The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by jerf » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

isoskeles wrote: post #114

olcor wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess what the OP is trying to say is that throwing a million or more into a savings account, not having to worry, and peace of mind is in itself a class game. Few people have that luxury; I got a chance to be a bit better off and immediately felt much differently and more attuned to class differences than I was before. I now have the luxury of time, choice and pecuniary freedom I did not have, and a lot of my peer…

That comment says "class of games", and you've started writing about "class games" and then "class differences" in your interpretation of the comment. Not saying you did something bad here, but it sounds more like the telephone game than discussing what was written, all because of the omission of the preposition "of."

This is correct. I mean that having a certain level of wealth throws you into a world where everyone wants a piece of you, friendships become very difficult because are they friends or are they just after some money? Probably the latter. It basically takes you out of the normal run of human affairs into a very isolated environment. It solves a lot of problems that, frankly, I can solve well enough now, in return for handing you a whole lot of problems that are basically unsolvable. And there are other levels that become very easy to accidentally blunder into, like blackmail, and you become the target of some fairly sophisticated actors, possibly even including state actors, looking to influence you, or drain your accounts.

Rich people tend not to talk about it as much from what I've seen, but you can, if you look a bit, find a number of accounts of people who got very famous talking about this, especially if they later fell from grace.

When I was younger, I kinda thought this was sour grapes or rich/famous people trying to feel bad for themselves, but the consistency of the stories, plus my increasing understanding of human nature and group dynamics as I get older and gather more data and think more about the data leads me to believe this is the expected outcome rather than some exceptional surprise. I also thought, eh, that's no big deal, those are the soft problems and money solves the hard problems, but now I rather significantly feel the other way around. (There is a class of money problems that is hard, especially in the medical area, but they are not all that hard.)

I'm sure there's some people who pull it off, but I'm not sure I'd be one of them.

(As a bonus observation, when you are born into and grow up in this environment, I think it produces certain characteristic pathologies that go a long ways towards explaining why elites act so consistently in certain ways throughout history. Same environment -> same result. It is not good to have leadership populated by people who have never really deeply connected with another human being, yet, the very act of being in leadership inhibits those connections, and being born into it effectively destroys them entirely.)

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

#162

Post by pmoriarty » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #113

I'm a mathematician because that's what interests me. My richness is not measured in dollars. As I age, I grow more concerned for my future, but I still have no regrets.

Lots of financial firms love to hire mathematicians (see Renaissance Technologies for a famous example). So you could probably secure your financial future relatively easily if you wanted to.

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

#163

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

Keloo wrote: post #76

lotsofpulp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Let's be realistic, what are the chances of success for a person who stays at home watch movies vs. someone who go out talk with people get involved in all sorts of activities + prepare the homework for those social events. Probability of success depends what environment you are in. A person with poor uneducated and possibly negligent parents living in a slum with no network has a very different probability of "succ…

Totally agree with you, parents and environment is one of the most important factor but this is not 100% of the odds, there are still things that you can influence yourself (especially in these times when we have access to the internet).

I spent most of a year living in Cambodia. I met some amazing people there. People who had put way more effort and work into improving their lives than anyone I had met in either the UK or Australia. But they were still (comparatively) poor. And that was never going to change, because they just didn't have the opportunities there that we take for granted. In some places, birth and family is more important than any amount of effort, talent or intelligence.

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

#164

Post by LyndsySimon » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #108

aivisol wrote: post #11

> For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000. True, but can IQ be, say 210? If yes, then standard deviation cannot be applied here, right? Because for that you would need someone with opposite IQ, i.e. -10? > The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but…

Every 15 points of IQ is 1 standard deviation from the mean. So 210 is 7.3 standard deviations away from 100. Just 7 standard deviations away from the mean means that you would expect only 1 in 780 billion from a population. Given that this is far more than the number of people on Earth: No, no one has an IQ of 210.

Well, to be fair, it’s only “highly unlikely” that anyone on Earth has an IQ of 210.

Given that seven sigma deviation should occur one time in 780 billion and that there are ~7.8b people on Earth today, then there is a ~1% chance of a person with an IQ of 210 being alive today :)

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

#165

Post by maerF0x0 » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

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.

AFAIK education is a prerequisite to employable citizens and employable citizens is a prerequisite to taxable citizens.

