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

281–290 of 356 posts

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

#281

Post by klaudius »

shadowtree wrote: post #35
martinni wrote: post #7

Rich people got "lucky" but they don't define what luck is to begin with. To quote Naval, there are 4 kinds of luck. 1. Blind luck - Where I just got lucky because something completely out of my control happened 2. Luck from hustling - luck that comes through persistence, hard work, hustle, motion. Which is when you’re running around creating lots of opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lo…

2-4 are great examples of survivorship bias. For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures. If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence. It's just like in sports. Usain Bolt is not the fastest man alive. He is the fastest professional runner. Within a sample se…

  "If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today."
You are unfairly using an extreme example. It would be like saying that someone wouldn't be 6'5" if they had been born in extreme poverty with malnutrition. Yes, extremely bad environment can stunt your growth, but you can't use poverty and malnutrition to explain in general why some people are shorter or taller than others.

There are wealthy people outside of the USA and those who weren't born wealthy.

It's a mistake to claim that differences in wealth (or height or IQ) can be explained by environmental factors.

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

#282

Post by LeftHandPath »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #13
martinni wrote: post #7

Rich people got "lucky" but they don't define what luck is to begin with. To quote Naval, there are 4 kinds of luck. 1. Blind luck - Where I just got lucky because something completely out of my control happened 2. Luck from hustling - luck that comes through persistence, hard work, hustle, motion. Which is when you’re running around creating lots of opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lo…

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.

It all boils down to just how deterministic you're able to believe the universe is.

Is there a such thing as my own willpower that allows me to improve my position more than an equivalently-placed person would, or is the willpower to act to improve my own situation derived from the blind luck of where and when I was born?

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

#283

Post by LeftHandPath »

buboard wrote: post #132

But what did the reviewers say about the paper? ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 ) They used a normal distribution for "Talent", but that's false. There is plenty of evidence that , like everything in life , it's power-law distributed https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-myth-... http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/11/16/power-laws-reve... And the assumtions of the model are rather childish: eac…

> Good conversation piece, everyone has an opinion on the subject, but the experiment is rubbish.

Agreed. The paper also seems to be promoting a view of wealth inequality that would support modern socialist policies.

The paper seems to be trying to scientifically support redistribution of welfare, without actually doing or saying anything, or posing the question directly.

Someone is warping the numbers to fit their agenda. Since it's a popular (and polarizing) agenda, of course everyone will have an opinion to chime in with.

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

#284

Post by ultraism »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #235
ultraism wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I favor the idea of free will but I don't buy this argument. Everything in the universe is bound by the same physics/quantum mechanics but you wouldn't say a rock has free will.

Quantum mechanics has the free will theorem: if you have free will, then so do sub-atomic particles. Thus if you want to have free will, then so does a rock. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem

To me, free will implies choice. I don't see how non-determinism is equivalent to choice. I can see it as necessary but not sufficient. I do not see how the "free will theorem" shows that elementary particles are choosing their spin. It seems that they mean free will differently than I do.

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

#285

Post by ChrisLomont »

anigbrowl wrote: post #257
ChrisLomont wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not like you're creating money out of thin air. No, but money (and value) is created out of ideas, of labor, and adding value to products. When an IPO happens, for example, and a company owner holding 50% of the company is suddenly valued at $20B, that value did not come from taking $20B from other people. It's the value of the company. It is value simply created out of thin air, that didn't exist before. If th…

When an IPO happens, for example, and a company owner holding 50% of the company is suddenly valued at $20B, that value did not come from taking $20B from other people. Unless you were the first to market in a completely new field, it's very possible that some of a firm's worth comes from gaining market share from existing players. That's the whole 'disruption' effect. This might be more economically efficient from o…

>Unless you were the first to market in a completely new field, it's very possible that some of a firm's worth comes from gaining market share from existing players.

It is possible, but you can simply check that the size of the US and world economy has grown tremendously, so that argument doesn't explain the growth.

>So what? Make co-op financing better,

There are plenty of ESOP companies. If they consistently did well enough, then the excess capital they generate could be used to start more employee owned companies.

That this doesn't happen perhaps points to an inefficiency in this process for company creation. Perhaps simply having workers is not enough to drive the economy. It shouldn't be a surprise that when an investor takes a risk to allocate capital to a fledgling company, that the investor would expect a return for resulting growth.

Creating companies without investment is possible, but likely less capable overall.

>That was the day I realized that wealth isn't a meritocracy.

Nothing is a meritocracy - everyone has luck and genetics. Income correlates both with IQ and hours worked, and I suspect most would consider the latter factor merit, and some consider the former merit too.

But wealth, correlating with many things one can control, is also not simply a random variable completely detached from merit.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... [2] https://www.nber.org/digest/jul06/w11895.html

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

#286

Post by vearwhershuh »

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…

> I was a full-time wife and mom.

Thank you.

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

#287

Post by foogazi »

biolurker1 wrote: post #234

the article assumes that nobody has orders of magnitude higher skills like nobody has iq orders of magnitude higher. that's extremely faulty because someone with an iq of 160 doesn't solve 60% more problems. He solves problems that others find impossible. Paul Allen and Gates hit iq ceiling

Any the compounding effect of a high IQ over time

It’s not about the problem at hand, but every day has been experienced differently

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

#288

Post by aianus »

drukenemo wrote: post #267
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.

Lots of people move to SF to get rich (and succeed, for some definition of rich) but end up losing their friends, not seeing their families, forgoing having their own families, living with lots of roommates, etc.

If someone just hands you $1 million, then sure, it's great. But if you're sacrificing your mental or physical health to earn that $1 million the hard way, you could definitely come out the other side rich and worse off.

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

#289

Post by ChrisLomont »

ultraism wrote: post #284
ChrisLomont wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantum mechanics has the free will theorem: if you have free will, then so do sub-atomic particles. Thus if you want to have free will, then so does a rock. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem

To me, free will implies choice. I don't see how non-determinism is equivalent to choice. I can see it as necessary but not sufficient. I do not see how the "free will theorem" shows that elementary particles are choosing their spin. It seems that they mean free will differently than I do.

>It seems that they mean free will differently than I do.

No, they mean it the same way you do; they only made it precise.

You probably suppose a scientist doing an experiment can choose between A and B for some setup. If so, then so can particles, because one can make experiments where a physicist can make a choice affecting the outcomes, and the particles in the experiment can choose their behavior in exactly the same manner.

So, since there are experiments that allow you to "choose" freely, and such experiments have particles able to do whatever you are doing, then either your free will implies their free will, or neither has free will.

Follow the links from the wiki page to learn more. It's quite precise, and is exactly the usual concept of free will.

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

#290

Post by matheusmoreira »

tempsy wrote: post #122

I guess it depends on the definition of "rich". We live in a frothy time when a relatively jr software engineer in SF can make $300k/year. It wouldn't take that much discipline to save 60%-70% as a single person and have a million saved in a few years time with the right mix of discipline and investing.

Aren't there huge costs associated with living in SF?
Post reply on HN