As an undergraduate, I participated in a faculty-student debate about artificial intelligence and I defended free will. The opposing professor claimed I believed in free will because I wanted credit for my success. That remark stuck and I found it applied elsewhere, such as in the context of luck.
As a gamer I am aware of the role (or roll) of chance in success. However, as the professor noted, I want credit for my successes and while I acknowledged the role of luck, I tended to minimize it. However, after modest success as a writer and teaching Aesthetics, I accepted that luck (favorable chance) has a huge role in success. But this was a largely unsupported view. Fortunately, Princeton’s Matthew Salganik investigated success and had the resources to do an effective experiment.
To determine the role of chance in success Salganik created nine identical online worlds. He then distributed the 30,000 teens he recruited for his experiment among these virtual worlds. Each group of teens was exposed to the same 48 songs from emerging artists that were unknown to the teens. In return, the teens were able to download the songs they liked best free of charge.
One world was set up as the control world—in this world the teens were isolated from social influence in that they could not see what songs others were downloading. In the other eight worlds, they could see which songs were being downloaded—which informed them of what the other teens saw as worth downloading.
This experiment was well designed: each world is identical at the start and the test subjects were randomly assigned to them. With the quality and size of the experiment, the results can be safely regarded as statistically significant.
Given that the same 48 songs were available in each world, if quality was the defining factor for success, then each world should be similar in terms of which songs were downloaded the most. However, Salganik found that the worlds varied significantly. For example, 52 Metro’s song “Lock Down” was first in one world and 40th in another. Salganik concluded that “small, random initial differences” were magnified by “social influence and cumulative advantage.” In short, chance was the decisive factor in the outcome. As a gamer, I certainly appreciated these findings and could easily visualize modelling this process with some dice and charts—like in games such as Pathfinder and D&D.
Lest it be thought that chance is the sole factor, Salganik found that quality does have a role in success—but much less than one might suspect. Based on additional experiments, he found that succeeding with poor quality work is hard but that once a certain basic level of quality is achieved, then success is primarily a matter of chance.
In terms of the specific mechanism of artistic success, a group of people will, as a matter of chance, decide a work is good. The attention of this group will attract more attention and this process will continue. Those drawn by the attention seem to reason that the work must be good and special because other people seem to believe it is good and special.
Leo Tolstoy seemed to have hit on a similar idea in his philosophy of aesthetics. As Tolstoy said, “a work that pleases a certain circle of people is accepted as art, then a definition of art is devised to cover these productions.” Tolstoy believed this approach failed to distinguish between good and bad art and saw it as flawed. With a tweak, this can be used to capture Salganik’s findings: “a work that pleases a certain circle of people is accepted as good, then it is believed by others to be good.”
The sort of “reasoning” that Salganik’s experiment seems to have revealed is the Appeal to Popularity fallacy: this is the “reasoning” that because something is popular, it follows that it is good or correct. It also nicely matches the similar Bandwagon fallacy: that because something is winning, it follows that it is good or correct. Not surprisingly, this is grounded in the cognitive bias known as the Bandwagon Effect: people have a psychological tendency to align their thinking with other people. In the case of Salganik’s experiment, the participants aligned their thinking in terms of their aesthetic preference and thus created a bandwagon effect. The effect is like the stereotype of an avalanche: a small, random event that sets of a cascade. Given that the process of selection is essentially not a rational assessment of quality but rather driven by cognitive bias and (perhaps) fallacious reasoning, it makes sense that the outcomes would be decided largely by chance. The same, if his experiment extends by analogy, would seem to hold true of the larger world. This would presumably also extend beyond music and even beyond aesthetics. It would also help explain why it can be so difficulty to manufacture success consistently: even if the art or product is good, it comes down to rolling dice.
