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Survivorship Bias

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Re: Survivorship Bias

#191

Post by jerf »

didibus wrote: post #184
jerf wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What about the factory workers who also practiced prudent money management and did not end up millionaires?" Then he at least ended up better off than he would have if he had not practiced prudent money management. Anything else would require stretching the definition of "prudent" beyond anything that fits. It is a fallacy to believe all of life's outcomes are purely due to skill, one that will harm anyone who acts…

I don't think what you're saying holds correct. You're just applying survivorship bias at a smaller and therefore less obvious scale. We do not know the amount of luck based causality versus non luck based. What we do know is the probability of ending up a millionaire vs not. So say it's 10% millionaire. I'm pulling this out of my ars. Now the question becomes what non luck based actions were performed by the 10% of…

We know I am correct that success is not entirely luck, because we can observe that no success comes to someone who just sits and waits for luck to strike them like a bolt of lightning. Even the lottery winner had to go out and buy the lottery ticket. Note I'm partially defining success as something like "a sustained and significant increase in wealth", so by my metric here even someone lucky enough to be born to the wealthiest person in the world and inherit more wealth than anyone else may still not experience "success" if they fritter away the wealth to no great effect. I don't think this is an unacceptable odd definition in this context, and those born into wealth so great that they literally have no responsibilities in life and can't manage to lose it no matter how hard they try are edge conditions anyhow.

This bounds luck's contributions to less than 100%. Mathematically that's a pretty weak bound, but it's not hard to see that it must be substantially less than that in the real world for the observed results to make sense, though. How substantially is hard to even put numbers on, so I'm not going to try, because the real point I'm trying to make here is that it is dreadfully dangerous to sell the idea that success is entirely luck based. It is far more dangerous to both individuals and the society they live in than to sell the idea that success is based on skill and effort. As I am a rather old fashioned person who still believes that truth is better than falsehood, the fact that telling people that success is based on skill and work works better than telling people that success is pure unadulterated luck suggests to me that the "skill and work" explanation, while still not Aristotelian truth, is likely closer to the truth than the "pure luck" explanation. (I'm skipping over some connecting justification there because this is an HN comment and not a philosophy essay; if you agree truth is better than falsehood you can probably fill it in yourself, and if you do not, then why are you arguing anyhow since no argument will produce anything better than what you already have.)

Re: Survivorship Bias

#192

Post by FrankenPC »

To me, a lot of success is knowing when to give up and make a tangential change. Many failures I've come across were stubborn people who refused to let it go and try something different. But then again, you might let go and someone else will pick up the ball and make a million. You are back to gambling.

Re: Survivorship Bias

#193

Post by jdmichal »

xxs wrote: post #155
devdad wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some students would have to start at 600 meters with led shoes and weights in their hands. And another group should get to start at 200 meters on bikes.

when I read 'led shoes', I thought of the one that literally have LED on them and flash/glow. Then I realized it was meant to be the lead element (Pb), that's actually pronounced (led)... Also typing/pronouncing/using 'LED lights' makes for a great tautology. ("Light emitting diode" lights) English is weird, sometimes.

That's RAS Syndrome -- redundant acronym syndrome syndrome.

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

Re: Survivorship Bias

#195

Post by crusso »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #137
crusso wrote: post #80

Yes, working hard is not an absolute determiner of success. It may not even be a majority determiner, depending upon your personal experiences or philosophy as well as the domain in which you're trying to achieve success. Winning the lottery is an absurdly extreme example of one domain where luck is provably a majority determiner. It's funny as a comic, but that domain doesn't really map onto many other career domain…

"My observation is that the people who succeed spend more time on the side of that spectrum toward working their tails off than on the side of doing nothing." My observation is those people are miserable, unhealthy and have poor relationships.

Not true at all on the health side. These days, most of those people have plenty of money for gym equipment at home, personal trainers, etc. and they have the motivation to actually do exercise.

Relationships are hit and miss, in my experience. Some hard workers work hard at their relationships too.

Re: Survivorship Bias

#196

Post by igk »

thenomad wrote: post #141
marcosdumay wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a significant difference between small business failure rates and small businessperson failure rates Most people can not afford a failed business. If you are looking at repeated tries, you are taking a huge amount of survivorship bias already.

Depends on the business. Not everything requires huge or even significant initial outlay. For example, infoproducts (or any kind of digital product) are very cheap to start up. They take time, but not necessarily a lot of money.

The thing is, time is money. Leisure time is one privilege of the rich, or lucky, which leads to unfair compounding advantages (like philosophy as well). "Normal" people (as in, if you selected them at random) don't have the time to learn the special skills required and also invest the time to develop the very specific type of product you are talking about. So, in order to start a business, you need to have a break. It can be getting lucky with your job, a windfall, or just gambling some precious savings or time onto your idea. And then, most of the time, it fails, and most people cannot afford to retry. Those that manage anyway are the exception, not the rule

Re: Survivorship Bias

#197

Post by jdmichal »

ericrav wrote: post #188
ctdonath wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mobility is there for the taking, though disincentives are at an all-time high. Welfare benefits are structured (presumably unintentionally) to discourage working: earning about $12/hr plus welfare equals about $36/hr without welfare ... but in between, welfare benefits plummet so fast that trying to work your way up from $12/hr to $36/hr amounts to a huge pay cut. As such many can't or won't make the bridging ef…

Are you referring to the US? Since we don't have a federal cash welfare program[0], what welfare program are you talking about that gives recipients an additional $24/hr ($50,000 a year if working full time)? [0]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-welfare-dollars-do...