I dont think education is a subsidy, so much as an investment.

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

#166

Post by DoreenMichele » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

LyndsySimon wrote: post #159

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…

> Health issues are another thing. If I’m remembering your previous posts correctly, you’re quite aware that mental health is absolutely a part of this. It’s a very big part for some people. I’ve never felt that I’ve lack “smart”. What I lack is passion, willpower, and consistency. From where I sit, I expect that I’d be much better off both financially and emotionally if my situation were reversed.

If I’m remembering your previous posts correctly, you’re quite aware that mental health is absolutely a part of this.

Yes. I do a poor job of making that clear because I feel so strongly that physical health and mental health cannot be neatly separated. "A sound mind in a sound body."

To me, (a lack of) "passion, willpower, and consistency" really sounds like someone with low energy due to a hidden health issue.

I was called lazy until I got diagnosed with a genetic disorder in my thirties. I've often joked that life got a lot better "after they found a better name for my condition than lazy and crazy".

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

#167

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

hnhg wrote: post #10

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…

I remember another study that looked at people who had made it very rich, and they saw that luck was something like 'being educated in a field just when that field is about to make a huge impact in the world' - in other words, great timing in addition to raw talent. I don't have the link to hand now though.

I loved the Whats App founder talk at the YC online class (I don't have the link either). I paraphrase: "we decided to make a messaging app just when that was the best, most profitable thing we could possibly have done." There was a ton of experience and talent behind it, but they acknowledge that they got lucky and timed it perfectly.

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

#168

Post by hnhg » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

omarhaneef wrote: post #15

hnhg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you clarify this? 'However, you don't need the simulation to add to this argument. If anything, the simulation undercuts it because now you point out small errors and end up doubting the whole argument.' I would say that if the author is making an argument based on probability distributions, then that's a fundamentally mathematical one, and they should see it through instead of hand-waving via rhetoric. Am I miss…

I don't know I can say it more clearly. I can sort of repeat what I said. Instead of two factors (intelligence, and effort), let's just take one factor (effort). One person works 12 hours a day. We know people can only work 2x as hard as this person. Yet, there are many people who are more than 2x as rich. Hence, effort alone doesn't fully explain the difference. That is it. You can get that argument right there. Do…

My point is that the mathematical simulation is more precise because you've exactly stated the model and ran it. While doing it verbally allows for all kinds of interpretation and is therefore much harder to interpret.

I apologise but I also really sincerely don't understand your verbal reasoning in the context of this particular paper. They took two underlying distributions and managed to produce something that looks like a real world one. I'm not sure what you're trying to say that's equivalent to that?

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

#169

Post by Udik » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 5:26 PM UTC

omarhaneef wrote: post #3

Ugh, I wish the author had made the point without the computer simulation. I think there might be merit to the argument people make more money than their intelligence, or effort, seems to indicate. And the author lays out some basic arguments here: "But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is sym…

The whole argument seems naively flawed to me: given a certain individual, with some defined IQ and personality, there are problems that they won't ever solve, no matter how much time they live. I'll never write a single novel, Georges Simenon wrote 200 of them. The average person wouldn't discover relativity, or write Mozart's music, in any amount of time.

It's not true that abilities scale linearly. Not even the difference in the amount if work people can perform is linear: there are people that can start successful companies in the time it takes me to set up an appointment with the dentist (weeks of procrastination).

Frankly it doesn't surprise me at all that this research comes from my country: a country that is deeply suspicious of success and, especially in the public sector, of any form of reward based on results. In fact the study finds exactly what most Italian public employees (such as university researchers) ask for: indistinct financing for everyone without the need to show anything for it.

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

#170

Post by mrmuagi » Mon, Oct 21, 2019, 5:26 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #119

regular_person wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point. It's not (necessarily) that Americans are just inherently money-hungry; we just have to be because we live in a system that is really callous and unmerciful compared to other places in the world.

There are plenty of people in America who continue to chase money long after their safe retirement is assured. I don't know if I'm qualified to compare Americans to Europeans, but many Americans really are enamored with money and judge material wealth as the be all and end all goal of life.

> There are plenty of people in America who continue to chase money long after their safe retirement is assured.

I mean take a look at rich (m/b)illionaires. It's a life style they can't give up.