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    [OC] View the Randomness of Life on Earth, a Data Exercise
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    [OC] View the Randomness of Life on Earth, a Data Exercise

    Any privilege (or non privilege) from wealth, education, access to water, and geography based on where you were born are essentially fully random ~1 / 8,000,000,000. I wanted to represent that so I built www.thebirthlottery.com where you can see all those possibilities.

    This is built off of real World Bank data so it is as realistic as possible. Check it out and let me know what you think!

    Please show me in DM or thread if you get any cool countries or rare achievements, I haven't even unlocked everything myself. Also if you think anything is inaccurate or misrepresented, I'm definitely interested in hearing.

    Update: Glad folks are enjoying the website! I wanted to call out a few features all located in buttons at the top for anyone interested:

    • Fast Mode: allows you to roll without the animation sequence
    • Compare to Self: input your own data to see the rarity and compare it to lives you roll
    • Achievements: each round can earn achievements based on the uniqueness of the rolls; you can view what you have and haven't unlocked
    • Historical Rounds: you can view all your historical rounds and see which countries you are rolling the most or least
    • Country Unlocking: you can see a full view of all the individual countries you have unlocked and how many are still to be discovered

    Posted by Worried-Meaning-429

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    19 Comments

    2. ExcelAcolyte on

      This is really cool and shows how awesome LLMs can be for getting ideas that would have never been built otherwise into reality! I got Very Wealthy in Tanzania as my epic pull 🙂

      Only suggestion I have is to let users continue to the next steps with the enter button on the keyboard and to add a button or checkbox to skip the animation of the lights moving around the world.

    3. lelvv on

      It would be cool if there was an option to input your own data and see how many other people match that description and what the odds that are

    5. douira on

      currently it seems the education level, water access, and life expectancy are not correlated with the wealth level. It would be far more interesting if the rolls actually looked at the education, water availability, and education distributions for that country correlated with the random wealth level each roll picks.

    6. amongusmuncher on

      >Any privilege (or non privilege) from wealth, education, access to water, and geography based on where you were born are essentially fully random ~1 / 8,000,000,000

      I’m pretty sure I could’ve only been born by my parents. Unless you believe in something like a soul vortex where random souls are put in random babies.

    9. WesleyBiets on

      Is it also based on the ratio of people and the chance you get to be born in that country? If so does this reset everytime you start a new game? Cause because of that I get A LOT of India and China.

    12. wesleyoldaker on

      Really interesting, thanks for sharing.

      The only thing that felt off to me was the even distribution of which local wealth tier you get. The wealthiest 20% of any country is always going to be a fraction of that size of the national population, and the bottom 20% the opposite. Upper-class and wealthy were popping up way too often.

      One other thought that might be interesting:

      Add another variable (which is also completely out of anyone’s control) into the mix: year of birth. Being born into a lower class of wealth in the year 2026 might not be so bad of a draw, but wind the clock back 1500 years? That’s gonna be a scary card. Maybe even add a new card for that scenario: you didn’t survive to your first birthday.

    13. mr_ji on

      It’s not random at all. You have generations of self-selection leading up to you. What a silly notion.

    17. BRCityzen on

      Pretty cool. I’ve done a few rolls. Interesting, but are you sure you’ve accounted for class disparity in life expectancy as much as you should, particularly in men? The differences in life expectancy between classes seem a little muted compared to the studies that I’ve seen.

      I only have data for one country, the US, but it’s gaping. Especially for men, because men tend to suffer more at the lower ends of the income spectrum. I made a post about it on another sub a while back.

      [Fascinating Harvard study said a lot about life expectancy gap… but nobody seemed to notice. : r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates](https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/1pnt1bk/fascinating_harvard_study_said_a_lot_about_life/)

      So in the US, if you’re a 1%er, the life expectancy is very high, and almost the same for men and women. But at the bottom, the difference is 10 years less for women, and a whopping 15 years less for men. I suspect it is more muted in places like Canada, or China. But in developing countries with high inequality, I think the gap between classes is going to be even higher. Overall, though, really impressive effort. Really illustrates the randomness of the human experience and the arbitrary nature of life.

    18. RubberDuck404 on

      There might be something wrong with the gender ratio because I get “male” almost every single time

    19. monsterfurby on

      There was an old life sim thing called Real Lives that illustrated this pretty impressively as well, because the player would be born in a social strata and country based on statistical probability. Just being born somewhere with clean water felt like winning the lottery.