The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
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 your interests will happen to nicely line up with things that lead to wealth.
Everything I've read suggests that being born into the right family plays a huge role in wealth, a la the joke "He made his money the old fashioned way: He inherited it."
Health issues are another thing. Miracles of modern medicine can be very expensive and come directly out of your pocket if you live in the wrong country. At the same time, you typically will be less productive and less competent while enduring serious health issues.
Personal relationships are another biggie. My mother used to work for an heiress whose husband ran through her money. After the divorce, she had to get a job to support herself.
Divorce, scandal, drug addiction and various other personal issues can all be financially ruinous.
Even if you are good at earning it, that doesn't mean you are good at keeping it or growing it, a la some tagline from some magazine "How money becomes wealth."
I would say it leads to the greatest form of wealth. We just do not measure it in $$$.
A society that has bad parents will soon be a bad society.
As a european, this assumption that everyone would value getting as rich as possible as their top priority seems really weird.
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.
That's probably because, over time, you become what you practice. So, even if you were not obsessed with money and work at 20, you might be at 40, after 20 years of chasing money and success to stave off potential disasters.
I mean take a look at rich (m/b)illionaires. It's a life style they can't give up.
like Europe, which has a level of public spending that many view as unsustainably high?
Edit: plenty of economists are saying this! It's hardly a controversial view
[1] https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/public-debt-...
[2] Sorted: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTcH12ah_hJh...
And then lets take a look at the North: Germany employs the Euro to support its economy by decreasing the true cost of its exports, resulting in the impoverishment of the southern European countries already mentioned. France's economy has been facing calls for major reform for decades now and - not sure if you've missed it - the latest economy related political problems have led to a minor civil war. Both economies also now face the prospect of integrating millions of low-skilled, penniless new arrivals. Those are the two biggest economies by far in the EU (if UK leaves). And then there's no shortage of other economies snapping at Europe's heels, all perfectly capable of manufacturing products that are equal if not superior to what comes out of Europe. Many think that German automotive engineering dropped off a cliff in terms of quality in the early 2000s and never really recovered, as a consequence of superior quality from Japan and Korea. And now China are just starting to penetrate Western markets with cars that are plenty good enough.
Also don't forget the Euro does not have the privilege of being the world's reserve currency. This gives the US a massive advantage and lessens the impact of deficits.
I live in one of these high benefit economies and having been taxed for years feel I'm owed something in return. But I don't expect it. Given the trends afoot I think anyone below 50 in Europe that thinks the welfare state will continue to be like it is now over their lifetime is utterly delusional.
The OP might be incorrect, but you are using the wrong argument against theirs.
I am not putting my bets on a change in culture or government. I see what's happening to people who counted on Social Security/Medicare and discovered too late that it wasn't enough.
Talk about my fintech venture or trading and young people are visible apprehensive
Very distinct from the general awe and congratulations and “wow but you're so young!” that comes with completely misunderstanding what personal and liquid monetary wealth is
Outside of Monaco and Zug I just started telling people I was a student studying communications
I had to look up what this brand new slang term meant.
fintech = "financial technology".
Linguistic evolution -- be it wanted, needed, or not.
No bitcoin involved
I really appreciate the business climate of the US, the tax and accounting rules are so complex that even communists likely wouldn't achieve much if they gained representation. they'll focus on "income tax" and "wealth tax" because its all they know, and their state planning would never gain consensus.
Mark to Market elections on securities transactions at arbitrary prices causing Net Operating Losses forever no matter what the income tax rate is? 60/40 rule on futures trades? Its unlikely they would ever notice.
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.
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".
Oh, without question it is. The problem has been identifying and treating it appropriately. I’m seeing help, but it’s slow going. It will pass - I’ve beaten it before and will do so again.
But the odds are rather poor that you have what I have.
My children nursed me back to health after doctor's wrote me off for dead. It's supposed to cost about $100k-$250k annually to treat my condition conventionally.
