Identifying Metas

Post by **Martin Hash** » Mon Aug 31, 2020 7:22 am

As I've talked about before, some people are so successful, in so many endeavors, that Lucktocracy doesn't explain it. A billionaire making more billions isn't Meta, but a billionaire with a #1 bestseller, hosting a top Reality TV Show, cover of Playboy, selected Top 10 Most Admired Men, and becoming POTUS is. Being successful on the Internet, electric cars, underground tunneling, spaceships & intelligence-enhancing implants is too. So is being a famous scientist, statesman, author, entrepreneur, and living in a sexual tryst with a French mother-daughter team at the time of America's founding. Those guys seem easy to identify subjectively but I was looking for an objective measure that had mathematical support...

My concept of our Lucktocracy is that some people win the lottery, even with the odds being millions to 1. The odds of becoming a billionaire are like that: long odds but there are still a considerable number of billionaires. Athletics is like that; so is acting, so is science for that matter. There are endless of examples of somebody winning lotteries. To identify a Meta, they have to win multiple lotteries; so many that the odds are prohibitive. Take Arnold Schwarzenegger for example: World champion bodybuilder 6 times: odds about 1 in 10 billion, 10^10; world's highest grossing actor: odds about 1 in billion, 10^9; governor of CA: odds about 1 in 100 million, 10^8. Enduring fame: odds about 1 in billion, 10 ^9; Marrying Maria Schriver: yikes! Any one of these accomplishments, and there are lots of lesser ones too, could be chalked up to Lucktocracy; maybe even 2 of them, but then the odds start getting into the 10^50 range, which is approximately the number of atoms in Earth. Odds in that range would be considered miracles, and science has no place for miracles, so it has to be something else... Perhaps Meta?