today I started a list: things I'll do when I'll have a lot of money.
I understood how used I am to being so close to poverty when I wrote stuff like a 20 bucks bluetooth speaker and a set of screwdrivers.
@freemo I don't think I understood this, a rich person spends time thinking of ways to invest and the poor on ways to spend, you mean?
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@arteteco Pretty much yes.. basically how you have mentally ear marked the money you dont have yet whether it be mentally earmarked as a means to create some new company or project, or on indulgences.. basically as you say investment vs personal spending.
@freemo Oh, I see now, makes sense. I don't have a rich future ahead of me, it seems =D
I think in the US you people are more attuned to that kind of entrepreneurship and personal economic growth, which is something I appreciate and I should learn from.
To be sure, as long as I have the basics and a bit more I'm alright, I'm not complaining, was just playing with my mind 😁
@arteteco Yea I think you are right in that regard, the USA has a lot more energy being focused on economic ventures.
I dunno, I think america has become the HQ for ideological quests in many ways. I generally see americans as being extremists in everything. Most americans are radically ideological, while others dont care much at all about ideological quests, there is very little middle ground.
Contrast that with europe where most people tend to be centrist with a small minority at the ideological extremes.
that has not at all been my expeirnce as someone who lives in both america and europe. Though it is what you hear most often.
The leftists in america in my experience are **far** more extremist than anything I've ever seen in europe. In fact most europeans I know who have spent any real time in america tend to mock american leftists for their absurdity. Same is true for our right leaning people, also generally considered extreme.
@amerika I'm not sure, I don't think I know enough about the US to speak, either by statistics or by personal experience. From the biased internet view, US seems more "ideologist" than most countries I know, arguing a lot about principles. If the matter was what works and what not, I'd see very different political debates, more based on science and facts
The reproducibility crisis is a real concern but its mostly limited to psychology, it isn't a general issue in science. This makes sense considering the difficulties in create double blind objective experiments in psychology.
Hard to say, all the talk about it is around psychology and I havent seen it being an issue in any other science fields. But its possible I havent looked into sociology specifically, but its possible.
As freemo, I've also seen it mainly in psychology, never heard of it outside that field. It makes sense, it's complex and young and in my opinion still lacks a strong paradigm to guide it.
There is no relation to ethnicity, race, gender or whatever involved, afaik, just some experiments giving different results now than before
Another important matter is that society changes, and people change, so while with biology or geology you will rarely have this kind of troubles, many psychological mechanisms are very much related on the culture and quickly change with it, making the experiments hard to verify.
To be sure, is not a fraud, it's mostly an epistemological problem, ie a problem of the methods
In my view, it's likely hitting all fields
The need to "publish or perish" has a high cost, and much research being pushed through is cherry-picked and/or filtered.
This isnt something you just have a personal view on on a whim. The replication crisis is well studied and born out with actual evidence by trying to replicate experiments at a later date and seeing how often they can be replicated...
I mean your welcome to have an opinion or speculate however you wish, but unless you have some actual evidence that shows it exists throughout science as a whole, and not just limited to psychology, then its really just noise.
Can you reference an actual professional well controlled studied that has shown there is a replication problem that is pervasive to science?
No one is claiming anyone who has ever said they were doing science was above board. You wont have any trouble finding the occasional bit of fraud or even incompetence. However largely when it does crop up the rest of the scientific community tends to catch it.
Yea and typically thats what happens exactly. The issue with psychology is mostly as arteco pointed out the nature of the field and not any dogma or other issues. We are talking about a new field where conditions change with the environment and thus experiments done later at time may not always reproduce earlier experiments whent he culture has changed in the time in between.
Still, peer review and others reproducing hard-science should continually preen the knowledge base, if it works right.
there is an expectation that you know certain theories and schools of though before you go onto more obscure or complex ones for sure. but that isnt dogma. Studying a thing doesnt inherently create dogma for the thing.
I study religion in some depth and while there is plenty floating around in the way of dogma when it comes to religion I have never adopted that dogma because I only study the topic, I dont adopt the faith.
I also never experienced teachers pushing too much dogma. Generally they care if you prove your point using logic and data, they dont force your conclusions. Most teachers not just accept dissenting thought they encourage it and want you to try to disprove theories, they even tend to promote projects where you attempt to do so.
the only reason scientific thought tends to align is because we have all went through the science and tried to disprove it and ultimately found we were wrong and could not.
Not sure that is a great example.. Your not talking so much about dogma or wasted careers as you are talking about observing scientific progress where competing ideas and theories are over time refined and confirmed.