My oldest has the same condition. Between the two of us, that's up to a half million dollars per year.
We were diagnosed over 18 years ago. You can conservatively guess that my kids have been worth at least $1.5 million to me, and potentially more than $9 million.
(That's just the dollar value saved on treatment. You can put no price on the improvement in quality of life that I got out of it.)
Those poor kids are just like every other kid in the world - other than they lack money. Their parents love them, and the best for them. What they define as best might not match my definition, but they want the best for them. And my son is well on his way to a second language, something that will be useful - in our opinion.
That's an unnecessarily reductio characterization. That kid might, say, end up working for a business started by someone without kids.
New people are only an element of a diverse, functioning economy.
For the record I'm a parent myself, and glad to be, but it's not right for everyone, and, I believe, not right for a significant percentage (>10%?) of those who do have them.
All things considered, that is definitely not a given.
Social security for instances is tied to one's lifetime earnings, throw in the correlation between life time earnings and longevity and it smooths out to getting what you put in (roughly).
There are also a lot of benefits, both employer funded and tax payer funded that goes to people with children.
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.
Social Security payouts relative to withholdings are strongly progressive, such that the less that you pay into social security, the greater percentage you take out once you start receiving benefits. Absent a difference in mortality (or to a much lesser degree, the age at which you start drawing), the less you contribute, the greater percentage of what you contributed will be paid out to you.
Regarding social security, I'm fairly confident the system will collapse before I see a penny of what I'm paying in.
I dont think education is a subsidy, so much as an investment.
Also, most families who were eligible, maybe even your own, got the benefits of the tax breaks available to parents.
For some reason many people seem to have a blind spot where they believe that benefits for "parents" or "children" aren't relevant to them if they aren't parents right now. But every adult was a child! ... "like, sure, but what have you done for me lately?".
So in a way everybody pays for their own education after the fact.
But seriously, I’m guessing you don’t have kids?
I've got no kids and no retirement savings. No one's going to support me when I get old. If I had kids there'd be a chance that they would.
Making progeny is not a ‘virtue’. Willing to procreate should not be considered a speculative way to raise monies for taxes.
This is well-said. James Hughes advocates families account their balance sheets on human, intellectual, financial, and social capital. For very-long-term (50-100+ years and >3 generations), the human, social, and intellectual components are arguably more important than the financial one, and it is essential to mitigate liabilities like divorce etc.
It's a tactless question, sure, but it should also be expected from a society that idolizes wealth the way ours does.
This is not true, (or if it is being taught, the professor doesn't understand what he is supposed to be teaching.) What first year economics courses do teach--what is meant by the term 'homoeconomicus'--is that in aggregate, people rationally pursue their own self interest. 'Self-interest' is defined here as a subjective utility threshold. So, for example, if someone cares about their children, they will work hard and make a lot of sacrifices to support their children. The idea is that the market follows the aggregate self interest of people and so we don't have to worry about the miss-pricing of goods because the market will take care of that.
The difficulty with this idea isn't that people have wrong values--modern economics presupposes that values are inherently subjective and thus cannot be judged--it's that people are capable of making consistently rational decisions in pursuit of their subjective goals despite information disparities and cognitive biases.
You could have reacted (slightly confused) like so: I pointed at my kids and said "I am."
You could more charitably think of it as a compliment and an attempt at awkward social critique of how life works. An attempt to ask someone whose intelligence she admired to try to explain why life doesn't work like she thought it was supposed to.
Thank you.
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 lot of things, lots of things will get stirred up in the dust.
3. Luck from preparation - If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in that field. When other people who aren’t attuned to it won’t notice.
4. Luck from your unique character - You created your own luck. You put yourself in a position to be able to capitalize on that luck. Or to attract that luck when nobody else has created that opportunity for themselves.
For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures.
If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.
It's just like in sports. Usain Bolt is not the fastest man alive. He is the fastest professional runner. Within a sample set of 9bn people, there are likely ones with better genetics - but no access or chance to become a professional runner.
