Hacker News Reader

Comment by roberthahn | Hacker News Reader

As soon as I saw the password I wondered if Mark was left-handed.

Turns out I was spot on: a bit of googling revealed he was.

I'm a southpaw myself, and therefore quite biased, but I've always been struck by the prevalence of CEOs, Presidents, notable scientists, etc. that I have met who are fellow lefties. Don't have a p-value, but it seems much higher than the ambient (~10%) rate.

For instance, for the last 4-5 years in our computational science research group, we have been sitting pretty steadily near 50%.

Selection bias? There are some studies indicating left-handed children tend to score lower (on average) on IQ, verbal scores, etc: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16643966 (Edit: Seems the IQ difference varies between studies and is negligible, if even exists.)

Hypothesis is that left-handedness can be caused by early brain trauma, so if "lefties" are disproportionately represented in such positions, the ones with non-pathological causes would seem to have an even bigger advantage over the right-handed to make up for the lower mean. Or perhaps it's associated with other talents that make up for the deficits. (Edit: Wikipedia seems to support this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handedness#Intelligence)

Or perhaps the research conclusions are just wrong.

It's possible for both phenomena to coexist. Extreme case: Suppose 95% of left-handers are low-functioning, and 5% of them are INCREDIBLY high-functioning. You'd then have them simultaneously overrepresented in top positions AND scoring lower on IQ, verbal scores, etc.

If true (in a less extreme sense), I imagine it would be vaguely correlated with post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth. Some of the most amazing people humanity has produced went through unimaginable suffering. And yet the vast majority of people who go through hideous suffering end up dysfunctional.

So it's something like– most people with a disadvantage get messed up, but the few who manage to overcome it, manage to overcompensate dramatically.

> You'd then have them simultaneously overrepresented in top positions AND scoring lower on IQ, verbal scores, etc.

Yep... you can have distributions with identical means, and fatter tails.

At my PPOE it was 50% too. I can remember being in meetings where everyone except one PHB was left handed.

Why? A password as simple as dadada has the great advantage that one can write it quickly with one hand - and for this you typically choose a password that you can write with your other hand on the mouse for when you are using it.

But you can access more than 20 keys with your left hand, including numbers and special characters, it's no excuse.

I'm a righty... so my left hand never leaves the keyboard my right moves all over the place dadada is super easy for me to type. I would think if you're a lefty and using a laptop like most ceos are likely to be doing (if they have a laptop at all) then your left hand is on the mouse making dadada harder to hit?

Lefty here... but as with many other things in life (e.g. gloves, golf clubs, etc.), the prevalence of 'right handed' mice forced me into being a mouse/trackpad righty.

Most left-handed people I know have a mixture of left/right-handedness, whereas it seems all the right-handed people are right all the way.

interesting I guess I'm used to games artists who often use left handed mice to throw their brain off.

I use my left for lots of things.

Oddly, learning ukulele currently I noticed that left hand is what hits the frets... which is way more dexterous work than strumming.

Guessing not.

http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/4dde798949e2ae723d0...

http://leadinvestor.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/mark-z...

You could be right handed and use a password like !@#asdQWEewq#@!123 (using the pinky on the shift) because it doesn't require you to take your right hand off the mouse

Reply on news.ycombinator.com