual, and also that it is a bad idea to follow the people with extremely good outcomes, even if they are right about some of the things most people are wrong about. I believe that in reality, the impact of your actions is much greater than in this toy model, but the same caveats still apply.)
In reality it has to be a mixture right? So many parts of my day are absolutely in my control, at least small things for sure. Then there are obviously a ton of things that are 100% out of my control. I guess the goal is to figure out how to navigate the two and find some sort of serenity. After all isn’t that the old saying about serenity? I often think about what you have said as an addict. I personally don’t believe addiction to be a disease, my DOC is alcohol, and I don’t buy into the disease model of addiction. I think it is a choice and maybe a disorder of the brain and semantics on the word “disease”. But I can’t imagine walking into a cancer ward full of children and saying me too! People don’t just get to quit cancer cold turkey. I also understand like you’ve pointed out, and I reaffirmed that it is both. I have a predisposition to alcoholism because of genetics and it’s also something I am aware of and a choice. I thought I’d respond to your post since you were so kind as to reply to my stuff. I find this forum very interesting and I am not nearly as intelligent as most here but man it’s fun to bounce ideas!
Yeah, this is usually the right answer. Which of course invites additional questions, like which part is which...
With addiction, I also think it is a mixture of things. For example, trivially, no one would abuse X if X were literally impossible to buy, duh. But even before “impossible”, there is a question of “how convenient”. If they sell alcohol in the same shop you visit every day to buy fresh bread, it is more tempting than if you had to visit a different shop, simply because you get reminded regularly about the possibility.
For me, it is sweet things. I eat tons of sugar, despite knowing it’s not good for my health. But fuck, I walk around that stuff every time I go shopping, and even if I previously didn’t think about it, now I do. And then… well, I am often pretty low on willpower. I wish I had some kind of augmented reality glasses which would simply censor the things in the shop I decide I want to live without. Like I would see the bread, butter, white yoghurt, and some shapeless black blobs between that. Would be so easier. (Kind of like an ad-blocker for offline world. This may become popular in the future.)
Another thing that contributes to addiction is frustration and boredom. If I am busy doing something interesting, I forget the rest of the world, including my bad habits. But if the day sucks, the need to get “at least something pleasant, now” becomes much stronger.
Then it is about how my home is arranged and what habits I create. Things that are “under my control in long term”, like you don’t build the good habit overnight, but you can start building it today. For example, with a former girlfriend I had a deal that there is one cabinet that I will never open, and she needs to keep all her sweets there; never leave them exposed on the table, so that I would not be tempted.