Let me start with an experiment.

In 1996, two experts (Epstein and Axtell) at the Brookings Institution in the United States, using computer simulation, developed an artificial social wealth accumulation model called Sugarscape.

Their intention is to use computer simulations to study a wide range of social phenomena, including environmental change, genetic inheritance, trade, market mechanisms and wealth accumulation, and to find out what causes them.

They designed this chessboard to represent society. The board consists of 50 by 50 cells. Dark squares are high in sugar, light ones are low in sugar, and white ones have no sugar.

As you can see, there are two dark sugar mountains on the board, representing resource-rich areas. There are large, light-colored areas on the board representing areas with limited resources, and white sugar-free areas representing areas with no resources, such as deserts.

Now that we have our simulated society, let’s put some people on this chessboard.

The 250 black dots in the picture are sugar figures randomly scattered on the board. Each sugar man is a separate computer program, and just like people in the real world, they have the ability to absorb information, look around, and act. They roam the board looking for sugar.

So, you can think of the chessboard as a society, and the sugar on the chessboard is the resource in the society, and the sugar man is the person who moves in the society.

The sugar figures were given some simple decision rules:

1) Sugar Man’s eyesight looks in four directions, aiming to find the plot with the highest sugar content. After being eaten, the sugar in the cell grows back over time.

2) If sugar Man can’t keep up with his metabolism, he will starve to death and the computer will clear him off the board.

3) Sugar people were randomly assigned with different genetic endowments. This includes two indicators, one is the quality of eyesight (some people can see 6 frames, others can only see 1 frame in front of); The second is the ability to metabolize (one person consumes only 1 unit of sugar at a time, while another consumes 4 units). Now, you press the button that starts the experiment, and the sugar people move. At first, it was a bit messy, but soon the researchers found that the sugar Man society showed a regular pattern as shown in the chart below.

As the program runs from Figure 1 to Figure 4, sugar people begin to gather around the two sugar mountains, gradually forming two large tribes. Sugar-free areas are sparsely populated. Also, the sugar people were positioned so efficiently that any new growth was harvested quickly.

When the researchers looked at the wealth variable, represented by the amount of sugar each sugar man received, they found something quite surprising: the virtual society showed a sharp divide between rich and poor.

The chart below shows the evolution of per capita wealth distribution from the start to the end of the experiment. The horizontal axis shows wealth from low to high, that is, the poor on the left, the rich on the right, and the number of people on the vertical axis.

As you can see, at the beginning of the society (top chart), wealth was distributed fairly evenly among the people of the country, and it was basically an egalitarian society. There are very few very rich and very poor people, and the income gap between the vast majority of the population is very limited, with even the richest people owning only 30 units of sugar.

Over time, the distribution of wealth in this society has become seriously distorted. At the bottom, 20 percent of the population holds 80 percent of the wealth. Tuhao, such as Ma Yun and Wang Jianlin, account for most of society’s wealth.

According to the experimenters’ Settings in the program, we can adjust the various initial parameters of Sugar Man at will to see which one is causing the gap between rich and poor in Sugar Man country.

What is the real and logical reason why you are poor and he is rich?

It turns out that there are three factors that determine how much money you make: talent, location, and random luck.

It seems that God is very wise in designing individual fates.

Let’s take a look at what these three factors mean.

1. Talented

This makes sense. For example, in the experiment, some sugar men had good eyesight and could see beyond six frames, while others could only see one frame in front of them.

The good news is that in real life, einsteins are in the minority, and most people are born with roughly the same IQs, which are normally distributed.

Although natural talents cannot be changed, acquired talents can be gradually improved through learning. For example, people with knowledge of statistical probability can think deeper and see farther than others.

2 Birth location

The second factor, location of origin, is really just conditional probability, and specifically there are two types.

The first category is the “location” that cannot be changed, such as the family you were born in, the year you were born.

For example, Wang Sicong has a conditional probability like Wang Jianlin, and those born in the 1980s will face the pressure of high housing prices. These are all conditional probabilities that can’t be changed.

