I'm a strong determinist. Effort, hard work and skill is irrelevant (any relevance comes from the fact that you're already in your statistical band for expected success and are trying to maximize within that). I believe most of your success is determined before you even take one step on this planet. Step one is acknowledging the truth: your initial circumstances dictate your future. Once this is acknowledged, we as a species can begin focusing on making the initial conditions ideal for everyone.
Note: I am not saying you shouldn't work hard. I am just saying that it's not doing as much as you think. Individual examples of success (I've done decently despite two parents who didn't finish elementary school, live in inner city, etc) are not of relevance for planning the future of the human race. The world is chaotic, so there will be outliers in spite of the "determinist property" of the world.
Parents' own desperation to "set their children up" for success is anecdotal confirmation of this fact.
I would rather believe in Existentialism. I come from a very poor background. Much of my childhood friends are either dead, in prison or working minimum wage. If I would have "acknowledged" the truth, like most of them did, I would have ended in the same position.
Humans are not animals. We can evolve of our own free will. Statistics do not apply at the individual level.
And what caused you to not acknowledge the so called truth. Determinism implies that even this acknowledgment was beyond your control, even though you feel like it wasn't.
I do accept that there is some "determinism" in life. You do not choose the game, you do not choose the board and you do not choose the pieces.
However, you are playing the game. To say that you have no control and that the game is playing itself is to have "mauvaise foi".
Life might limit your options but only you can make choices.
To wait until life cuts out all options but one is not letting life make choices for you. It's deceiving yourself. No choices are made, options are simply slowly getting removed from you. That's not having no freedom, that's not acting on your own freedom.
Hardcore existentialists will even say that the act of not acting on your own freedom is an act of freedom itself. You are free to let life take all options from you.
Suppose I could show you a "Raphmedia" response that I calculated, held aside while you were making this post, then showed you my calculated responses (top-5). If we compared the corpus to what you wrote, would you think differently about determinism and who you are? Maybe right? This presuppose I know a lot about Raphmedia, I'm thinking brain scan type detail (Google does pretty well with the search bar autocomplete using a lot less info).
I sort of feel like Raphmedia could be encoded, same here as well. Still, I enjoy the chats :)
"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be."
I believe I understand the arguments against freewill, but that doesn't answer the question of why people fighting for purpose and meaning.
> Step one is acknowledging the truth: your initial circumstances dictate your future. Once this is acknowledged, we as a species can begin focusing on making the initial conditions ideal for everyone.
The "we as a species can begin focusing on..." part seems to be framed like a choice. But if the choices of the species as a whole are the weighted sum of the choices of the individuals comprising it, and if the individual choices are strictly determined, then the future of the species is strictly determined too (that is, it is the result of society's strongly determined responses to a chaotic environment).
And I'm not saying it isn't (I don't know one way or the other). Just curious if this is what you meant.
There's no way to know what the outcome is until the end. Perhaps all of our suffering is necessary for us to realize something akin to what I said, and then we'll all be elevated.
Also, yes, I do believe our species future is determined. Since no one knows the future, all we can do is hope. Some people think determinism gives rise to fatalism, but I think the opposite -- determinism means everything matters but you (I do see that there's a contradiction here).
There's little downside. I guess we could improve the initial conditions of everyone for nothing :/ [1]
When you say "determinist" do you mean in the physical sense or some abstract social sense? Because if you mean in the physical sense, that has no bearing whatsoever on the role of hard work.
Shouldn't the arrow that connects psychology to ability also pass through factors like effort, hard work and skill, if you expand that connection? Doesn't that imply the opposite of what you said? That effort, hard work and skill do cause success, but they just aren't the "ultimate" cause, whatever that means?
Yeah, that's completely irrelevant. Even if the universe is deterministic, having a particular brain configuration (which we call "work ethic") correlates with being successful later. Determinism or stochasticism has no effective bearing at this high of a level of abstraction.
Yeah, I don't think the article is trying to make a claim about the existence of physical causality, it's about what attitude we ought to take to take.
Maybe. The article is talking about luck, without talking about what exactly "luck" is. If luck is defined as favorable circumstances, then the article really is talking about initial conditions cascading into good opportunities. I believe talking about the good opportunities without talking about the conditions that gave rise to them is harmful. It creates the illusion that you can just create the good opportunities without the appropriate conditions.
Note: I am not saying you shouldn't work hard. I am just saying that it's not doing as much as you think. Individual examples of success (I've done decently despite two parents who didn't finish elementary school, live in inner city, etc) are not of relevance for planning the future of the human race. The world is chaotic, so there will be outliers in spite of the "determinist property" of the world.
Parents' own desperation to "set their children up" for success is anecdotal confirmation of this fact.
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Some examples:
Socioeconomic status v. Education http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/education.a...
Health v. Education http://www.nber.org/digest/mar07/w12352.html
Health v. Socioeconomic Status http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/work-stress...
Parent education v. child long term success https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2853053/
Skin color v. attractiveness http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0095798405278341
Height v. success http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...
Weight (at birth) v. success http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/5882
Attractiveness v. success https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates-play/201...
Gender v. success https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
Eye color v. alcoholism http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886900...
Geography v. socioeconomic success http://www.cid.harvard.edu/archive/andes/documents/bgpapers/...