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I'm not quite getting how can you put talent vs luck, when talent is based on luck you got from your genes, parents, environment etc. I see it as the same thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no such thing as talent either. No one is born with a natural skill to do something unnatural. Genetic traits are not talents, they are traits. To be born with a talent would be to be able to do whatever it is you do from the moment you are born, if you had the physical capacity for it. Otherwise, any “talent” you display later is really just the result of effective learning and practice, but that is just wh…
Luck is anything the individual cannot control. You don't get to choose your parents, for example. I don't see what your point is.
- fixed rate of return (doubled or halved) make luck play an oversized role. One of talents greatest contributions is knowing how to let your winners run and cut your losses. The setup is close to a random walk by definition.
- risk reduction is hugely important. High earners especially when speaking of finance tend to know how to reduce risk. Only fools always bet half they capital in every decision.
- talent would understand what events are more likely to succeed than just every event having the same probability.
- talent and preparation generate events. The more you prepare the more chances you'll have available. Most successful people have failed multiple times but keep trying.
- no learning. One of talents great benefits is learning from mistakes. And when combined with increased number of chances that talent provides, this is a critical feedback cycle the model misses.
Basically the model made everybody similar and then had an exponential random function. With such small tails in the talent pool, there is no other decision it could have reached.
I'm not quite getting how can you put talent vs luck, when talent is based on luck you got from your genes, parents, environment etc. I see it as the same thing.
My parents were 100% not luck. If I had different parents, well I'd be dead wouldn't I since I was never born.
Same with my genes, if my brain genes were different, I'd be dead.
As with environment.... because of my parents genes they got me into a good environment... cause they too didn't rely on luck.
Pretty much very little was luck.
To think it was luck would mean you'd have to believe in a god who gives out souls.
I still think the focus on wealth/income inequality rather than on absolute poverty is irrational. I've seen people justify it to me on the grounds that people care about relative poverty, which to me reads "people are jealous". But then the result is: 1) A focus on inequality is irrational. 2) People focus on inequality for irrational reasons. This means that if policy-makers and intellectuals fully give in to the p…
The reason we care so much about inequality has nothing to do with jealousy and everything to do with power[1]. As resources are a major source of power (and often vice-versa), and because power is relative, inequality of resources means inequality of power. And as power means influence (and so the ability to reduce another's freedom), inequality reduces overall freedom. As freedom can never be total[2], the question…
I'm not quite getting how can you put talent vs luck, when talent is based on luck you got from your genes, parents, environment etc. I see it as the same thing.
> It could be that the results were built into the model’s design. Every true mathematical proposition is a tautology. I don't find this point particularly convincing. As long as the model's predictions match reality in interesting ways, it can lend possible insights on why reality might have certain characteristics. > Like getting an improbable series of heads when flipping a coin long enough, improbable clusters of…
I completely agree with everything you've said. I think that an interesting way to gauge the accuracy of the model without doing major empirical research is to create models where talent is the decisive factor, and then compare which model's assumptions better capture what we know about the world. My guess is that for a variable to be a decisive factor, it must correspond to excessive control over others, thus not ma…
Exactly. This paper should be one among many models explored, but it's a good start.
In fact, I'm sure the paper's simulation can be run with a whole variety of parameters for luck's probability, talent, and bad/good luck's effect on capital. We can then see which set of parameters best matches some aspect of reality and possibly gain some new insight there too.
The original model was so abstracted that it was absurd. There is no such thing as “luck”, it is only a name for what we call the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Both can be controlled. People tend to think opportunities are random and based on chance – they aren’t. They are the result of smaller intersections of preparations and opportunities that happened previously.
I'm pretty proud of the careful preparation I did that led me to be born in the Netherlands.
I'm not quite getting how can you put talent vs luck, when talent is based on luck you got from your genes, parents, environment etc. I see it as the same thing.