This idea ("almost everything is luck") is not exactly rare. But the author has a giant blind spot when he cites the story of Abraham Wald while ignoring a glaring case of similar gap in his own argument.
There are tons of people who had all the luck in the world and they didn't achieve much at all.
Just look at his long list of all the lucky circumstances that Steve Jobs had to encounter ("he was born in the USA", "GPS was funded", "all the necessary technologies necessary to create an iPhone already existed").
True, but Steve Jobs wasn't the only one who had this kind of luck. Most of these conditions are wide enough that, in their intersection, there were at least several million other individuals whose activity didn't result in anything remarkable.
At which moment we are back to square one. Was Jobs' life story a propaganda? Perhaps, but if you want to recast it as an end product of several instances of luck, you need to explain all the duds too.
An interesting example is Elon Musk. Whenever Musk is discussed on Reddit or on HN, there is a glut of forists who explain that someone born into this kind of wealth and privilege simply had to be wildly successful.
But Musk's own brother Kimbal, who grew up in the very same family and environment, is barely known.
So, 300x less than his brother. Quite a difference. Two orders of magnitude are a lot. The gap between those two is as big as a gap between Kimbal and a random person who inherited a nice home in California worth about 2,5 million, but has nothing else of value.
And it’s another similar multiple drop to the average American. I’m not sure your point.
Musk is an outlier and we will never know who would have held those positions if he didn’t exist. On the technology front I’d argue it’s far more likely we would be equivalently close to self-driving EVs than not.
In my experience billionaires are unique in their proximity to money and relative desire to accumulate wealth, and their lack of attention or concern for anything that does not serve this outcome.
If they are inherently unique perhaps it is because they cross-wired the evolutionary modules for threat detection and scarcity avoidance.
My point is that explaining away outliers as a result of a long string of random positive events is as unsatisfying as elevating them to some superhuman status.
I find the idea of "they are what they are because of pure luck" intellectually lazy, unless it is well supported by statistics - which is something that Nassim Nicholas Taleb did for so-called superstar stock exchange brokers.
There are tons of people who had all the luck in the world and they didn't achieve much at all.
Just look at his long list of all the lucky circumstances that Steve Jobs had to encounter ("he was born in the USA", "GPS was funded", "all the necessary technologies necessary to create an iPhone already existed").
True, but Steve Jobs wasn't the only one who had this kind of luck. Most of these conditions are wide enough that, in their intersection, there were at least several million other individuals whose activity didn't result in anything remarkable.
At which moment we are back to square one. Was Jobs' life story a propaganda? Perhaps, but if you want to recast it as an end product of several instances of luck, you need to explain all the duds too.
An interesting example is Elon Musk. Whenever Musk is discussed on Reddit or on HN, there is a glut of forists who explain that someone born into this kind of wealth and privilege simply had to be wildly successful.
But Musk's own brother Kimbal, who grew up in the very same family and environment, is barely known.