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A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime. The remaining half of the candidates already spent some of their luck in this selection, so they'll be on ave

A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime. The remaining half of the candidates already spent some of their luck in this selection, so they'll be on average less lucky than the discarded half.

throwawaythekey 3mo ago
> A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime Ah yes, the much revered cosmological fairness constraint.
- cyanydeez 3mo ago
  everyone knows luck is tied to the wealth-gravity and increases as the inverse distance to the density of matter. hut because its relative, everyone thinks they have the same luck when not observing others.
latexr 3mo ago
Even assuming that was genuinely how luck works, the conclusion does not follow from the premise because it’s obvious not everyone “starts with” the same amount of luck to spend.
- addandsubtract 3mo ago
  But assuming a random draw, you're more likely to select people with higher luck.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- lobocinza 3mo ago
  assuming luck is spendable
t-3 3mo ago
No, luck would be some expression of the difference between the average and the individual outcomes - it only exists relative to a population at the point in time when it is measured.
CuriouslyC 3mo ago
Donald Trump disproves the fixed luck hypothesis (and the Karma hypothesis!)
bee_rider 3mo ago
But, however you structure the selection process the people who get picked are the ones who’ve expended some luck (like, if you throw away half the resumes, but then pick the resumes out of the trashcan, the ones you plucked out are still the lucky ones). I see two possible solutions. 1) Most people won’t be using up most of their luck on this one thing. I mean they’ve got their whole lifetime worth of luck, so you just need to make sure to pick people who still have plenty left. In other words, ageism and/or picking people who’ve never accomplished much are the solutions! 2) We assume working for the company is a lucky outcome. If you make the company a really unpleasant place to work, people will have to use their luck to dodge it. However, luck can only be evaluated against other possible outcomes. The plan, then, should be to set up a competitor (possibly a front) that is a really nice place to work. They’ll act as the “lucky outcome expenditure dump.”
sfn42 3mo ago
This is not at all how probability works. Luck is not a resource one spends. If you flip heads 500 times in a row with a fair coin, the next coin flip is still 50/50.
- aspenmayer 3mo ago
  Presupposing that the same coin is used for every flip (which is implicit in the example), it would be fair to question whether the coin could possibly be a fair coin after 500 heads in a row, even (and especially) if the flipping process were ideally fair. I’m not a whiz with the math involved, but I am of the opinion that 500 consecutive same-side flips is a large enough sample size to calculate that the coin in question is biased, so it would be unreasonable to assume that the next flip is 50/50. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fai...
  - sfn42 3mo ago
    I already said the coin is known to be fair.
    - aspenmayer 3mo ago
      > I already said the coin is known to be fair. The coin can be assumed to be fair before the flips, but after the flips we have no mathematical reason to believe that the coin is fair, as our results heavily suggest that it quite simply isn’t fair. However, for the purposes of discussion, assuming an ideal coin, the probability of 500 same flips in a row is so statistically unlikely that fairness of the flipping process and/or flipper must then be called into question. Even if the coin, flipping process, and flipper are all ideal (which wasn’t stated, but we will also assume for the sake of argument that we have ideal immovable goalposts), the likelihood of the 500-in-row event is so improbable as to be unreasonable to use as an example or even a metaphor, because it doesn’t have much predictive power in a conversation, as ideal coins don’t exist any more than ideal coin flippers. Even a coin designed to be fair would be fairly deemed defective after so many same-side flips, and any reasonable gambler would demand that the coin be replaced with another; at that point an argument could reasonably be made to also change the coin flipper and/or the venue.
Terr_ 3mo ago
Normally we'd reject the first 37% [0] of candidates and then pick the next one that is above the average, but if all the unluckiest candidates show up first, then we need to sample even more in order to get an accurate baseline. This may be compounded by the the "Teela Brown" problem [1], where some candidates may be too lucky to end up with our company, causing them to appears later in the stream or not-at-all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

throwawaythekey 3mo ago

> A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime Ah yes, the much revered cosmological fairness constraint.

cyanydeez 3mo ago
everyone knows luck is tied to the wealth-gravity and increases as the inverse distance to the density of matter. hut because its relative, everyone thinks they have the same luck when not observing others.

latexr 3mo ago

Even assuming that was genuinely how luck works, the conclusion does not follow from the premise because it’s obvious not everyone “starts with” the same amount of luck to spend.

addandsubtract 3mo ago
But assuming a random draw, you're more likely to select people with higher luck.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
lobocinza 3mo ago
assuming luck is spendable

t-3 3mo ago

No, luck would be some expression of the difference between the average and the individual outcomes - it only exists relative to a population at the point in time when it is measured.

CuriouslyC 3mo ago

Donald Trump disproves the fixed luck hypothesis (and the Karma hypothesis!)

bee_rider 3mo ago

But, however you structure the selection process the people who get picked are the ones who’ve expended some luck (like, if you throw away half the resumes, but then pick the resumes out of the trashcan, the ones you plucked out are still the lucky ones). I see two possible solutions. 1) Most people won’t be using up most of their luck on this one thing. I mean they’ve got their whole lifetime worth of luck, so you just need to make sure to pick people who still have plenty left. In other words, ageism and/or picking people who’ve never accomplished much are the solutions! 2) We assume working for the company is a lucky outcome. If you make the company a really unpleasant place to work, people will have to use their luck to dodge it. However, luck can only be evaluated against other possible outcomes. The plan, then, should be to set up a competitor (possibly a front) that is a really nice place to work. They’ll act as the “lucky outcome expenditure dump.”

sfn42 3mo ago

This is not at all how probability works. Luck is not a resource one spends. If you flip heads 500 times in a row with a fair coin, the next coin flip is still 50/50.

aspenmayer 3mo ago
Presupposing that the same coin is used for every flip (which is implicit in the example), it would be fair to question whether the coin could possibly be a fair coin after 500 heads in a row, even (and especially) if the flipping process were ideally fair. I’m not a whiz with the math involved, but I am of the opinion that 500 consecutive same-side flips is a large enough sample size to calculate that the coin in question is biased, so it would be unreasonable to assume that the next flip is 50/50. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fai...
- sfn42 3mo ago
  I already said the coin is known to be fair.
  - aspenmayer 3mo ago
    > I already said the coin is known to be fair. The coin can be assumed to be fair before the flips, but after the flips we have no mathematical reason to believe that the coin is fair, as our results heavily suggest that it quite simply isn’t fair. However, for the purposes of discussion, assuming an ideal coin, the probability of 500 same flips in a row is so statistically unlikely that fairness of the flipping process and/or flipper must then be called into question. Even if the coin, flipping process, and flipper are all ideal (which wasn’t stated, but we will also assume for the sake of argument that we have ideal immovable goalposts), the likelihood of the 500-in-row event is so improbable as to be unreasonable to use as an example or even a metaphor, because it doesn’t have much predictive power in a conversation, as ideal coins don’t exist any more than ideal coin flippers. Even a coin designed to be fair would be fairly deemed defective after so many same-side flips, and any reasonable gambler would demand that the coin be replaced with another; at that point an argument could reasonably be made to also change the coin flipper and/or the venue.

Terr_ 3mo ago

Normally we'd reject the first 37% [0] of candidates and then pick the next one that is above the average, but if all the unluckiest candidates show up first, then we need to sample even more in order to get an accurate baseline. This may be compounded by the the "Teela Brown" problem [1], where some candidates may be too lucky to end up with our company, causing them to appears later in the stream or not-at-all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld