Prove that possessing extreme wealth or being famous isn't mostly luck?

[Kasz216]

richardhutnik said:

Kasz216 said:

richardhutnik said:

How exactly does the comic book story NOT show luck in it?  The fact is someone got a break, and acted on it, and happened to break into the business.  That break was then removed, so no one else can repeat it.  In life, old "rules" people followed do change, and no longer work.  That is what is seen in the comic book artist example.  In that case, no one else knows what the new rules are, so they engage in a random search strategy in hopes of finding a new way to break in the business.  In cases where there is too much supply and not enough demand for talent, then the talent that makes it is the one who was lucky enough to find a new way to break in.

Now back to extreme wealth.  For that to happen, a large number of choices made and environmental conditions, would have to be the right ones.  If it wasn't so, then more people would be extremely wealthy.  Given this, also factor in that each situation doesn't have a 100% chance of success of happening.  In life, few things are.  And let's say that each situation has a .99999 chance (that is 99.999%) of happening.  And that, the extreme wealth side is a condition of 1 happening.  The .99999 is the guarantee the person has of making it, based on their ability to control successfully and do the right thing.  The .00001 is the chance of failure that, if it happened, would end up causing the condition of extreme wealth to happen, well....

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=.99999 power x = .5

Between between 69000 and 70000 tries, the probability of hitting success breaks right below .5, meaning that the conditions of failure is now greater than the chance to succeed.  And this argument is based entirely upon everything a person does, in their control, is what is needed for success, and that which is out of their control, is working against them, a pure condition to measure whether or not extreme wealth is the byproduct of mostly chance or mostly not-chance (luck).

Again, that's why success isn't predicated on following "the old rules", drastic amazing success pretty much never revolves around that.

People aren't "blindly searching".

Something being hard to achive doesn't mean you need luck to do it!

Not everyone can climb mount everest.  Those who do, do not do so because of luck.

Why are you assuming these people did "eerything in their control needed to succeed"

I mean, you assumed the Blitz Ball guy did... except you know, he didn't.

He had an unbelievably stupid idea as a base.  Not picking a stupid idea would of been a good start.

According to information theory, the search algorithm you apply when you lack information is a random one.  Unless you are following "the old rules", there comes a need for a search.  With a lack of information, which happens with someone goes off in a new area, the way to get the needed information is to do it randomly.

Now take what I said before and change the formula.  Feel free to shorten it if you like, but then you need to redice tje pdds of a given action being both successful and deterministic (in complete control of the individual).  Successful is needed, because the context here is the needed elements to reach the point of success, otherwise it was irrelevant.  And also it needs to be deterministic (in the sense a chess move is deterministic), because the action needs to be under the control of the person acting, or it is out of their control.  You can put conditions in the environment someone is aware of that would be favorable, that a person is aware of and moved towards to be in position for, because that would be deterministic in the sense of the person put themselves in a place to benefit.

Now factor in the extreme wealth.  For you to show what I described above as not being appropriate, you would have to show that the path to extreme wealth isn't that long, nor does it involve a lot of low probability things needing to happen.  Odds are, you won't be able to do this.

Ok, my answer to this is generally.... what?

I mean, why would you think information theory is relevent.  That's like me trying to argue about gay marraige by using the law of thermodynamics.

Information theory is about language and computer programming, that you'd try to use it when talking about assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a market is just... strange.

 

We aren't talking about a blind search through a bunch of words with no context, like information theory deals with.  We are talking about looking at a society with context and interpeting it.

If your looking at it from a viewpoint where context is irrelvent, that would explain why you think everything is luck.

Complete lack of context.

 

A market isn't a blank database of words that's invisible.  It's a visible market with every changing variables.  That are visible.  To claim it's luck is like claiming science is luck.