Why Success is Rare

Here in the USA, we are told a story. The story is that if we work hard and persevere, success will be ours. We are bombarded with stories of people who pull themselves up by their bootstraps into their dream lives. Sports players making it to the big league. Coal miners becoming rocket scientists. Homeless people becoming millionaire businessmen. These stories are inspiring, and make us feel that if we just work hard enough, we too can achieve the success we dream about.

Success means different things to different people. For this discussion, we will define it as is how well you are able to achieve whatever you set your life toward.

I, too, hope for success. It is my dream to one day walk into the Sci-fi and Fantasy aisle of a Barnes & Noble and see a book with my name on it. But when I think about the millions of people who write books, or at least want to write books, those shelves in the bookstore start to look very small.

This is an example of the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. The Pareto principle is the observation that, for any measure of success, 80% of it is held by 20% of the people who seek it. This also applies for sub-sections of the distribution, meaning 64% of the success is held by 4% of the people (80% of the 80% is held by 20% of the 20%), and so on. Of course, this is only a general observation across large numbers of people in many different areas of life. Within small groups of people, the numbers may be different. But overall, it shows us that success is rare.

Like any statistical rule, the Pareto principle is not baked into reality, but shaped by a number of different factors. Part of it is because work also follows the Pareto principle; on average, 20% of workers do 80% of the work. But this is not the whole story, and it, too, needs to be explained. So let’s look at some of the reasons these 80/20 rules exist.

We are not born blank slates. Each of us has different personalities, interests, and talents, which affect what we can be good at, and how good we are at them. No amount of hard work is going to turn the average truck driver into a groundbreaking theoretical physicist, or the average biologist into a world-class basketball player. So part of the success equation comes from natural-born talents and interests.

Another thing to consider, and an unfortunate fact of our society, is that the playing field is not level. Many people are born too poor to practice and make use of their talents. Others are born into social minorities, groups of people for whom, by tragic accidents of history, the deck is stacked against. These are roadblocks against success.

We live in a dynamic economy. The opportunities that are available today will be gone tomorrow, taken by those who were in the right place at the right time. In order to find a niche, it helps to know people who can vouch for you and get your name out there. Connections and good marketing are essential for success.

From these four areas; effort, innate qualities, societal factors, and economic environment; we can begin to see the picture of success more clearly. If we were to put success into an equation, it would look something like this:

Success = hard work + passion + talent + social status + niche + connections

+ marketing​

Each of these things contributes toward one’s probability of success. If one of them is lacking, the others have to make up for it. The amount each part contributes is different for every endeavor.

What can we learn from this? Well, to me it says that we should not judge people for being unsuccessful. Our effort and choices only get us so far. Most people, even if they give life their all, are just going to be average. And if someone is not doing well in life, that does not necessarily mean it is their fault. It gives me an appreciation for the sports player who will never make it into the league. The writer who will never be published. The musician who posts online and gets only five downloads. The hard worker who will never run their own businesses. There is nothing wrong with these people. They are average. Normal. And they should be respected and allowed to live out their lives doing the things that are meaningful to them, even if the world around them does not view their contribution as important.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Consciousness:
The Hard Problem
Dualism
Physicalism
Idealism
Identifying Consciousness

Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

Consciousness. It is the one part of reality that we experience directly, rather than as a mental representation. Consciousness is the experience of existing and experiencing. When we are awake, we are conscious. When we dream, we are conscious. We are not conscious when we are sleeping dreamlessly, or when we are in a coma, or when we are dead. Without consciousness there is no color, no sound, no taste, no beauty, no meaning; only physical reality.

So what is it, and how is it possible for it to exist?

This question has been debated by philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. The very existence of consciousness seems at odds with everything else we know about reality. Nevertheless, we know it exists, and we know it absolutely, which we cannot say about anything else.

There is plenty we do know about consciousness. We know that while you are thinking or feeling or tasting something, there is activity in the neurons in your brain, and each sensation correlates with a different pattern. It is reasonable to assume that in the future, we will have machines sophisticated enough to read exactly which neurons fire, and figure out how to know what is going on in someone’s consciousness, to read their mind, just by reading the patterns in their brain.

But that is only the Easy Problem of consciousness. To understand consciousness, we have to tackle the Hard Problem: how is it possible that consciousness exists at all?

There is a famous thought experiment called the Philosophical Zombie. In this experiment, we imagine a person who looks exactly like a regular human being, who acts the same, their brain works the same, and they can have conversations with us that are just as sophisticated as with anyone. When you ask the zombie if they are conscious, they say yes. But they are wrong. They have no consciousness. There is nothing it is like to be them. They experience no color, no sound, no light, no time. They are nothing more than a bunch of matter functioning as a complex machine.

Taking this a step further, we can imagine an entire universe full of philosophical zombies. Perhaps a universe just like ours, planet for planet, particle for particle, person for person. In this imaginary universe, there is an exact copy of you, and an exact copy of me. But no one is conscious. They believe they are conscious, and have conversations about metaphysics, but they are wrong.

Our search for the nature of consciousness will take different directions depending on whether or not the Philosophical Zombie thought experiment is valid. If it is, then consciousness must be its own physical substance, different from anything else that we know of. This is known as Dualism. On the other hand, if it is impossible for a zombie universe to exist, then consciousness is not its own substance, but a property of other parts of physical reality. This is called Physicalism. As this series goes on, we will examine theories of consciousness from the perspectives of dualism, physicalism, and more.