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

The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

academic.oup.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 245 posts

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#81

Post by Tade0 »

onos wrote: post #68
epistemer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. Of course, it is not all luck but to believe wealth accumulation is a type of purely deterministic meritocratic game without a giant stochastic factor is ridiculous. That might even be the dumbest aspect of our society. Believing the powerball lottery winner is a genius for picking the numbers they picked is obviously stupid. Yet we ba…

Yeah but presumably averaging over many people or situations in a study like this would reduce that noise.

But that just averages to systematic error.

The same mistake has much worse consequences if you don't have wealth.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#82

Post by t344344 »

psychphysic wrote: post #71

I feel much less sharp once I passed 30. Hangovers also started to last days. Learning new stuff that requires precision also seems harder - like syntax. Even though I feel like I'm much smarter when it comes to fuzzy processes like judging a good idea or programming language. Dementia runs in my family... But I think I'm too young for that and it's just what happens when you're not 25 anymore.

Liver gave in. Look into fasting...

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#83

Post by Qem »

Tade0 wrote: post #81
onos wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but presumably averaging over many people or situations in a study like this would reduce that noise.

But that just averages to systematic error. The same mistake has much worse consequences if you don't have wealth.

Nailed it. If you're Elon Musk, do some dumb mistake and lose 200 billion, your life barely changes. If you live on minimum wage, and loses half of it, starvation ensues for your family. The impact of losses is disproportional between rich and poor.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#84

Post by vorpalhex »

epistemer wrote: post #58
solatic wrote: post #28

Implicit is the presumption that the smartest people optimize for wealth, or that the smartest people are good at optimizing for wealth. Outside of Wall Street, "smart" people - academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. - are just as likely to make bad personal finance decisions and/or to stay in labor (rather than management) positions for most of their careers (leave aside the dual-track IC/management ladder at…

It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. Of course, it is not all luck but to believe wealth accumulation is a type of purely deterministic meritocratic game without a giant stochastic factor is ridiculous. That might even be the dumbest aspect of our society. Believing the powerball lottery winner is a genius for picking the numbers they picked is obviously stupid. Yet we ba…

This analysis seems to disprove your theory.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#85

Post by Swizec »

friedman23 wrote: post #80
epistemer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. Of course, it is not all luck but to believe wealth accumulation is a type of purely deterministic meritocratic game without a giant stochastic factor is ridiculous. That might even be the dumbest aspect of our society. Believing the powerball lottery winner is a genius for picking the numbers they picked is obviously stupid. Yet we ba…

> It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. It's not a lottery game, it's a poker game (and in reality, it's much easier than poker because the economy is positive sum and poker is zero sum). If you only consider "wealthy" to be people who have made billions or hundreds of millions then it's a lottery. But someone that consistently makes decisions that maximize expected moneta…

Fun fact: The average American perceives “wealthy” as having just over $2.2million in net worth.

https://www.kiplinger.com/personal-finance/605075/are-you-ri...

This is very achievable to most HN types. Maybe not in our 30’s, but easily by retirement. Just maxing out your 401k for an entire tech career will get you there.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#86

Post by angarg12 »

epistemer wrote: post #58
solatic wrote: post #28

Implicit is the presumption that the smartest people optimize for wealth, or that the smartest people are good at optimizing for wealth. Outside of Wall Street, "smart" people - academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. - are just as likely to make bad personal finance decisions and/or to stay in labor (rather than management) positions for most of their careers (leave aside the dual-track IC/management ladder at…

It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. Of course, it is not all luck but to believe wealth accumulation is a type of purely deterministic meritocratic game without a giant stochastic factor is ridiculous. That might even be the dumbest aspect of our society. Believing the powerball lottery winner is a genius for picking the numbers they picked is obviously stupid. Yet we ba…

Not accounting for luck as a factor of success is one of my pet peeves.

I'm reading "So good they can't ignore you" and although I'm loving it, it's also guilty of that.