This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit. A net worth of 100mil still means generational wealth. But once you're in the billions, the gap to all the other employees in your company becomes just crazy - but none of the billions would have been possible without their labor.
Remember: a million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds? 31.71 years.
Flip that around. There are thousands, if not millions of other kids who grew up with wealthy, connected parents. Why aren't they all billionaires if that's all it takes?
On the other hand, suppose you employ 30,000 people each with 10,000 in savings from working at your company. Without your initial labor to get everything set up and get the business going, none of their combined $300 million in assets would have been possible without your labor, so actually your net worth seems ever more justified.
No, but money (and value) is created out of ideas, of labor, and adding value to products.
When an IPO happens, for example, and a company owner holding 50% of the company is suddenly valued at $20B, that value did not come from taking $20B from other people. It's the value of the company. It is value simply created out of thin air, that didn't exist before.
If the next day, someone prices the stock 30% higher through market forces, the owners value shoots up 30% also. That 30% increase in a single day was not taken from anyone - it is made up out of thin air.
When a craftsman buys a piece of wood for $10, crafts it such that others value it at $1000, that craftsman just added $900 of value. It might have taken a week, or might have taken 15 minutes. It's not simply some labor value per hour times hours. The amount of value is created out of thin air, but it took some labor to allow that increase to happen. The labor amount and value added is somewhat related, but varies greatly across all endeavors.
And saying the employees could have just worked somewhere else is shuffling the truth - to have somewhere to work, someone has to start a company, which often takes significant money and risk to begin with, before thousands of workers can have a stable job. That money too was created previously through invention, innovation, labor, and previous investment.
They could have earned just as much elsewhere. However since we are not in a situation of labor shortages yet, every income providing job is still important. If your employees worked elsewhere they may be as rich as they are with you, but the guy whose job they replaced would have to look for another job.
What? No, how is it justified?
Try again.
If Bill Gates didn't exist we could all easily be using Osbournes instead of PCs, or something equivalent would have occurred.
> Remember: a million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds? 31.71 years.
That was insightful and I am telling you: I am going to use your argument from now on---it was just beautifully simple and clear!
Survivorship bias is looking at only the successes and not the failures. All those self-help books about "the 25 things all successful entrepreneurs do" without acknowledging that thousands of unsuccessful entrepreneurs also do the exact same 25 things.
It's standing up on stage and saying "I worked really hard to get here, I deserve this", without acknowledging that other people are working just as hard but didn't get the same result.
Survivorship bias is not acknowledging that there is luck involved in success. That "meritocratic" blindness that divides the world into "winners" and "losers" and blames people for not being successful.
What is usually achievable through hard work, and worth achieving, is an honest life, a home of one's own, and for some, kids. These are things that bring contentment and happiness. Wealth and power beyond a reasonable measure only endangers these things.
same IQ, same hustler and you'd have a warlord or a revolutionary leader. There are genius everywhere, and they don't create only software.
I guess that is the reason why 2-4 start with "luck from...".
I read it like this: from the ones who do/are X only a few lucky succeed. But (almost) all who don't do/are X fail. To succeed you need both: luck + X.
"If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today."
There are wealthy people outside of the USA and those who weren't born wealthy.
It's a mistake to claim that differences in wealth (or height or IQ) can be explained by environmental factors.
I would bet if Gates had been born in Rwanda, he would have stood a good chance of being successful there, better than average.
When I was a teenager we hosted at our home kids running from Rwanda , my mom was working in an hospital that cured them, doing the best possible for kids (kids!) with arms or legs amputated or a big part of their skull chopped off with a machete.
You're assuming Gates had probably more chances when the chances weren't there to begin with.
// Still on the backs of “labor”.
You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life.
In the end, everything is just blind luck, but our egos want to feel like they are in control somehow.