One scientist was wrong, happens all the time and it's not a bug: it's a feature of the scientific method.
The replication crises regards a series of studies, you can read more about it on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
@amerika @freemo
@TradeMinister
I am very familiar with it. Individuals have wrong theories all the time, and thats how science is suppose to work, thats how we learn we are wrong and ultimately what is correct.
I think part of the disconnect here is that you view left, right, and center as relative terms. I wouldnt agree with that assessment.
While there is certainly a lot of variation and flavor in how right, center, and left might manifest I think that often becomes confused with implying relativity. If everyone is on the left then the left doesn't become the new center, everyone just agrees their on the left.
I see this in places where there is a clear left or right lean to their society. Even in societies where 95% of the population might be right leaning they would still identify themselves as right, and the majority of the population would. You dont really see a shift towards considering the right center in those cases.
I think we have pretty clear ideas of where the left most and right most points of this spectrum are and they are pretty absolute in their nature. The msot extreme left would be some flavor of communism, for example, and once your full on communism you cant go any farther left.
While that may make sense in some situations, here I wouldnt say that applies.. Just based on actual examples int he real world.
If you were correct then in every society about 50% would consider themselves left and 50% would consider themselves right. Yet in societies that are relatively more right you actually see a larger portion of the population self identifying as right.. you never see the center "move" as you suggest.
If your assertion were true, and left and right were relative and the idea of center" shifts" relative to the societies perception then yes, that is exactly what one would expect, you would expect to see the center shift to represent the middle of the society and thus split the groups down the middle.
You are right there is no reason to think in reality there would be a 50/50 split, because left and right isnt relative but rather absolute and the center does not move with society at all.
Thats just pure hyperbole and not really what was said at all. Obviously simply having a thought will not fix the problem. However patterns of thinking reflect patterns of action. How you plan to spend money you don't yet have is an indication of how you will spend that money when the time comes that you do have it. Thoughts alone may not get you from rags to riches, but when those thoughts represent your financial plans for the future or in general then absolutely and of course it will be an indicator of financial success to some degree.
With that said there needs to be more than just positive thoughts and there are absolutely external factors that may work for or against you as well.
@freemo @arteteco Sorry if I’m salty over it, but people have been repeating the same tired old argument for so long, that it’s not their fault for being super rich, and if I support their exploitive system, then one day I too may be rich beyond compare! It’s both excusing the crimes that the rich can get away with because of the imbalance of power, and blaming the poor for their own oppression.
Yes, almost everyone has some influence over their financial situation, and that influence is tiny, doesn’t matter, and the vast majority of financial ruin is due to the actions of others. What you’ve been led to believe that I have to do to stop being poor is either something that the richest among us have never had to do, or else it’s a rigged game with uncountable millions who’ve spun that same wheel of fortune and got nothing but regrets in return.
There is so much to unload in that statement.
For starters lets be clear I do recognize and agree that there are plenty of examples of governments where the laws are designed in such a way that is unfair for those in poverty and makes it harder to get out of poverty than I'd like.
With that said, I certainly wouldnt adopt the idea from this statement you made:
> Yes, almost everyone has some influence over their financial situation, and that influence is tiny, doesn’t matter.
As someone who grew up in absolute poverty, on welfare, had to grow up in a home with 4 generations under the same small roof and never even had a room of my own until much later in life, someone who later made my own success and am now financially successful, I can say first hand, at least in the USA, that nothing can be farther from the truth.
My success didnt come at the whim of some rich person, no one gave me a chance, I worked my ass off in near-starving conditions to get there on my own. I spent my free time at the library, I studied at a very young age, and by the time I was 15 years old I figured out how to make 6 figures from a house hold that otherwise could barely feed me.
I've been through the process, I've seen it first hand, and I can say without a doubt int he USA we have a great deal of power to define our own financial freedom. While that doesnt mean the system is fair, and it doesnt mean you have the same advantage as someone born rich, it is clear the notion of ones control over their own financial health as being insignificant is simply not the reality.
I should also point out I spend a good deal of my free time tutoring young adults in subjects that they cant afford to go to college to learn, in the hopes they can use that knowledge to get out of poverty on their own. I never give these people dumps of money or give them favors to start them out in life, the only thing I do is spend a year or more helping them study and learn marketable skills. Virtually everyone I ever taught who lasted a year without quiting went on to make very good money and be successful despite having a start in life of poverty...
So I also know im not the exception, I've seen dozens of people go from rags to riches due to their own hard work and study and little more. So even if we agree that the cards may be stacked against them it is also clear that most people have a great deal of influence on their financial standing, the system may not be fair, but you do have a lot of the power to change your situation despite this.
