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Normally we'd reject the first 37% [0] of candidates and then pick the next one that is above the average, but if all the unluckiest candidates show up first, then we need to sample even more in order to get an accurate baseline.

This may be compounded by the the "Teela Brown" problem [1], where some candidates may be too lucky to end up with our company, causing them to appears later in the stream or not-at-all.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

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No, luck would be some expression of the difference between the average and the individual outcomes - it only exists relative to a population at the point in time when it is measured.
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But, however you structure the selection process the people who get picked are the ones who’ve expended some luck (like, if you throw away half the resumes, but then pick the resumes out of the trashcan, the ones you plucked out are still the lucky ones).

I see two possible solutions.

1) Most people won’t be using up most of their luck on this one thing. I mean they’ve got their whole lifetime worth of luck, so you just need to make sure to pick people who still have plenty left. In other words, ageism and/or picking people who’ve never accomplished much are the solutions!

2) We assume working for the company is a lucky outcome. If you make the company a really unpleasant place to work, people will have to use their luck to dodge it. However, luck can only be evaluated against other possible outcomes. The plan, then, should be to set up a competitor (possibly a front) that is a really nice place to work. They’ll act as the “lucky outcome expenditure dump.”

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> A person's total luck is constant over a lifetime

Ah yes, the much revered cosmological fairness constraint.

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everyone knows luck is tied to the wealth-gravity and increases as the inverse distance to the density of matter. hut because its relative, everyone thinks they have the same luck when not observing others.
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Even assuming that was genuinely how luck works, the conclusion does not follow from the premise because it’s obvious not everyone “starts with” the same amount of luck to spend.
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But assuming a random draw, you're more likely to select people with higher luck.
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assuming luck is spendable
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This is not at all how probability works. Luck is not a resource one spends. If you flip heads 500 times in a row with a fair coin, the next coin flip is still 50/50.
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Presupposing that the same coin is used for every flip (which is implicit in the example), it would be fair to question whether the coin could possibly be a fair coin after 500 heads in a row, even (and especially) if the flipping process were ideally fair.

I’m not a whiz with the math involved, but I am of the opinion that 500 consecutive same-side flips is a large enough sample size to calculate that the coin in question is biased, so it would be unreasonable to assume that the next flip is 50/50.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checking_whether_a_coin_is_fai...

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I already said the coin is known to be fair.
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> I already said the coin is known to be fair.

The coin can be assumed to be fair before the flips, but after the flips we have no mathematical reason to believe that the coin is fair, as our results heavily suggest that it quite simply isn’t fair.

However, for the purposes of discussion, assuming an ideal coin, the probability of 500 same flips in a row is so statistically unlikely that fairness of the flipping process and/or flipper must then be called into question.

Even if the coin, flipping process, and flipper are all ideal (which wasn’t stated, but we will also assume for the sake of argument that we have ideal immovable goalposts), the likelihood of the 500-in-row event is so improbable as to be unreasonable to use as an example or even a metaphor, because it doesn’t have much predictive power in a conversation, as ideal coins don’t exist any more than ideal coin flippers.

Even a coin designed to be fair would be fairly deemed defective after so many same-side flips, and any reasonable gambler would demand that the coin be replaced with another; at that point an argument could reasonably be made to also change the coin flipper and/or the venue.

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Bro just assume there's been a billion flips right before my example indicating it's close to perfectly fair, the only point of my comment was to illustrate that previous flips don't influence future flips. Pretend I said 5 instead of 500 if it makes you feel better.
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> Bro just assume there's been a billion flips right before my example indicating it's close to perfectly fair, the only point of my comment was to illustrate that previous flips don't influence future flips.

I agree: the events are independent in probability, which was never under debate, and is a separate matter to whether or not the coin is fair.

As for your edit:

> Pretend I said 5 instead of 500 if it makes you feel better.

At this point, wouldn’t you say that’s a bridge too far? It’s uncharitable to ask of your interlocutor as that changes the entire context and implications of what you originally said upthread.

Asking me to just pretend that you made a different argument than you originally made, when the mathematical implications of your original argument are the context under question, is literally moving the goalposts.

If you had said it was 5 flips in a row instead of 500 flips, then I wouldn’t have said what I said, because there’s a difference so wide between the two statements in their degree of probability as to be different arguments entirely. You didn’t say that though, and so I don’t know what you’re trying to say now.

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Donald Trump disproves the fixed luck hypothesis (and the Karma hypothesis!)
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