The second category is the “location” that you can change, such as the school you choose to go to, the industry you choose to work in, the skills you choose to learn, and the people you choose to marry.

Now many parents break through their heads, even if they sell a comfortable big house, they also want to replace the old shabby small school district house, in order to let their children go to key primary schools, because the probability of being admitted to a key primary school is higher, in fact, parents are aware of the need to create better conditions for their children.

Or the skills you choose to learn. Stackoverflow, the largest technical question-and-answer community, counted the number of people who viewed a programming language from January to August 2017. Android include PHP, Python, and R are the most widely used programming languages in Stackoverflow. The analysis chart is as follows:

On the horizontal axis is GDP per capita from low to high, and on the vertical axis is the number of people browsing a programming language on Stackoverflow (percent). The larger the orange circle, the greater the number of people accessing the technology.

According to the above analysis results, it can be seen that:

Android and PHP are mainly used by people in low income countries who browse Python and R more often in high income countries

On an individual level, in the age of ARTIFICIAL intelligence and big data, if you choose to learn Python and R skills, you are changing the environment in which you come from, thereby increasing your earning power and conditional probability higher than others.

The French mathematician Laplace said, “The most important problem in life, in most cases, is really just a matter of probability.”

The world belongs to those who both understand probability and create conditional probability.

3. Random luck

Let’s say we have two sugar men, A and B — they start the program with the same vision, the same metabolism, the same source of sugar in their birth place.

At this time, within the range of vision, A took A step in the sugar mountain in the northeast by chance. It was so coincidence that there was no sugar Man to occupy here, so he occupied this grid. His wealth began to accumulate rapidly, and he became rich, and then became richer and richer.

B also looked around, as well as by coincidence, it moved one step to the southeast, the result is starting to move away from rich sugar, as it realized the wrong direction, other sugar-coated figurine has long been surrounded by the gateway to the north sugar mountain path, so it is no chance, had to random roaming, try very hard to collect in resource-poor area, but also can only from food and clothing, And ended up being one of the poorest 122 sugar men.

In this way, a small difference in the choices of two people of similar talent and birth position can lead to a huge difference in the accumulation of social wealth. This can also be called the “butterfly effect” — a very small change in the initial conditions can lead to a huge difference in the outcome.

What to do with the average person who doesn’t have many resources and isn’t as powerful as Alpha Go?

Just do the following two things:

1. Choice is more important than effort.

The choice here is that you want to increase your conditional probability, and choose the position of origin that you can change.

For individuals, they should follow the trend of The Times and choose the right place to dig Wells where there is plenty of water. Never take pride in taking risks.

  1. Where skills are needed, a strategy of hard work is adopted. Where luck is needed, it is better to do nothing

The weight of luck in the activities of people varies, but we can rank them from zero to 100 percent, as shown in the chart below.

At the far left, in games like chess and Go, skill is 100 percent weighted, and luck has little to do with it.

On the far right of pure gambling, like the coin flip we talked about before, where luck is 100% weighted, there’s no room for skill.

Between these two extremes are other things with different proportions of skill and luck. Basketball, for example, is closer to the skill end, indicating that skill has more weight than luck. Although sometimes, due to bad luck, the ball that seemed to have been shot bounced back and forth in the basket, improving skills is the most effective.

You’ll see investments closer to the right, which means luck is weighted much higher than skill. In other words, investing is mostly a matter of luck.

In higher skill weights, hard work is more important. Where luck is more important, “doing nothing” is more important.

For example, investment, all the research and learning is done before investment. Once you buy, don’t look at k-chart research every day. Instead, do nothing. Invest at a fixed time and invest in selected stocks for a long time.

There’s a line in The Random Walk Of Fools:

The man who has good skills but is poor will eventually climb to the top. And the lucky fool he may have some good fortune in his life for a short time. But in the long run, his situation will be slowly approaching that of a fool whose luck is not so good.

Supplement: If you don’t know about probability, you can learn this