@freemo From the other side of the fence, I agree. I'm not on the low end of the income spectrum because "powers were against me", even though I studied hard at many things I also never managed to market them or to properly sell myself, also out of shyness. I never properly learned how to go for jobs and I spent years travelling and discovering the world without giving a fuck about my income. Choices.
I could have make quite some money in my life if I did things differently. I won't lie, I feel stupid now, and I feel not appreciated and bla bla bla, but most of it is definitely on me.
I'm sure that holds more true for some other countries, but for EU, USA and rich places... man, I don't know, I don't think so
I worked my ass off in near-starving conditions to get there on my own. I spent my free time at the library, I studied at a very young age, and by the time I was 15 years old I figured out how to make 6 figures from a house hold that otherwise could barely feed me.
Yes that would be the “wheel of fortune” I mentioned. There are billions of people working their ass off in near-starving conditions, many from a young age, many using the library, all trying to figure out how to make 6 figures, and only a handful of them have succeeded. I know you did a lot of good for people in your hard work, and I really respect that. It’s incredible what you did, even if anyone just as good as you could have failed, gotten fooled, and ended up with nothing. Most who try to “work hard” though only end up perpetuating their own suffering. Hard work is suffering, after all, and their employers are all trying to arrange it so that they get ahead before the employees, so fortune favors the ones in control, even if a few exceptions manage to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Virtually everyone I ever taught who lasted a year without quiting went on to make very good money and be successful despite having a start in life of poverty…
Forgive me for being skeptical about the efficacy of your method, because if what you say is true, then wealth would be evenly distributed over a bell curve, where the few who were most able and willing to do the hard work made the most money, but the vast majority of the wealth was still in the middle class. Instead we have this: http://lcurve.org/
> Yes that would be the “wheel of fortune” I mentioned.
Yes I realize that is what you were thinking of. But as I said this isnt an isolated incident, virtually every one of my past students, of which there are many dozens, almost every single one who made it past a year of tutoring had similar success. This shows me my situation was not just some luck on a wheel of fortune but rather a consistent and predictable result that the vast majority of people can achieve.
> There are billions of people working their ass off in near-starving conditions, many from a young age, many using the library, all trying to figure out how to make 6 figures, and only a handful of them have succeeded.
I think this statement right here is where the error in your logic takes place. It assumes that my argument is basically "anyone who works hard will become rich", however that is not at all what I am trying to say. Hard work in and of itself is not enough to ensure financial success. I could work really really hard trying to learn how to fit 6 billard balls in my mouth and even if I make the world record in that category after a life time of hard work I wouldnt expect you to walk away a millionaire from such a venture. In other words, hard work in and of itself, does not guarantee you financial security (nor should it). Much like a person running around in a circle will do all the same work as someone running in a straight line, but wont get anywhere.
What DOES matter is if you do the hard work that is needed, over an extended period of time, and it is invested explicitly into marketable skills or marketable investments, then, and only then, will you have a very good chance of being financially stable. So while I agree there are a great many people working hard and never becoming particularly well off financially, that really isnt saying much, what matters is how many of those people are 1) in the USA or a country of comparable opportunity and 2) are working hard and investing in their own marketable skills and resources. For most people in poverty in the USA who do in fact work hard, and there are many, are almost always the people who are not investing that hard work in themselves but rather in short term gains. If you invest 5 hours a day working a register at mcdonalds you are working hard but you wont get very far. If you invest 8 hours a day, 5 working a register at mcdonalds and 3 at a library hard in study of marketable skills or working in starting your own company with those 3 hours, then there stands a good chance of your success.
> Most who try to “work hard” though only end up perpetuating their own suffering.
I agree with this too by the way. Hard Work isnt enough and if all you do is put in hard work but dont invest it in the right places it will eventually break you and likely make you not want to try at all, that is unfortunate. Which is why it is important for people to understand that hardwork without the proper direction isnt enough. I dont like to see hard work wasted because as you say, that can really bring a person down.
> Forgive me for being skeptical about the efficacy of your method, because if what you say is true, then wealth would be evenly distributed over a bell curve, where the few who were most able and willing to do the hard work made the most money
I wouldnt say this statement is true either.. As we already covered it isnt just about hard work, so that already invalidates the assertion here. But even if it was the assumption would be that hard work follows a normal distribution as well, and thats an assumption which im not sure is true. Fair systems (and im not saying the system **is** fair) does not imply that it will follow a normal distribution.
