Luck. The answer is luck.
A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)
251–260 of 438 posts
Re: A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or they took more risks than you and it paid off. Or they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Or...
Over the course of your entire life, the statistical expected values of the "gambles" tend to net out.
And over the course of the population there are going to be a lot of outliers (both winners and losers).
Re: A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. People on here seem to forget that almost every single rich person that can be named had hereditary money. Jeff Bezos now has more money than can be made if an American family earned 63k for 2 million years. He also had parents that gave him a so-called "three hundred thousand dollar investment" (more money than most people see in a lifetime even while working hard for their family, dedicating most of their…
Fine with what, that his parents helped him start a business or that he's so enormously wealthy? I hope people don't mind the former, but the latter is a bit problematic. When individuals can control that much wealth, democracy breaks down, they can control politics. It wouldn't hurt capitalist incentives at all if the richest of the rich were limited to earning say $100 m.
> I hope people don't mind [that his parents helped him start a business]
parents != parents
maybe i'm stating the obvious, but "if you want to get rich, come up with a good idea and work hard" is way easier when your parents can invest 300K in your startup and you have that safety net to fall back on. as in, that's a substantial factor into somebody's "self-madeness" that's often overlooked
(i know that's not what you said, but imo it's a common sentiment re: creating a successful business)
Re: A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)
#254While I agree with the article, it is important to distinguish the macro from the micro point of view. From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one. On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater th…
You are over simplifying the world. You are doing a mental exercise and reducing everything to a single variable: Talent. So if someone success without talent, you explain it with another monovariable: luck. By the way, for me being talented in something is just another version of luck. So we can say that you believe in just one variable: Luck is everything. The world is way more sophisticated and complicated than a…
The op is not reducing everything to talent, or even implying that talent is especially important. If you are thinking about this statistically (the OP is), than these examples don't matter.
The implication is a distribution of outcomes, not definite outcomes.
The argument works regardless of the definition of success used.
Re: A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)
#255Didn't bother to read the article. Just the comments. My take? The smartest people I know are the ones who married well and have a great family and social life. Wealth / education are great but worthless if your personal life is a mess.
Take Benjamin Netanhau as an example. The guy is very wealthy and successful. I think he graduated from both Harvard and MIT. (Although one degree might be an MBA that anyone with money can do). However, he is married to a psycopat who controls his life and is hated by everyone around them. I don't even want to talk about his son. Do I want his life? Hell no!
Re: A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article doesn't really use a strict equality between being "intelligent" and being good at making money. It's more an implication, that being good at making money implies being probably something like "intelligent". Now having this established, your examples of playing the violin and Hollywood stars doesn't make any sense. They are reading the relation backwards. The implication holds the other way round.
The implication you are pointing at still an assumption. If we can't assume that Hollywood stars or concert violinists are intelligent (even if not all intelligent people can be those things), then why would it naturally be so with financially successful people? The examples still make sense under the premise that the assumption is off.
Sure, it's an assumption.
But saying that all concert violinists are intelligent is something different than saying that everybody, who is intelligent, is a concert violinist.
Re: A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)
#257A much more thoughtful treatment of this problem is "The Dictator's Handbook." There are three possible explanations: 1) The CEO knows something I don't. 2) The CEO is dumb. Those are rarely it. The third one is: 3) The CEO is optimizing for personal wealth / fame / success, and there are political considerations. Most CEOs can recognize that a business decision can be absolutely the right thing to do for the busines…
They can and sometimes will take that strategy, but of course then be self-selected out of the CEO and be replaced by someone who conforms to nr 3.
This is the filtering process that makes psycopaths over-represented at the top.
Re: A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)
#258While I agree with the article, it is important to distinguish the macro from the micro point of view. From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one. On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater th…
I think it's mostly just that intelligence is not terribly important for success. Tenacity, street smart, charisma, connections, passion are all more important than IQ.
In a sense, it's like skill in any domain. Being good at something isn't strongly correlated that strongly with being successful at it, at least if success is taken to mean fame and fortune.
In that sense, the most successful CEO isn't necessarily the smartest individual/CEO in the same way the most successful artist isn't necessarily the best one on a technical level.
Re: A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. People on here seem to forget that almost every single rich person that can be named had hereditary money. Jeff Bezos now has more money than can be made if an American family earned 63k for 2 million years. He also had parents that gave him a so-called "three hundred thousand dollar investment" (more money than most people see in a lifetime even while working hard for their family, dedicating most of their…
> He also had parents that gave him a so-called "three hundred thousand dollar investment" (more money than most people see in a lifetime even while working hard for their family, dedicating most of their life to work and barely managing to enjoy life) Jeff Bezos also had a teen mother, a biological father that abandoned him, and a Cuban immigrant father that came to the US alone at 16 with nothing and no ability to…
I don't know much about Jeff Bezos so I try to reserve my judgement about him. But I am confused - how does one come from a poor family and then receive a $300k loan from said family?
Re: A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)
#260I feel like what isn't really properly understood in these situations is the statistical chances that are involved here. 10 people put $50 on the roulette table, and then we celebrate the guy who hit their number. That genius who hit their number still had a negative expected value when placing that bet. Colette Martin would've been right to criticize Reed Hastings if he were making that bet with Netflix's money. But…
> we don't read articles about the CEOs who make bad bets and lose them
Yes we do, all the time: Theranos, WeWork, WebVan, Myspace, Friendster, BlackBerry, Enron, Worldcom, etc, etc, etc.
Sure, we don't hear about companies that never get anywhere because they never did anything interesting to start with, because that's unremarkable.
But we hear a lot about the companies that attracted a lot of success or hype early but then "bet" wrong. (In fact, these stories arguably get a disproportionate amount of coverage, due to schadenfreude from journalists and their audience.)
The roulette spin analogy is not apt, because building a successful company is not a single bet; it's many many bets, every year/month/day over many years, which moves it well out of the realm of random chance and mostly into the realm of skill.
And before someone says it: nobody argues good luck is not a factor in a company's success. But that is mostly at the very beginning (e.g., Steve Jobs meeting Woz; Bill Gates' mother knowing the chairman of IBM) and luck alone is not nearly enough.
Skilled leadership over the long term makes all the difference between success and wasted opportunity.