Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

technologyreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 356 posts

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

#261

Post by lazyasciiart »

zepto wrote: post #46
Keloo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Changing the country you live in is not possible for most people - it requires luck to have the resources necessary to do so. And even if you do change the country you live in, it won’t be equivalent to having been born there.

See: all those undocumented kids who grew up in the USA and now are stuck hoping that DACA doesn't get cancelled.

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

#262

Post by agota »

Okay, so I quickly skimmed the paper in question, and I'm very skeptical of it.

They are using talent as a variable in their model, but what do they mean by "talent"?

"talent Ti (intelligence, skills, ability, etc.)"

Throwing "intelligence, skills, ability, etc." together doesn't make much sense to me.

Out of these three, only intelligence (assuming they meant IQ), is an established measure, at least from what I understand. What does "skills, ability, etc." even mean?

It's not surprising to me that their conclusion doesn't seem to correspond with reality:

"An important result of the simulations is that the most successful agents are almost never the most talented ones, but those around the average of the Gaussian talent distribution - another stylised fact often reported in the literature" (what literature??).

I can't comment on this "talent" variable as a whole since it doesn't make much sense but in terms of IQ it's certainly not the 100 IQ individuals that tend to be the most successful ones.

I also question the "luck" variable, because:

"...does not change this fundamental features of the model, which exposes different individuals to different amount of lucky or unlucky events during their life, regardless of their own talent."

I find it unlikely that "talent" and "luck" are completely independent from each other.

For example, if I recall correctly, reaction time correlates with IQ, so wouldn't that make more intelligent people less prone to accidents?

Finally, I'm dubious of their results that show that distributing funds equally among all scientists would lead to most scientific discoveries.

From what I understand, people with a specific set of traits, aka geniuses, are over-represented in scientific discoveries.

If that's the case, wouldn't deliberately seeking out geniuses and throwing money at them lead to more discoveries than distributing funds equally?

Again, I only skimmed this paper, but it seems to me that the researchers didn't look at the data we already have, and instead made up their own models that don't appear to correspond with reality.

Also, given that this is a Hacker News comment, not a scientific paper, I can't be bothered to cite anything :D

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

#263

Post by prewett »

hinkley wrote: post #232
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hustle and preparation are not luck, they're skills you have to hone for them to be useful. You have to actually do something. They aren't something you can be born into (much to the dismay of rich parents with deadbeat kids). By reducing 2 and 3 to luck you're implying that people have no agency. Sure, the person who develops those skills in rural Africa isn't going to go as far as someone who develops those skills…

"Fortune favors the prepared mind." not "Fortune rewards the prepared mind." Although the latter is effectively Calvinism, which the US culture was founded on. It will probably echo through the ages.

I've never heard Calvinism talk about either "fortune" or the "prepared mind". I get that you're denigrating Calvinism here rather than making a precise statement, but what part of Calvinism are you referring to? The Calvinists I know would be more likely to say that God willed your situation or gave you the preparation for your mind. This is more akin to fate than fortune. ("Fate" being what will inevitably happen, and "fortune" being chance events.)

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

#264

Post by lazyasciiart »

hnhg wrote: post #168
omarhaneef wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know I can say it more clearly. I can sort of repeat what I said. Instead of two factors (intelligence, and effort), let's just take one factor (effort). One person works 12 hours a day. We know people can only work 2x as hard as this person. Yet, there are many people who are more than 2x as rich. Hence, effort alone doesn't fully explain the difference. That is it. You can get that argument right there. Do…

My point is that the mathematical simulation is more precise because you've exactly stated the model and ran it. While doing it verbally allows for all kinds of interpretation and is therefore much harder to interpret. I apologise but I also really sincerely don't understand your verbal reasoning in the context of this particular paper. They took two underlying distributions and managed to produce something that look…

Given the starting numbers, the math is fine. But because the starting numbers are not real data, they had to create them out of a simplified model - and all the decisions that went into that model can be criticized and used as reasons that the output is wrong.

