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

It’s better to be born rich than gifted

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 202 posts

Re: It’s better to be born rich than gifted

#31

Post by pedrosorio »

kasperni wrote: post #23

Just take a look at Wikipedia. There are more people on there with parents who are university professors, doctors or succesfull entrepreneurs than parents who are farmers. Even though the amount of farmers vastly outnumber the others. I don't think it is just the money. You also have someone (your parents) to mentor you everyday about how to be "succesfull". They probably have a network you can tap into, someone who…

The article repeats several times something along the lines of "money trumps genes" at the beginning, but it does mention what you're saying later on when talking about why IQ tests were deceiving:

"Such tests can’t be administered at conception, birth or infancy — before high-income parents have given their young children a head start by feeding them well, reading to them at higher rates and enrolling them in more activities.

“Two people who are genetically similar can have strikingly different IQ test scores because the richer ones have invested more in their kids,” Papageorge said. When you look at the raw genetic potential of the two people, though, “you see they’re actually quite similar.”"

Re: It’s better to be born rich than gifted

#32

Post by bko »

paulpauper wrote: post #28
bko wrote: post #4

> Contrast that with a finding from the other end of the genetic scoring scale: about 27 percent of those who score at the bottom quarter of the genetic index, but are born to high-income fathers, graduate from college. Is this "genetic index" real and scientifically accepted? It sounds vaguely like eugenics. > And their work has limitations, in addition to being limited to white people for now. I guess you can use t…

It has nothing to do with eugenics. One can also create a genetic index/profile for heart disease risk or anything else.

Pre-disposition to illness is fine. But that's not what the researchers are talking about when they talk about a superior "genetic score".

Re: It’s better to be born rich than gifted

#33

Post by Hydraulix989 »

paulpauper wrote: post #27

Jordan Peterson says it's the opposite. I guess it also depends on how one defines 'rich'. If you're the only child of a multi-millionaire family, then you're in a much better financial position than being one of 3-5 children of a family that is only upper-middle class. But one cannot underestimate the power of having a high IQ though in terms of making wealth. You look at at all these successful people in STEM and s…

If I had to pick between IQ and pre-existing wealth, I would choose wealth.

Having a high IQ still requires you to rely on luck by rolling the dice at investing (knowing to buy bitcoin is more gambling than intelligence), squeaking past super selective all-or-nothing societal gateways like Ivy League admissions, FAANG interviews, YCombinator, etc. against very stacked odds, tenacity whenever life randomly and inevitably decides to punch you in the gut, and tremendous sacrifices in terms of hard work, time, MORALITY (screwing people over and fighting hard to prevent others who are actively working against you from doing the same to you), and personal health.

I think the fact that you can solve puzzles really well on a test doesn't really lend itself well to money making at all. There's FAR too much of a chance/luck component to making money to attribute it to IQ alone. Any time I've ever made money, I came back thinking wow, I was very lucky -- even though everyone is still biased towards themselves in terms of their own personal attributes or qualities (intelligence, hard work, savviness, hustling, etc.) when they make money, I can still recognize that yes, buying and selling crypto at the right time was almost entirely luck -- so was teaching myself how to code when I was 8 years old growing up in a rural area where everyone else thought it was a waste of time. Hard work is a necessary but not sufficient condition to make money -- same applies to IQ. Often you'll find people who had the exact same amount of "talent" or worked just as hard doing exactly the same things as someone who has a lot of money but don't have anything to show for it. Right place, right time.

Meanwhile, having money handed to you on a silver plate by virtue of your birth family means being able to accomplish all of the above without doing or sacrificing anything at all, and you even still have a free pass from society to still have an ego about it. Even worse, many people somehow see having money as a moral characteristic while selectively ignoring the very often immoral cost of acquisition.

Re: It’s better to be born rich than gifted

#34

Post by romed »

Of course it is, especially in America. Just look at a guy like Brett Kavanaugh: a complete fuckup by objective standards, gets installed in the Supreme Court for life, for no other reason than he was born on that trajectory: rich kid, prep school, legacy admission to Yale.

