Hacker News Reader

Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

If they literally are "stuck" . Here we get into a nasty debate about spectrum of probability vs effort and the multipliers that should be reachable by end of life.

I definitely agree that a 0 probability despite maximum effort is unfair. In between is a grey area though.

View on HN

Effort is irrelevant though, if they spend their effort on something that could never succeed or is useless or irrelevant to the market then their effort should obviously fail and it is not unfair. So it matters a lot what they choose to apply effort to. Generally life is an IQ test and rewards those who make optimal choices WRT events in their life.

> Generally life is an IQ test and rewards those who make optimal choices WRT events in their life.

Do you think that if you'd been born in a slum you would have a decent chance of winning in the IQ test & optimal choice events in your life? I would imagine that almost anyone reading these comments has been unbelievably fortunate to be born into relatively wealthy circumstances & had things like "books" around to help bolster their IQ.

Being born in a slum more than likely means that your parents failed the IQ test, which is a strong signal about your IQ.

I hope that was meant to be ironic. If not that was one of the most depressing statements I have seen in a while.

That is completely untrue. When researchers have actually taken the time to do IQ testing in poor communities, they find a similar distribution of high and low IQ's as in the general population. There are a lot of 130 IQ people living in the slums.

Americans went from riches to soup lines (living in slums/squalor) over various periods of time. Though their IQ did not vary over that same time period.

A strong signal IQ is not, maybe a nice tailwind, but that doesn't help much if you are born in the bogs.

This is just downright stupid. Slums are societal issues which ant individual has little control over.

Perhaps you failed the IQ test too?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com