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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

#311

Post by EugeneOZ »

bluGill wrote: post #252
shantly wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were on track to retire comfortably by 55 without even trying very hard, 45-50 with some effort, without even FAANG money or any sudden jumps in income. Three kids starting just before age 30 and now retirement ever is... iffy, and it's probably not going to be very comfortable if it does happen. They're really expensive. Mostly healthcare, child care, and housing (more space, but also need good schools, so pricie…

Good schools are more about the parents than location. We opted our kid into the poorest school in the city: the one where many of the students speak Spanish at home so they made it a dual language immersion school. The school administrators were shocked when we said we didn't want to waste our time applying for the subsidized lunch program (It would probably be cheaper to give every kid a free lunch than process the…

It depends on the city, hehe :) In my childhood kids from "bad" families would easily convince you that you're risking your kids every day they visit that school :) My parents were convinced when one of my schoolmates broke 4 fingers of his arm while was beating the face of my another schoolmate - half of my schoolmates had police records.

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

#312

Post by zxcmx »

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.

You could also say that society subsidised your education and will do the same for other, future citizens.

Also, most families who were eligible, maybe even your own, got the benefits of the tax breaks available to parents.

For some reason many people seem to have a blind spot where they believe that benefits for "parents" or "children" aren't relevant to them if they aren't parents right now. But every adult was a child! ... "like, sure, but what have you done for me lately?".

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

#313

Post by tempsy »

viklove wrote: post #307
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.

> We live in a frothy time when a relatively jr software engineer in SF can make $300k/year. This is just a lie.

What’s the lie?

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

#314

Post by anm89 »

This content of this article does not even come close to supporting the assertion in its title.

The claim it is making is that wealth and intelligence are not correlated linearly.

Its not even claiming they aren't positively correlated, and the surely are to some degree, more or less getting into some type of causality as is implied by the title.

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

#315

Post by ChrisLomont »

viklove wrote: post #306
ChrisLomont wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 we…

> 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. Can it keep growing forever? If not, how much longer can it keep growing? Should we alter our economic system to account for the change in economic environment?

> Can it keep growing forever?

Why not? Can people keep adding value to things? Only once there is no possible to add value to anything would an economy have to stop growing. I suppose in some heat death of the universe scenarios, this may happen, but we’ve got billions of years before even our local sun destroys earth, and I suspect mankind will have changed significantly if we make it that far.

Why do you imply economies cannot grow for the long term foreseeable future?

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

#316

Post by fingerlocks »

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…

Both of your links show a power-law distributions for the returns on talent, not the underlying distribution of raw talent in the population. We already know this. Wealth begets wealth- a successful book author is more likely to sell another successful book than a new author. Likewise with artist paintings and salesmen.

But actual talent, like human height or average running speed, is probably normally distributed.

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

#317

Post by anigbrowl »

_fq4v wrote: post #272
anigbrowl wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I haven't said anything about rwanda. I wad only adding nuance to your extremely blanket characterization of libertarianism which clearly calls for a government of some kind.

If you read back up the thread, the whole context of people hacking each other with machetes arose from speculation on how well Bill Gates would have done had he been born in Rwanda. I default to assuming that people read the threads to which they are commenting, and that it's not necessary for everyone to restate all the context every time.

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

#318

Post by anigbrowl »

mkr-hn wrote: post #245
anigbrowl wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way would be think that it's smarter to have a social safety net and cooperate with other people to that end.

Don't confuse smart for the individual with smart for the society. Of course a good social safety net would be great. We don't have it. Nothing in my short life tells me this political system or culture can produce it. I am not putting my bets on a change in culture or government. I see what's happening to people who counted on Social Security/Medicare and discovered too late that it wasn't enough.

Other places have managed to produce it, it seems kind of bizarre to rule out the possibility given its manifest existence elsewhere.

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

#319

Post by meiraleal »

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. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.

same IQ, same hustler and you'd have a warlord or a revolutionary leader. There are genius everywhere, and they don't create only software.

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

#320

Post by meiraleal »

klipt wrote: post #195
meiraleal wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wealth and privilege buy you (and your children) a lot of safety nets and a lot of second chances. People without those advantages are often in an incredibly precarious situation, just one tough break or one bad decision away from total ruin. People without those advantages have to build them. That is what smart people do. That is what I (a poor black kid) did with an old used computer that my father left behind af…

Yeah, I think you want to tell different people different things. You want to tell poor people to take responsibility for their own success, because that's the best way to motivate them. But you also want to tell those running things that they have a huge impact on poor people's success, and things like better public schools would go a long way. Because if the people running things shrug and say "those poor people ar…

> But you also want to tell those running things that they have a huge impact on poor people's success,

They already know it. They know that it would make sense to raise corporate taxes to offer free and good education to everybody. But in most of the countries, the people in power were not elected to do that but to lower the corporate rates.

That is why I focus on the individual side, although I'm ideologically communist. To hack capitalism and live well coming from a violent/poor background is one of the most revolutionary acts we can do and teach how to do currently.

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