Cal Newport tells the story of a Clean Tech VC and how he got the job using a personal connection to VC. But then he dismisses it by saying that "such small breaks are relatively common".

Why is it so hard to admit that someone success is partially due to luck?

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#87

Post by mejutoco »

Swizec wrote: post #85
friedman23 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. It's not a lottery game, it's a poker game (and in reality, it's much easier than poker because the economy is positive sum and poker is zero sum). If you only consider "wealthy" to be people who have made billions or hundreds of millions then it's a lottery. But someone that consistently makes decisions that maximize expected moneta…

Fun fact: The average American perceives “wealthy” as having just over $2.2million in net worth. https://www.kiplinger.com/personal-finance/605075/are-you-ri... This is very achievable to most HN types. Maybe not in our 30’s, but easily by retirement. Just maxing out your 401k for an entire tech career will get you there.

Maybe by then (one's retirement) the average American will perceive "wealthy" as having $4million in net worth.

If I understand right, this is the perception right now, not in the future. Probably then it will be higher.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#88

Post by amelius »

friedman23 wrote: post #80
epistemer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. Of course, it is not all luck but to believe wealth accumulation is a type of purely deterministic meritocratic game without a giant stochastic factor is ridiculous. That might even be the dumbest aspect of our society. Believing the powerball lottery winner is a genius for picking the numbers they picked is obviously stupid. Yet we ba…

> It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. It's not a lottery game, it's a poker game (and in reality, it's much easier than poker because the economy is positive sum and poker is zero sum). If you only consider "wealthy" to be people who have made billions or hundreds of millions then it's a lottery. But someone that consistently makes decisions that maximize expected moneta…

No, the game is Monopoly. And those who entered the game late are out of luck.

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#89

Post by wyager »

fwlr wrote: post #61

It’s tempting to theorise why this might be, but it’s most likely just a simple statistical feature inherent to correlations themselves. I’ve heard it called “the tails come apart” - in a scatter plot of two correlated variables, the highest y value will not have the rightmost x value, and the rightmost x value will not have the highest y value. Ellipses don’t come to a sharp point at their tips, if you overlay them…

Also, intelligence maybe lets you pick out a pareto isosurface in job-space, of which money is only one dimension. At higher isosurfaces, the relative value of money shrinks, because material needs are met, because of the sublinearity of utility-vs-money, etc. If you condition on people who make $X+/-eps per year (fixing one dimension in the optimization space), probably there will still be a strong correlation between intelligence and other desirable factors (status, fulfillment, etc).

Re: The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners

#90

Post by sidlls »

angarg12 wrote: post #86
epistemer wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. Of course, it is not all luck but to believe wealth accumulation is a type of purely deterministic meritocratic game without a giant stochastic factor is ridiculous. That might even be the dumbest aspect of our society. Believing the powerball lottery winner is a genius for picking the numbers they picked is obviously stupid. Yet we ba…

Not accounting for luck as a factor of success is one of my pet peeves. I'm reading "So good they can't ignore you" and although I'm loving it, it's also guilty of that. Cal Newport tells the story of a Clean Tech VC and how he got the job using a personal connection to VC. But then he dismisses it by saying that "such small breaks are relatively common". Why is it so hard to admit that someone success is partially d…

Because few people are objective enough to put aside their deep emotional attachment to the notion that their particular bit of hard work and skill meant nothing without that luck.

I’m wealthy now: very wealthy by any standard (mid 7-figure net worth). I came from humble beginnings (nearly homeless frequently as a youth with a single mom), but I am quite intelligent (PhD in physics) and I worked hard. I would have retired with the same 401k any other white collar worker would have but for the sheer luck of choosing the right company at the right time to win an IPO lottery. I wouldn’t have got hired without the work I put in: but there’s no doubt in my mind that my wealth is the product of luck more than that work. Literally billions of people worked harder than I have in that same period of time and have nothing but poverty to show for it. But to hear my engineer peers talk you’d think luck was negligible. They simply don’t want to discount their hard work and bias toward putting much more weight on it than is merited

Post reply on HN