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

#265

Post by anigbrowl »

_fq4v wrote: post #204
empath75 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libertarians who talk about how the state just gets in the way of innovators like Gates forget how hard it is to start a business when the central government fails and people start hacking away at each other with machetes instead of programming computers.

Okay, but this is a strawman, because a basic tenet of libertarianism is that a government is necessary to forcefully (if necessary) prevent others from trampling on your individual rights. You are describing anarchy, not libertarianism.

In theory yes, but in practice most libertarians involved in politics want to ruthlessly prune government down to courts for arbitration of contractual disputes, and police for enforcing property rights.

What you are describing is not anarchy, for that matter. Anarchy means absence of rulers, which is not the same thing as chaos and warlordism. Political anarchists are concerned with the establishment of systems that disallow concentrations of power or wealth that enable oppression.

Libertarianism is not exclusively capitstic. Philosophical anarchism can include autonomism, autarchism, and market anarchism, for example: https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/anarchism-libertarian...

It's doubly wrong to describe the situation in Rwanda as anarchism because the genocide that occurred there was not due to some lack of contractual or property relations, but planned, engineered, and carried out because of tribal animosity, partially pursuant to grievances stemming from a particularly brutal period of Belgian colonialism and subsequent civil war(s). That genocide was highly organized by social elites of one tribe over a period of about a year. To maintain otherwise is either product of ignorance or bad faith, so I hope you'll abandon this erroneous position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

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

#266

Post by patentatt »

Konnstann wrote: post #138
maerF0x0 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's a plethora of tax breaks and deductions related to children that you can claim. Besides that, the people who don't have kids are subsidizing the education of yours through their taxes. Regarding social security, I'm fairly confident the system will collapse before I see a penny of what I'm paying in.

As everybody know, kids are a nonstop gravy train /s

But seriously, I’m guessing you don’t have kids?

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

#267

Post by drukenemo »

golemotron wrote: post #22

There's also the fact that being rich isn't everyone's goal. It looks like it is a pain in the ass to be rich, actually.

Why is that? I think there are many ways of being rich. For example, being rich but still living a relatively simple life.

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

#268

Post by anigbrowl »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #29
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.

Hustle and preparation are not luck, they're skills you have to hone for them to be useful. You have to actually do something. They aren't something you can be born into (much to the dismay of rich parents with deadbeat kids). By reducing 2 and 3 to luck you're implying that people have no agency. Sure, the person who develops those skills in rural Africa isn't going to go as far as someone who develops those skills…

Hustle and preparation are very important, lucking into wealth vastly outweighs those factors, because a) it provides room to fail and b) it makes it easy to hire the busy and well-prepared.

Try playing multiple games of monopoly with 4 or 5 friends (or run monte carlo simulations if you want a fun machine learning project, since Monopoly is a game that can easily be taught to computers), but randomly assign one player 10x the starting capital and $2000 every time they pass go instead of the normal $200.

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

#269

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

lots of people from poor countries go to US or Europe

Have you noticed the existence of extremely anti-immigration politicians who are trying to reduce that number to zero by rewriting the rules in the most inequitable fashion possible?

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

#270

Post by burntoutfire »

pmoriarty wrote: post #119
regular_person wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point. It's not (necessarily) that Americans are just inherently money-hungry; we just have to be because we live in a system that is really callous and unmerciful compared to other places in the world.

There are plenty of people in America who continue to chase money long after their safe retirement is assured. I don't know if I'm qualified to compare Americans to Europeans, but many Americans really are enamored with money and judge material wealth as the be all and end all goal of life.

> There are plenty of people in America who continue to chase money long after their safe retirement is assured.

That's probably because, over time, you become what you practice. So, even if you were not obsessed with money and work at 20, you might be at 40, after 20 years of chasing money and success to stave off potential disasters.

Post reply on HN