Not OP, but my guess would be that such a number would have come from pricing out equivalent services as those being provided. That is, providing discounted housing is not handing out money. But you could take the average discounted rent, and the average non-discounted rent, and come to an approximate cash-equivalent "value" of that discount.

Also, I find the direction of the article in your link interesting. That is, given this:

> Under TANF, states can spend welfare money on virtually any program aimed at one of four broad purposes: (1) assistance to needy families with children; (2) promoting job preparation and work; (3) preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and (4) encouraging the formation of two-parent families.

I'm a little surprised to see this a couple paragraphs down:

> In 1998, nearly 60 percent of welfare spending was on cash benefits, categorized as “basic assistance.” By 2014, it was only about one-quarter of TANF spending. That shift has happened despite a burgeoning economics literature suggesting that direct cash transfers are in many cases the most efficient tool to fight poverty.

I don't see "fighting poverty" on the list of four things, so I'm not surprised that it got disincentivized.

Re: Survivorship Bias

#198

Post by ctdonath »

ericrav wrote: post #188
ctdonath wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mobility is there for the taking, though disincentives are at an all-time high. Welfare benefits are structured (presumably unintentionally) to discourage working: earning about $12/hr plus welfare equals about $36/hr without welfare ... but in between, welfare benefits plummet so fast that trying to work your way up from $12/hr to $36/hr amounts to a huge pay cut. As such many can't or won't make the bridging ef…

Are you referring to the US? Since we don't have a federal cash welfare program[0], what welfare program are you talking about that gives recipients an additional $24/hr ($50,000 a year if working full time)? [0]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-welfare-dollars-do...

It's the proliferation of programs, most of which don't write checks to the individuals but do provide generous coverage & subsidies. EBT (aka "food stamps"), health insurance, "Section 8 housing" ("right" to rent in upscale neighborhoods with capped cost), etc all add up. Details are out there, often reported. https://downtrend.com/robertgehl/welfare-payouts-top-20-per-... http://nypost.com/2013/08/19/when-welfare-pays-better-than-w... The totality of details is too much for a brief casual blog comment, and it may not be exactly so in all cases, but point is there is a substantial drop in welfare benefits above a certain income threshold for given jurisdictions, enough that between about $12-20/hr the decrease in benefits is more than the increase in wages - to wit: the more you earn, the lower your revenue at an economic strata where decreased income is extremely difficult to bridge. ...and that economic barrier to social mobility is an artificial construct instituted by a well-meaning, but deeply misguided, sociopolitical philosophy.

Re: Survivorship Bias

#199

Post by sdflkd »

jondubois wrote: post #142
ux-app wrote: post #23

Most people are missing the point a bit here. Survivorship bias doesn't relate to people who worked hard, improved themselves and now earn 1-10MM/yr. There are loads of stories like that. Survivorship bias is "Zuck did X, Y and Z, if I do the same then I'll be a multi-billionaire too!" Following the playbook of those that made it into the top 0.001% is foolish and does not properly account for the large part luck pla…

It's amusing to watch lucky people on HN make comments like this (taking their extreme luck for granted and attributing it to hard work) and then watch them get down-voted by equally hard-working people who have the opposite experience. ... And let's not forget that HN is not an accurate representation of society as a whole (HN itself 'suffers' from survivor bias).

> It's amusing to watch lucky people on HN make comments like this (taking their extreme luck for granted and attributing it to hard work) and then watch them get down-voted by equally hard-working people who have the opposite experience.

It's less amusing when you realize these same arguments are used against minorities/the disadvantaged to keep them down.

Re: Survivorship Bias

#200

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

ctdonath wrote: post #198
ericrav wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to the US? Since we don't have a federal cash welfare program[0], what welfare program are you talking about that gives recipients an additional $24/hr ($50,000 a year if working full time)? [0]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-welfare-dollars-do...

It's the proliferation of programs, most of which don't write checks to the individuals but do provide generous coverage & subsidies. EBT (aka "food stamps"), health insurance, "Section 8 housing" ("right" to rent in upscale neighborhoods with capped cost), etc all add up. Details are out there, often reported. https://downtrend.com/robertgehl/welfare-payouts-top-20-per-... http://nypost.com/2013/08/19/when-welfare-p…

If your problem with welfare is that it should have no drop off points, what makes that the product of a "deeply misguided, sociopolitical philosophy"? It seems to me more like a problem created by the fumblings of a bipartisan beauracracy.
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