Underrated predictor of success: willingness to be low-status • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by dragonwriter » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 2:40 AM UTC

User23 wrote: post #268

jdmoreira wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but none of them are even remotely classifiable as ugly. Have you seen photos of younger Mick Jagger? Young Mick Jagger could be a successful female model in 2020

It's interesting you should mention that, because successful female models are orders of magnitude lower status today than they were 25 years ago. Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, and Tyra Banks, to name a few, were massively high status, on the level of professional athletes and movie stars. Nowadays, not so much.

> because successful female models are orders of magnitude lower status today than they were 25 years ago.

No, they aren't.

> Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, and Tyra Banks, to name a few, were massively high status, on the level of professional athletes and movie stars.

So are Chrissy Teigen, Bella and Gigi Hadid now. Kendall Jenner, too, though more in the style of an athlete that is an massive on-the-field standout that takes every opportunity to generate negative attention off the field.

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

#272

Post by probe » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 3:39 AM UTC

veddox wrote: post #114

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…

> For the people who are busy working on something they find important, most often 'status' is not even a thing. I'd slightly modify that to say that what they were doing was more important to them than status - which isn't the same as saying they didn't care about status at all. I read a number of biographies of great US presidents in the last year, and found it fascinating to see that pretty much all of them were i…

Whose biographies did you read and what else did you learn from this study? Sounds like a fun adventure

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

#273

Post by lioeters » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

barrenko wrote: post #111

Basic Taoism, the way of the trickster sage. Going the roundabout way to get what was inacessible via a direct route.

The supreme good is like water,

which nourishes all things without trying to.

It is content with the low places that people disdain.

Thus it is like the tao.

...

Fill your bowl to the brim

and it will spill.

Keep sharpening your knife

and it will blunt.

Chase after money and security

and your heart will never unclench.

Care about people's approval

and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.

The only path to serenity.

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

#274

Post by happyjack » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 5:29 AM UTC

Man, I see that this conversation has gone a lot of different directions in the comments. Everything from work / life balance to Ivy League schools, etc.

Everyone from an early age is fed a lot of information regarding all this stuff. Your parents, the ZIP code you grew up in, to the public or private places you were educated or dropped out from.

The truth is, it takes all kinds and success is defined 8 billion ways by 8 billion different people on this planet.

I think one thing that is interesting about tech (I don't work in tech, and I'm not a programmer) is the entrepreneur / start up culture. Maybe it has something to do with the cap nature of the beast (all you have to do is code and rent a server) that makes everyone bananas to be "successful" or a "CEO," but I just don't see this in other industries. Sure, other industries have entrepreneurs and people who start their own thing. But is it SO much different in this tech world. It's a cultural phenomena. It's more or less a function of time. No matter how hard I worked, I could never start a chemical refinery or build a car company. A new app? Function of time and sweat.

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

#275

Post by vinay427 » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 7:39 AM UTC

RIMR wrote: post #86

bluedays wrote: post #8

Yeah, 33 years old, haven't accomplished much, went into school to start a degree in programming, still low status and can't find a job anywhere. I'm not sure willingness is the word for this. All I feel is bitterness. I'm not sure if this is me being reflective because it's my birthday today or what, but I'm so fucking sick of working so hard to get nowhere.

The word you're looking for to describe the situation you're in is "capitalism". Nobody wants to be "low-status". That's a terrible narrative. All that's being illustrated here is that being low-status is the default, and success is a matter of luck, not of merit or hard work. Capitalism doesn't care how hard you work. It doesn't even care if you deserve the status you have (high or low). It cares about money above a…

> Capitalism doesn't care how hard you work. It doesn't even care if you deserve the status you have (high or low). It cares about money above all else, even more than you.

Can you please explain this part? I have no idea what you actually mean by it and an unsure how it follows from capitalism.

