Chance and achievement

 Each and every one's intrinsic value is beyond (independent from) what each and every one eventually manages to achieve. Achievement necessarily depends on chance and opportunity.

2021/01/24

Chance / uma martelada na meritocracia

“Even intelligence is rather an accident of Nature,” White writes, “and to say that an intelligent man deserves his rewards in life is to say that he is entitled to be lucky.” It doesn’t seem like coincidence that White played poker.
Aqui

“Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.”
Shakespeare

Political annealing e o Princípio de Peter

"It has been hard to explain to real people that stressors and uncertainty have their role in life — so you can imagine what it would be like to explain it to politicians. Yet this is where a certain amount of randomness is needed the most.

I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness — very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would become a baker, and the baker a prisoner, etc. At the end, people end up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their inalienable right.

I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing — and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients — again, those ancients! — were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parlementary system."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile

OH SORTE! (onde quer que seja o teu centro de produção)

Obrigada.
O pedido foi atendido.
Apareceste.
Agora é só preciso mais um bocadinho.