Conversation

One aspect of serendipity/zemblanity is luck returns on decisions. There is compounding good/bad-luck returns on good strategic decisions, not just the immediate outcome. So ones made earlier are especially important since more time for luck to compound.
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Assume a luck compounding rate of 8%, that’s 9y doubling for strategic decisions. So a good decision at age 14 (the age most of us make the first autonomous choices, like how hard to work at school) = 32x luckier life outcome by 68. Hard drugs at 14, 32x worse, likely dead
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Both 32x luckier/unluckier are relative to mediocre decisions where you make neither brilliant nor disastrous choices. I think this dynamic is why I’m inclined to be compassionate towards people who seem to have willfully fucked up their lives through their own bad decisions.
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Good parenting I think is primarily about making sure kids don’t make disastrously bad decisions 14-18. Their first and most compounding calls that are hardest to recover from. Picking a bad major at 19 is a much more recoverable error than aiming/not aiming for college at 14.
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When I moved to the US in 1997 a lot of people told me it was the land of second chances. It’s still true relative to India, where early screw-ups in key decisions are pretty much unrecoverable disasters. India is slightly more forgiving in 2019. But the US has gotten worse.
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I once called the Internet the land of a 1000 second chances. This is getting complicated. How you get onboarded to the Internet is now crucial. Today’s kids are born with golden WiFi installed in brainstem of course, but they don’t take ownership of digital life till ~10-14.
Replying to
The Internet is the land of 1000 second chances and a lifelong agency over snapping your luck, recovering from past bad decisions, leveraging past good decisions to the hilt etc... But...
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There are also dangerous black holes you can fall down really early that can ruin your life. Like getting radicalized and turning into a terrorist. This was much harder pre-Internet.
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One reason the Internet is either highly forgiving (“make your own luck, reinvent yourself every few years!”) or a black hole is that there are no real middling outcomes for very online lives. And increasingly all lives have to be very online to work at all.
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We are all living lives that are almost entirely the result of 1-2 key decisions made by 14-18y olds. You may have made several brilliant or terrible calls since that crucial launch window age, but in terms of relative range of possibilities spanned they were narrower.
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A good way to measure life outcomes in classist societies is class mobility. Every 2x difference in relative life outcome = moving up or down 1 social class by retirement age. In Fussell’s model, there are 9 classes in american system. Counting from middle, that’s +/- 16x
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Immigration and generation gaps complicate the story, but going by outcomes of old friends in India who I feel I can compare myself to PPP-adjusted, and comparing them to my parents, I’d guess I’ve kinda held steady at normalized global middle-middle class 😂, so <2x up or down
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