Destiny? Or Luck? Or Beer?

You know the drill right? It doesn’t matter how insane the odds are, the plucky protagonist will win out in the end? Heck, Hollywood has been churning these movies out forever (Rocky Balboa, John McClane, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, ….) and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. I mean, yes, it’s now turning into Teams of Protagonists (Ethan Hunt and Friends, Marvel movies,…), but the underlying point is pretty much the same — Impossible Odds + Grit = Success.

Hollywood, as usual, is not much more than a reflection of our culture. We see the same stories playing around us over and over and over again. Take Generative Adversarial Networks (•) for example. Ian Goodfellow came up with the idea for them during a beer-soaked argument, stayed up all night coding to prove his friends wrong, and — BOOM! — it worked on the first try!

/via https://xkcd.com/1827/

The thing is, this doesn’t work as a strategy! Survivor bias is a powerful force for myth-making, and needs to be treated as such. Oh yes, we should use myths to appreciate the virtues of hard work, focus, and dedication, but we should not, ever, assume that it is the reason for success.

Ian is quite self-aware about this. As he puts it — “That was really, really lucky… because if it hadn’t of worked, I might have given up on the idea.”And it isn’t just him, it turns out that dumb luck has a crazyamount to do with success. Yes, a good education, effective training, and the availability of resources to succeed, all of these are useful precursors to actually “making it”, but thats all the are — precursors. The dice also need to roll in your favor for things to actually pan out in your favor!

Think about the real world, about all the people you know. In particular, think of all the people that should have made it but didn’t (if it helps, go look at your yearbook to remind yourself!). And now look at all the stories that you told yourself as to why they didn’t succeed.
• “Yeah, Alice, she was on track to make the Olympic team, but she cut her hand slicing a bagel the day before the trials. Bad luck there!”
• “Wow, did you hear about Bob? His company folded because the entire product team got the flu and they missed the deadline! Terrible luck, eh?”

However, the narrative changes completely if they succeed.
• If Alice hadn’t cut her hand, we’d be talking about the lifetime of training that got her into the Olympic team during the broadcast.
• If Bob would have been profiled in Forbes as the next wunderkind.

The thing is, it’s actually worse than the above. We actually end up rationalizing the above in to personal failings.
• “Alice should have been more careful”.
• “Bob should have split his team up”.
Whatever.
The point being that we, as humans, are incredibly good at taking random events and ascribing meaning to them. While this may have been good in the past (“Stripy shadows? Or tiger? Doesn’t matter, RUN!”), the trait does not serve us well now.

We should absolutely promote the merits of skill, mental toughness, hard work, tenacity, and talent. But we should also be equally aware (and self-aware!) of the role that luck plays in success!

(•) Generative Adversarial Networks: Basically two Neural Networks pitted against each other in, like, an arms race. For example, one network learns to build realistic photos, and the second one plays the adversary, trying to determine whether the photos it is seeing are fake. This feedback loop helps the first network generate increasingly better fakes, till eventually the generated photos are indistinguishable from the real thing.