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The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

technologyreview.com

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Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#81

Post by ranie93 »

Keloo wrote: post #40
ta1234567890 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, 2, 3 and 4 can be reduced to 1. You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life. In the end, everything is just blind luck, but our egos want to feel like they are in control somehow.

> You don't choose your genes I agree with this one. > or where you are born Not really agree with this, you can change the country you live in. And it's more important where you live not where you are born. For example lots of people from poor countries go to US or Europe and are quite successful there. > 2,3 can be reduced to 1. Don't agree either. Let's be realistic, what are the chances of success for a person wh…

I think the person you are replying to is making the more basic interpretation that such propensities (someone who stays at home watching movies, someone with the motivation to move to another country, etc) are themselves composed of variables outside of one's control-- genes, gene expression, nutrition, etc, etc-- i.e. blind luck

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#82

Post by DoreenMichele »

umvi wrote: post #51
DoreenMichele wrote: post #21

Years ago, a friend of the family said "You're so smart. Everyone thought you would be a millionaire by age thirty. What happened?" I pointed at my kids and said "They happened. And they take all my time." I was a full-time wife and mom. This is not a career known to lead to great wealth. So, for starters, not all interests or career paths have equal potential to lead to wealth. Intelligence in no way guarantees that…

Next time just say: "I am a millionaire, and more. My kids are worth more than I could have imagined"

That's more literally true than you think.

My children nursed me back to health after doctor's wrote me off for dead. It's supposed to cost about $100k-$250k annually to treat my condition conventionally.

My oldest has the same condition. Between the two of us, that's up to a half million dollars per year.

We were diagnosed over 18 years ago. You can conservatively guess that my kids have been worth at least $1.5 million to me, and potentially more than $9 million.

(That's just the dollar value saved on treatment. You can put no price on the improvement in quality of life that I got out of it.)

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#83

Post by DoreenMichele »

citronlakris wrote: post #75
DoreenMichele wrote: post #21

Years ago, a friend of the family said "You're so smart. Everyone thought you would be a millionaire by age thirty. What happened?" I pointed at my kids and said "They happened. And they take all my time." I was a full-time wife and mom. This is not a career known to lead to great wealth. So, for starters, not all interests or career paths have equal potential to lead to wealth. Intelligence in no way guarantees that…

Are you from america? As a european, this assumption that everyone would value getting as rich as possible as their top priority seems really weird.

I'm American. The friend of the family in question was a German immigrant.

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#84

Post by maerF0x0 »

Edmond wrote: post #77
epx wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the same for men, too. I had everything set up to retire at 35... then I married. Sure, I am a more socially productive person now. My kid will someday pay taxes that will finance the retirement of people that didn't bother to have kids.

>My kid will someday pay taxes that will finance the retirement of people that didn't bother to have kids. All things considered, that is definitely not a given. Social security for instances is tied to one's lifetime earnings, throw in the correlation between life time earnings and longevity and it smooths out to getting what you put in (roughly). There are also a lot of benefits, both employer funded and tax payer…

> Social security for instances ...

And parents likely have lower lifetime earnings than non-parents. So its possible they're not only funding the future of social security, but also getting less for themselves...

It would be great if someone had a source if parents are net recipients of benefits beyond the societal benefit of having children.

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#85

Post by danans »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #36
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being prepared doesn't mean anything unless 1 happens. Hustling => success and preparation => success are dependent on lucky opportunities.

No they are not. Yes, there is more opportunity in some settings than others but the people with the skills are much less likely to be passed by by that opportunity than everyone else. There's a lot more opportunity that usable to the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation) and have the drive to do so (hustle).

> the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation)

In a great many cases this boils down to already having enough money to survive a failure in a condition that you can get up to hustle again.

If you are supporting a family, the size of that financial backstop needs to be bigger. For every story of person X who bet their family's security and ended up a big financial success, there are far more who ended up in the negative.

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#86

Post by pmoriarty »

rubidium wrote: post #73
nostrademons wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like this is a free will argument. In a reductionist view, yes, everything is all blind luck because the universe was set in motion at the Big Bang and has evolved according to the laws of physics since. If you got rich through intelligence, determination, and good choices, that was still luck because your intelligence and determination are largely determined by your genes and your choices by your environment,…

But, the best we know is the laws of physics are not deterministic! The quantum states that your neurons fire to is unknowable in advance and determined only at the point of measurement. Therefore, you are _free_ in the exact results of your neural mass are unknowable in advance and truly random. There's certainly a distribution of probability to the randomness... but be free and don't by the deterministic, 19th cent…

Quantum events might not be completely predictable by our puny human brains, but that doesn't mean that they're not pre-ordained or pre-determined in some sense.