In fact everything else aside we know that even if the underlying properties that determine wealth were themselves normally distributed we can in fact conclude that wealth in a society would not, in that case, be normally distributed. Normal distributions are only valid on unbound data. That is, where the x axis goes infinitely in both directions. Wealth however is single-sided bound in any practical sense, as such it would be literally impossible for wealth distribution to ever follow a normal distribution (bell curve), it would have to follow a one-sided bound distribution at a minimum, which looks nothing like a bell curve.
if all you do is put in hard work but dont invest it in the right places
Willingness to work, intelligence, perceptivity, random inspiration, it all falls on a bell curve. If the only poor people were the ones who were doing it wrong, then wealth distribution would also fall on a bell curve. It does not, therefore it’s not their fault, and there’s in a majority of cases, nothing they can (legally) do about it. Because the system is rigged.
Normal distributions are only valid on unbound data
Normal distributions are completely valid estimations on bound data, and the larger the data set, the more accurate the estimate is. Random variance of limited sample sets shouldn’t ever randomly change a fair distribution into highway robbery, once you get past a hundred data points or so.
The picture you attached to your last post does not depict a normal distribution and the distribution depicted in the various charts have no relationship to the normal distribution. As you can see none of the following phrases appear in the image "Normal Distribution", "Bell Curve", "Gaussian Distribution".
> Willingness to work, intelligence, perceptivity, random inspiration, it all falls on a bell curve. If the only poor people were the ones who were doing it wrong, then wealth distribution would also fall on a bell curve.
Again, no, that is not at all true.. Even if we assume those qualities fall on a bell curve that does not imply wealth would fall on a bell curve, though youd have a hard time arguing if those qualities even really do fall on a bell curve at all
> Normal distributions are only valid on unbound data
>
> Normal distributions are completely valid estimations on bound data
Also not correct, and im not just talking about a matter of opinion here, it is literally incorrect by the **definition** of the normal distribution in the first place. Let me explain why, its actually fairly easy to understand.
The normal distribution is another word for "bell curve", it is also called the gaussian distribution, all these terms refer to the same thing, and its a specific equation, a function. It takes an input (x) and produces an output (y), x is the random variable you want to know about and y is the chance of x being observed when randomly selected from the group. So it is an equation f(x). while the specific shape of the normal distribution can vary depending on a few constants (variance and mean) the equation always has a few universal properties. One that is relevant to what we are discussing is that for **all** normal distributions for any input, x, the output must and always will be a positive value that is greater than 0. This is the reason why it is not valid on bounded data and why a different distribution is required to represent bounded data.
This should be obvious now why, but let me give a more concrete example to drive it home. Lets say we are talking about the age of people in a population, this is bounded data, no one can be younger than 0 years old. so it is single-sided bound random variable. If we look at the probability in the population of a randomly selected person being a particular age you will quickly see that the normal distribution fails. If I ask the normal distribution "If i select someone from the population randomly what is the change their age will be -12 years old" you will get a positive non-zero value, suggesting that there are people in the population who are younger than a 0 year old, which obviously isnt true.
Statistics is literally my expertise and I cant emphasize strongly enough that no, normal distributions make absolutely no sense when applied to bounded data, single or double bounded. It only applies to unbounded data. We have different distributions for that.
I haven't read the whole thread, but I just wanted to reply to:
> Yes, almost everyone has some influence over their financial situation, and that influence is tiny
I don't know about the "tiny" part. I have some anecdotal experience with seeing two different people become millionaires independently (one relative, one friend), and taking up their whole family up with them, after being extremely poor people literally selling cheap clothes on the sidewalk to afford food at one point (both of them did that for some weird cosmic coincidental reason).
Both people had starkly different behavior from anyone around them; mainly extreme risk taking, and very strong workaholism. And I mean that in a very pronounced way, like, take for example the relative, whom I know more about. While other poor family members were trying to "find a job" or "wait for the next paycheck", or whatever, that guy was literally sneaking up to war-torn countries to organize shipments of goods and drive them under direct artillery fire. Every venture that person organized was totally funded by someone else, he would talk to many people, and convince them to fund the craziest of ideas, and on many occasions traveled to other countries without having the money to come back. He got shot at least one time. He was attacked with bats by some Ukrainian mafias at some other point. At his height he owned a manufacturing company of a few thousand employees in China, which he founded himself to produce goods which he sold to his home country, and its neighbors. He had many branches around the world, a handful of villas, and a bunch of land here and there.
I don't know how much of that is inherent personal traits, how much of it conscious change. I know, from older relatives, that this person was never like that initially, and his personality was very different up to some point where he kinda changed. I don't know how he changed though.