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

#276

Post by ivanhoe » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 8:35 AM UTC

esperent wrote: post #92

spicymaki wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about just pure chance? To be born in to the right family, in the right country, to be in the correct field, to have the right idea at the right time. Perhaps the correct path is just luck. We are all rolling the dice here. Just be yourself and do what you find interesting. If it pays off great, if it doesn't that is okay too.

> if it doesn't that is okay too. So for people who find themselves going into dept slavery, unable to feed themselves and their children well, unable to afford healthcare, and so on, you're saying it's all good, just a bad roll of the dice, nothing to worry about? Seems to me more like the system is fundamentally broken if pure chance is all that seperates a millionaire and the destitute and downtrodden.

I think OP meant that it's OK to be middle class mediocre, nothing especially bad or shameful about it. Being poor is the other extreme of the system - just like good luck and smart decisions can make you rich, bad luck and stupid moves can make you poor. I don't think that anyone argued that society shouldn't reduce the risks and provide a safety net for poor people. Also IMHO for social stability it's important that system slowdowns both of these tendencies, not let people get extremely poor, but also not extremely rich over the night.

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

#277

Post by ck425 » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 9:35 AM UTC

fierarul wrote: post #226

ryandrake wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education is often a financial inheritance in disguise. If dad pays for your K-12 private schooling and entire Harvard education, how is that practically different than a direct cash transfer?

Would you want to live in a society where a parent would definitely not pay for better education? What kind of people would those be!?

I'd prefer a situation where everyone automatically paid for university fees via a graduate tax and no one has the option to pay outright.

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

#278

Post by adwn » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 11:24 AM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #229

rektide wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t buy that entrepreneurs are not interested in status, they’re just making a longer term status play (and taking on more financial risk to do so). Trying to group all entrepreneurs together, I think, is a huge mistake. I've definitely seen status driven entrepreneurs. Some of them are amazing. But the ones that fill me with joy are the ones that clearly were sick of the world being incredibly bad at things, t…

> But the ones that fill me with joy are the ones that clearly were sick of the world being incredibly bad at things, that could not accept humanity embarrassing itself so poorly, and who could not live with a planet that had so much wasted potential. Yeah me too, Eliezer Yudkowsky comes to mind - there may be others but I think they're quite rare. Even in these cases I suspect status is some component though not the…

> Yeah me too, Eliezer Yudkowsky comes to mind - there may be others but I think they're quite rare.

Yudkowsky is not an entrepreneur, he's primarily a philosopher (regardless of his disdain for other philosophers) and secondarily an artificial intelligence researcher. Among philosophers and researchers, it's not hard to find someone who wants to improve humanity.

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

#279

Post by fierarul » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 11:35 AM UTC

ck425 wrote: post #277

fierarul wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you want to live in a society where a parent would definitely not pay for better education? What kind of people would those be!?

I'd prefer a situation where everyone automatically paid for university fees via a graduate tax and no one has the option to pay outright.

This just moves the goalpost. Parents will pay for something that improves the odds of their children. Should a society where that just does not exist or is allowed be preferable? I think nobody wants that.

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

#280

Post by manuel_w » Sat, Oct 24, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

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…

> The social elevator can take 2 generations. And that is ok.

It is not. You don't choose your parents, just the same way as you don't get to choose your sex/gender, race/ethnicity or caste. If you take "equal chances for everyone" seriously, it is a primary concern for a society to allow children to prosper freely without being impeded by the misfortune or failings of their parents.

> Sadly inheritance is looked down upon

We're totally not on the same page. Not even close.

> destroy a millenium of wisdom at their generation by not transmitting all the accumulated knowledge, generally due to some ideological dream (« my ancestors were all wrong! THIS is how you do it! I shall be free to roam! »)

I think it doesn't take a millennium of wisdom to understand what's needed to raise sane, mentally healthy children. Besides, this chain of knowledge-transfer gets interrupted constantly anyway, often due to war, accidents or addictions.

> But the failed child is free to start again, marry, work a lot, study success, and he can give his child an excellent life, and his grandson can be CEO of a large company.

Why the grandson? Why not the son? (Or daughter, for what it's worth.)