The world could be 100% a "clockwork universe", but we just aren't capable of understanding how it all works or fully predicting what will happen.

To say that something is "random" is more of a statement about our own inability to see a pattern in the data than about the data not having some pattern in it.

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#87

Post by epx »

Edmond wrote: post #77
epx wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the same for men, too. I had everything set up to retire at 35... then I married. Sure, I am a more socially productive person now. My kid will someday pay taxes that will finance the retirement of people that didn't bother to have kids.

>My kid will someday pay taxes that will finance the retirement of people that didn't bother to have kids. All things considered, that is definitely not a given. Social security for instances is tied to one's lifetime earnings, throw in the correlation between life time earnings and longevity and it smooths out to getting what you put in (roughly). There are also a lot of benefits, both employer funded and tax payer…

These benefits are largely theoretical, I don't get any of them. Here (Brazil), unless you are a public servant, regular jobs with such benefits are all low-pay. I have been working as a consultant for my whole life.

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#88

Post by nostrademons »

rubidium wrote: post #73
nostrademons wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like this is a free will argument. In a reductionist view, yes, everything is all blind luck because the universe was set in motion at the Big Bang and has evolved according to the laws of physics since. If you got rich through intelligence, determination, and good choices, that was still luck because your intelligence and determination are largely determined by your genes and your choices by your environment,…

But, the best we know is the laws of physics are not deterministic! The quantum states that your neurons fire to is unknowable in advance and determined only at the point of measurement. Therefore, you are _free_ in the exact results of your neural mass are unknowable in advance and truly random. There's certainly a distribution of probability to the randomness... but be free and don't by the deterministic, 19th cent…

My physics professor met with the Dalai Lama to discuss this exact point - whether the indeterminacy in quantum mechanics can give rise to free will.

The thing is, the randomness in quantum mechanics isn't really the same as what we talk about with "free will". Quantum mechanics is really a statement about coupling - it finds that you cannot separate the results of a measurement from the act of measuring, and so you will always introduce uncertainty into the measurement of any physical quantity.

There are a lot of possible philosophical interpretations of that. Does it mean nature is inherently random? Or is nature deterministic underneath, but our knowledge of nature is inherently random? Does it leave room for God in the machine? Free will? Are the laws of physics lines of code in a computer program, and we're Sims trying to reverse-engineer them?

Physicists tend not to concern themselves much with these quesions: as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, there is uncertainty in the measurement of any physical quantity, and this uncertainty can be quantified. The laws of physics are just models anyway: they've worked remarkably well at predicting reality, but we'll never know whether they're actually reality, and that's not really the point.

"Free will" usually implies some form of agent that can shape actions in the future. The mind, soul, whatever is a distinct thing that determines our actions. Personally, I'm of the opinion that we don't actually have free will, but I was predestined to believe that I do, and as a model of reality it works fairly well even if it's false, so there's no particular reason to discard that model. Similarly, I don't actually have a "self" - I'm just a collection of neural impulses firing - but it's convenient to believe that I do, so why not?

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#89

Post by wklauss »

bjornsing wrote: post #79

> So some people are more talented than average and some are less so, but nobody is orders of magnitude more talented than anybody else. This is the same kind of distribution seen for various human skills, or even characteristics like height or weight. Some people are taller or smaller than average, but nobody is the size of an ant or a skyscraper. Indeed, we are all quite similar. I realize this is the politically c…

> how many randomly selected people would you need to produce a score aver 200 on an IQ test, produce a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem or build something like the SpaceX Falcon.

It's been proven time and again that IQ numbers are more or less meaningless. Setting that aside, I think the point of the article is exactly that you might not need a huge sample to find someone with the potential to do these things, key word here being "potential", nor these things require a different order of magnitude in talent or intelligence, just the right combination of drive, luck, inspiration, opportunity, etc...

Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms

#90

Post by zornado »

diminoten wrote: post #27

True, but you can't be lucky if you don't roll the dice, and some people roll the dice more than others.

And what guarantees that rolling the dice will always be profitable. Rolling the dice can bring profits or losses.
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