Personally, I've also seen huge changes in my material condition directly tied to changes in mindset and "hard-work" (I kinda hate the term). And I was sure to note that the mindset changes came first (often introduced by meeting people who became "my role model", but mostly through the internet and books tbh), and it caused me to initiate the exploration in search of chances, and the exploitation of chances found.
Well, but here's the kicker, both of those people are no longer millionaires, both of them lost most of their wealth. One to the financial crisis of 2008, and one to the current Covid-19 pandemic.
Such anecdotes seem to me to show that "everyone has HUGE influence over their financial situation", but also "The world can Completely Destroy You, in a blink of an eye". It seems to be possible to explain this overall with the "the higher the risk, the higher the reward" kinda thing. And don't just skim over the "risk" part. The other family members who remained relatively poor never took such massive risks, but they never faced "millions of dollars in debt and shot in the chest by some random mafia" either. Low risk, low reward.
Of course this is all anecdotal evidence, and it's not enough for ultimate conclusions. So take of it what you will. I think that there are tons of outside factors, but it's one's own choice whether to optimize for safety and stability, or to optimize for risk taking and opportunity. Choose the wrong thing to optimize for, at the wrong time, and you're dead. And you can't know for certain what the wrong time is.
Ain't life so much fun /s
Its a complex topic. As a general rule high-risk means your money will move, up or down, at a faster rate than low risk. They are neither inherently good or bad but can result in people loosing or gaining wealth int he blink of an eye if don't indiscriminately.
If someone is to become wealthy, and do so in a way that is likely to be stable and pass that wealth on for multiple generations, then it requires a lot of study and understanding of many things, one of which (and that a lot of schools teach aspiring entrepreneurs) is risk management. No one teaches you to take less risk, risk is good, but they do teach you how to manage risk to ensure that the risk works for you and not against you.
The people you describe sound like people who most of the elements to make it plus some really good luck that turned on them later... They did the hard work to invest in themselves, to move up, to grow their company. But by the sound of it they never did the hard work around study and knowledge needed to be proficient at keeping it or how to handle risk. Basically they had just enough of the equation to be dangerous, enough to make it when the stars align, but not enough knowledge to know to secure, keep or manage that wealth once they grew large enough to have wealth at all.
Sadly this is common, self-made millionaires often loose their money because they skipped a few essential skills and got there more by determination, hard work, and risk taking, with little study and expertise, you really need both.
> but not enough knowledge to know to secure, keep or manage that wealth once they grew large enough to have wealth at all.
Well, I don't know about that. Both lost their wealth to very extreme abnormal circumstances. Much more powerful and knowledgeable entities lost to the 2008 crisis. Same can be said of the current Covid crisis.
Yes, many millionaires don't know how to keep their wealth, many probably lose their wealth to silly mistakes, but to those two's credit, they withstood a lot of different smaller hits, and it took a hell of a hit to take them down.
> pass that wealth on for multiple generations
This one is a though one. Despite the mindset of my relative, almost none of the family around him possessed it, or understood it. This lead to them wasting a lot of money on silly things, and none of them would actually know how to generate the wealth or maintain it.
That person probably did not want to feel selfish and ungenerous, especially since he constantly was away from his family, and that made him turn a blind eye to their many money wasting expenditures, and useless displays of wealth just to show off their riches.
It kinda disgusts me when people become too proud of wealth they did not make, and waste money that someone else worked hard for on bullshit, and exploit the person's feelings of duty and love.
Other than that, yeah, risk-management.
Everything you wrote, is well said :]
Fair, I dont really know the individuals you speak and it could very well have been just shitty luck and circumstances too. But my point is that it is fairly typical for people who are self made millionaires to have a hard time keeping and perpetuating their wealth unless they did a lot of study about money management before hand.
yup, agreed.
and I know you don't know those people, so I'm not trying to make them look better or something :]
My point was that no amount of study about money management can save you from sudden catastrophic system failures. Still, you should do that as not to fail from the silliest of mistakes, like forgetting to keep track of the interest on your loans or whatever.
Another more extreme example I've witnessed was Syria. We had a total brutal civil war. In some cities, every single business was absolutely, and literally, destroyed. Door to door massacres, heavy artillery, chemical weapons. You get the point.
@arteteco the difference between a rich person and a poor person is that a rich person spends most of their time trying to think of ways they could spend/invest money they don't have yet, a poor person thinks up ways they will spend money they don't yet have :)
Though I think this applies a bit farther above the poverty line than you are dealing with too. Obviously you gotta cover the basic needs first. but someone told me that once and it stuck with me.. how you spend (in your head) the money you dont have yet says everything about your financial future.