Re: It’s better to be born rich than gifted

#35

Post by deleteme12345 »

romed wrote: post #34

Of course it is, especially in America. Just look at a guy like Brett Kavanaugh: a complete fuckup by objective standards, gets installed in the Supreme Court for life, for no other reason than he was born on that trajectory: rich kid, prep school, legacy admission to Yale.

A complete fuck up by objective standards? That's the most subjective thing I've heard so far. Everyone that has worked with him has praised him. What are you smoking?

Re: It’s better to be born rich than gifted

#36

Post by romed »

deleteme12345 wrote: post #35
romed wrote: post #34

Of course it is, especially in America. Just look at a guy like Brett Kavanaugh: a complete fuckup by objective standards, gets installed in the Supreme Court for life, for no other reason than he was born on that trajectory: rich kid, prep school, legacy admission to Yale.

A complete fuck up by objective standards? That's the most subjective thing I've heard so far. Everyone that has worked with him has praised him. What are you smoking?

The ABA downgraded him in 2005 from "well qualified" to "qualified", then in 2018 said that his confirmation to the Supreme Court was not in the best interests of the legal profession or the Association. Those are certainly the people who worked most closely with him.

Objectively, you'd want to find one of the top handful of legal scholars in America to serve on the court. Kavanaugh is not one of those people. He has a scant record of legal scholarship. He does have a documented record of getting into fights in bars.

Re: It’s better to be born rich than gifted

#38

Post by lend000 »

Qworg wrote: post #13
dokein wrote: post #6

This isn’t going to be popular, but: Should parents be allowed to try to give their children a boost in life? If the answer is yes, then it follows that parents with more resources will be more able to provide that boost. For me, the line is drawn at “legacy” admissions or jobs, where a clearly lesser candidate is given the nod over someone who is more qualified. But if the parent is able to provide e.g. volunteer op…

It is definitely inequitable. However, it is also how humans work - we want to advantage our inner group over other groups. This cuts directly to the heart of the meritocracy argument (most strongly in technology, but it exists everywhere): how can you claim that everyone is judged by their merits (directly related to how hard they work and how smart they train themselves to be) when being lucky (in genetics, in birt…

Unless you're a strong believer in free will, someone who is lazy, sleazy, unintelligent, etc. (has little "merit") did not 'choose' to be born that way, or even if they say they did, they did not choose to have the nature/nurture that caused them to be the kind of person to make that 'choice.' No more than a bird chooses to eat a worm or a salmon chooses to swim upstream, anyway. We can build productive societies based on incentive structures we put around merit, such as capitalist market systems. But in reality, nothing is fair and simultaneously everything is fair. Fairness is undefinable outside of a closed system. It's just how it is. Heuristics to define merit are just forms of evolution for human society that allow more productive people to command more responsibility.

Re: It’s better to be born rich than gifted

#40

Post by cthor »

Qworg wrote: post #13
dokein wrote: post #6

This isn’t going to be popular, but: Should parents be allowed to try to give their children a boost in life? If the answer is yes, then it follows that parents with more resources will be more able to provide that boost. For me, the line is drawn at “legacy” admissions or jobs, where a clearly lesser candidate is given the nod over someone who is more qualified. But if the parent is able to provide e.g. volunteer op…

It is definitely inequitable. However, it is also how humans work - we want to advantage our inner group over other groups. This cuts directly to the heart of the meritocracy argument (most strongly in technology, but it exists everywhere): how can you claim that everyone is judged by their merits (directly related to how hard they work and how smart they train themselves to be) when being lucky (in genetics, in birt…

I don't think meritocracy implies cosmic fairness.

The way it's used by most hackers is to say that someone's work is judged only on its own merits, rather than the author's social status or how good they are at playing political games or anything else orthogonal to the work actually being valuable.

At least, that's the ideal.

Post reply on HN