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Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

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Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#131

Post by bluedino »

rjkennedy98 wrote: post #119
pengstrom wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unfair argument if you're not acknowledging how media is designed to be addictive. Even we technical folk are susceptible. It's a convenient fantasy that the downtrodden deserve their place for being lazy.

That's just one data point. I could go on and on about how people make obviously bad decisions. Take college major choice. Why do so many people get worthless degrees? They can do a simple google search to see how much people with X major make as salaries. It's not hidden or even a remote mystery. I won't get in to how people finance their education (not even reading the terms of their loans which are invariably awfu…

>> Why do so many people get worthless degrees?

A lot of people just want to go to art school.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#132

Post by ck425 »

rjkennedy98 wrote: post #67
roenxi wrote: post #7

The more-correct observation is that any well-understood or easy path to becoming high status will be shut down. Most people are not high status, and want to be. It follows that the path has to be either risky, or difficult to comprehend. If hard work were enough, we'd all be in charge. Lots of hard workers out there.

> Lots of hard workers out there. I disagree with this. Never underestimate how many people just don't show up or try at all. Look at average screen time for Americans as a data point. It's a ridiculous 12 hours a day of media usage. Just think about that. People are basically staring at their phones/tvs for 12 out of the 16 waking hours. As I get older I realize more often than not most successful people are not spe…

I both agree and disagree with this.

You're right that in a lot of places in western society (though not all) you can become pretty successful through good strategy and some hard work as you've described. But that's actually quite hard to do!

Plenty of things in life can get in the way and more importantly having a good life strategy requires a level of knowledge not available to many. The reason so many entrepreneurs come from moderately well off backgrounds is that the middle class is far far better at teaching their kids the strategies to success than those less well off. The upper class are even better and can use their money and access to take shortcuts not available to the rest of us.

If you're a working class kids whose family have never been to college or who hasn't been exposed to the 'professional class' you might have no idea how to get there and thus have no idea that you could get there. There are plenty of super smart kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds who would never even consider going to uni for a 'reasonable degree' because no ones implied it was possible for them.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#133

Post by PragmaticPulp »

roenxi wrote: post #7

The more-correct observation is that any well-understood or easy path to becoming high status will be shut down. Most people are not high status, and want to be. It follows that the path has to be either risky, or difficult to comprehend. If hard work were enough, we'd all be in charge. Lots of hard workers out there.

> any well-understood or easy path to becoming high status will be shut down

Not shut down so much as exhausted by everyone rushing in.

High status isn’t an arbitrary designation that everyone can achieve. By definition, it requires some degree of exceptionalism and significant separation from the average.

If everyone could achieve a certain high status attribute, it’s no longer high status. It’s just average.

It’s easy to forget that high status is something given by others. You can’t become high status arbitrarily, you can only be high status if the average person voluntarily decides to see you as high status. Luxury good brands understand this perhaps better than anyone as their entire business revolves around making things appear artificially rare, unique, and hard to get while discreetly selling them to as many people as possible.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#134

Post by rootusrootus »

OJFord wrote: post #55
javiramos wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, 2020 has been a tough year for everyone

I think if you started speculative stock-picking in March (as it seems many did) then it's quite likely you did pretty well. If you (that person) got out ~now, it's probably been a.. well, at least a year with a nice silver lining. (If you that person carried on it's not necessarily bad of course, but then you're just any old investor, it was a good year and maybe you'll have more good and more bad.)

Anecdotally, I suspect a few people hosed themselves this year in the stock market. I met a few people early on in the pandemic who thought themselves very smart for paying attention to the news and getting their money out of the market before the first big drop.

Admittedly, I haven't talked to them since, but they didn't seem to expect it to bounce right back up again. I wonder how many people out there did something similar.

I remember back in 2008 one of the older voice engineers I knew, who was in his 60s and getting ready to retire, panicked and moved his money out of the market (it's a separate question why he still had so much in stocks) near the low point. He quietly canceled his retirement and worked another 5 years. Whoops.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#135

Post by troughway »

boredumb wrote: post #106
matthewmacleod wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get a degree in an upcoming field or start a company you're not guaranteed anything, but your chances are a lot better than if you're just slacking off. But your chances of being able to do that in the first place are massively dependent on your luck. It's a lot harder to get a degree or start a company if your family is struggling to afford essentials, or you're caring for a sick relative.

Just wait until you hear the chances these people had to luck out on in order to become an embryo.

Truly an underrated predictor.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#136

Post by ativzzz »

roenxi wrote: post #7

The more-correct observation is that any well-understood or easy path to becoming high status will be shut down. Most people are not high status, and want to be. It follows that the path has to be either risky, or difficult to comprehend. If hard work were enough, we'd all be in charge. Lots of hard workers out there.

Leetcode is becoming the status differentiator for software engineers.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#137

Post by [deleted] »

jgilias wrote: post #101

The Twitter thread explores some ideas why this may be the case. However, quickly skimming through it, they miss the most obvious one. For the people who are busy working on something they find important, most often 'status' is not even a thing. So there's no 'willingness' really to it, it's just that status doesn't really exist. The way they see themselves and how they measure their success has literally nothing to…

[deleted]

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#139

Post by sidlls »

laurent92 wrote: post #90
m_eiman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as "the right parents", which in many cases is a pretty efficient gate keeper.

The social elevator can take 2 generations. And that is ok. There is a lot of things to learn. It gives hope to one’s dad. Sadly inheritance is looked down upon, and people would like every citizen to be born with the same information, and this information being delivered by public education. Sadly, parents teach much better than teachers when it is about the little things that make a life successful. There will neve…

There are three ideas core to your comment that are, at best, controversial: marriage as a predictor of success, French-born developers are lazy, and wealth/social exclusion having no role in whether "having the right parents" applies.

Also I'd love to see a deeper analysis of your "86% of billionaires" comment. Usually what happens is we discover that "self-made" millionaires grew up in quite affluent circumstances, perhaps not with millionaire parents, but with parents who earned a sufficient income to themselves retire as millionaires. That is to say, they aren't "self-made". It isn't meaningful to compare their accumulation of wealth to the struggles of those born in less favorable circumstances.

There are no "self-made" billionaires. Or very, very few (WhatsApp founder Jan Koum is literally the only one I can think of who comes close). Every single high-profile billionaire today--Gates, Buffet, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, etc.--came from a family with substantial financial means and social connections.

Re: Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status

#140

Post by dfxm12 »

ck425 wrote: post #123
laurent92 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The social elevator can take 2 generations. And that is ok. There is a lot of things to learn. It gives hope to one’s dad. Sadly inheritance is looked down upon, and people would like every citizen to be born with the same information, and this information being delivered by public education. Sadly, parents teach much better than teachers when it is about the little things that make a life successful. There will neve…

My impression, and indeed my personal issue with inheritance, is financial inheritance. I have far less issues with other forms of inheritance. Sure I'm occasionally jealous of the opportunities or skills others learnt from a young age but overall I'm just glad there are more talented, thoughtful, considerate people out there. The only part that ticks me off is arrogant people who claim to have gotten far only on the…

My impression, and indeed my personal issue with inheritance, is financial inheritance.

According to this study[0], at least 50% of wealth persistence is accounted for by direct transfers from parents, i.e. financial inheritance, while earnings and education are only able to explain 25%.

0 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecoj.12535

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