Absolutely, Professor. Being a dedicated musician for several decades, I have observed first hand that it is 90 per cent just luck, and not only in music. But let’s say something about music. People who know me tell me how I deserved to be successful, etc….I tell them what first Socrates said: ‘I had to follow my daimon. I could not help it.’. I remember exactly as a kid transfixed by music, how I felt: I didn’t care about my ‘future’, or if I ended up living in a mansion or a trailer park. I still don’t, mostly. And what Epictetus would say about ‘worldly fortune’ spring to mind: these things are out of one’s control and should not be our concern. My concern was to be a musician, and the best I could be.
I am sure you had a similar experience with philosophy. You certainly didn’t become a philosopher because you wanted to earn a lot of money.
In music, this kind of ‘artistic success’ is dictated by the so called ‘music industry’. The irony is, musicians generally don’t care about this ‘industry’, and very few know or care to learn much about it, (though now with the internet things have changed a bit, but not by much). For ‘the music industry’ is to music something completely artificial and extraneous: this industry is basically made by investors. They don’t really care about music that much, if at all.
Talent has little to do with anything in the way of so called ‘artistic success’. Not the lack of artistic success really greatly discourages a real musician, who wanted to be a musician simply because he could not live without music.
I never became ‘successful’, in part because of my very introvert personality, for I (and others I know of) are better musician than others I know of who are ‘successful’.
Nowhere this evidence is strongest, about music (but not only) than from the biographies of the great composers, which are historically as accurate as possible, such as JS Bach: during his lifetime, no one really cared about his music. He didn’t even get a job as a music servant when he wrote to the Margrave of Brandeburg, who didn’t even reply to him. Now there’s many reasons why Bach is considered even today to be an absolute freak of nature, the reasons for that would be too long to try to explain here. This man excelled at anything he tried with music, anything he touched is today a proven masterwork. Suffice is to say that he has always been considered as a musical god from even the very best composers who came after him.
Yet, when he died, his music scores were being used to pack meat, by the local butchers. No serious musician today doesn’t know enough about Bach and his music, made of perfectly interwoven, multiple melodies occurring at the same time, which is a very difficult thing to do even for very good musicians, impossible for most without ending up with poor results.
He could do this easily and more perfectly than anyone else in the history of music.
But do you think he was the only one who fared like that? By no means. Many other great composers fared very poorly. Many compositions by Beethoven were not appreciated by the audiences, even by other excellent musicians. Same for Robert Schumann, many thought his works sounded strange.
Today, each one of these works are considered works of art, and are known all over the world, in every music conservatory and in every discerning audience.
”An ancient writer says, very truly, that there are three great powers in the world; Sagacity, Strength, and Luck,—[Greek: sunetos, kratos, tuchu.] I think the last is the most efficacious…..man’s life is like the voyage of a ship, where luck — secunda aut adversa fortuna — acts the part of the wind, and speeds the vessel on its way or drives it far out of its course….how often it happens that a man is unable to enjoy the wealth which he acquired at so much trouble and risk, and that the fruits of his labor are reserved for others; or that he is incapable of filling the position which he has won after so many years of toil and struggle. Fortune has come too late for him; or, contrarily, he has come too late for fortune,—when, for instance, he wants to achieve great things, say, in art or literature: the popular taste has changed, it may be; a new generation has grown up, which takes no interest in his work; others have gone a shorter way and got the start of him.”. – Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims
as the millionaire Felix Dennis wrote in a book: ”You can believe in luck; but don’t waste your time looking for it.”.
I.e., luck is real and true, but to try to control it is a waste of time. (sorry about the broken trains of thought….what happens is that I write, then I try to edit, then I get tired and I press enter before I delete everything).
”..a new generation has grown up, which takes no interest in his work…”.
That is exactly what happened to old Bach. Even his own sons, who were also excellent musicians, said to him: ‘Dad, you are STILL composing this old stuff?’.
Now, this ‘old stuff’ is considered some of the greatest musical achievements in the whole of history of music, and for very, very specific reasons that go way beyond ‘it’s beautiful’, etc.