This argument may be true but it isn't very useful, because the concept of "useful" itself implies free will and active decision-making. In other words, yes, maybe it was all predetermined before we were born, but if you're the sort of person that believes in free will, that decision was predetermined before you were born, so why challenge that belief? And the reason we evolved to believe in the fiction of free will is because humans who did do better than those who don't, so whether it's correlation or causation, it's still adaptive.
The quantum states that your neurons fire to is unknowable in advance and determined only at the point of measurement.
Therefore, you are _free_ in the exact results of your neural mass are unknowable in advance and truly random. There's certainly a distribution of probability to the randomness... but be free and don't by the deterministic, 19th century nonsense!
The thing is, the randomness in quantum mechanics isn't really the same as what we talk about with "free will". Quantum mechanics is really a statement about coupling - it finds that you cannot separate the results of a measurement from the act of measuring, and so you will always introduce uncertainty into the measurement of any physical quantity.
There are a lot of possible philosophical interpretations of that. Does it mean nature is inherently random? Or is nature deterministic underneath, but our knowledge of nature is inherently random? Does it leave room for God in the machine? Free will? Are the laws of physics lines of code in a computer program, and we're Sims trying to reverse-engineer them?
Physicists tend not to concern themselves much with these quesions: as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, there is uncertainty in the measurement of any physical quantity, and this uncertainty can be quantified. The laws of physics are just models anyway: they've worked remarkably well at predicting reality, but we'll never know whether they're actually reality, and that's not really the point.
"Free will" usually implies some form of agent that can shape actions in the future. The mind, soul, whatever is a distinct thing that determines our actions. Personally, I'm of the opinion that we don't actually have free will, but I was predestined to believe that I do, and as a model of reality it works fairly well even if it's false, so there's no particular reason to discard that model. Similarly, I don't actually have a "self" - I'm just a collection of neural impulses firing - but it's convenient to believe that I do, so why not?
The world could be 100% a "clockwork universe", but we just aren't capable of understanding how it all works or fully predicting what will happen.
To say that something is "random" is more of a statement about our own inability to see a pattern in the data than about the data not having some pattern in it.
It's useful to some in the sense of justifying the taking and redistribution of the outcomes from whatever mix of luck, skill, and labor went into the creation of wealth.
it's not even surprising we'd jump to such conclusions: our brains are designed to tease out and magnify the significance of the things that we do and control.
Imagine a poker tournament. The winner is determined by a combination of luck and skill. But somebody who didn't play had no chance to win.
I find it difficult to undermine all four 'kinds of luck' when you look at someone studying hard to get into a certain university, or you look at a foreigner deciding to uproot their lives to hopefully get a better life in US/Canada,etc or someone who decided to knock on every door to get their first client and hone their skills throughout that process.
So, yeah, it all boils down to #1. But #s 2-4 determine how much of #1 you need.
Having children without a plan puts ones own copies of genes at risk. As is not having the resource to raise them well. It’s self sabotage..as it were..by two people who decided to combine their genetic material and their immediate circle of friends, family and acquaintances who enable their sub optimal decision. Society and media should be ignored anyways while making important decisions.
if you workout and are in the best shape your genes can provide, you will be more lucky when meeting people and more interesting people will be interested on you. That would be 3, not 1. And if you have a good conversation and go out every day, you will also have more chance of meeting interesting people. That would be 2.
For example, from what I understand, in the big five model of personality, conscientiousness is over 40% heritable.
Anecdotally, I remember how even in the first grade there were kids that were clearly low in conscientiousness and kids who were clearly high in conscientiousness.
Pretty sure the kids in the latter group didn't instill a work ethic into themselves by age 6.
I hope that it's possible to develop conscientiousness as an adult, at least to some degree, but clearly it is something that you can be born into.
I'm using "conscientiousness" as an example, I don't think it's the same thing as "hustle", in fact I'd even suspect that there's some conflict between the two.
However, my point is that development of skills aren't independent from luck, since we all are dealt different cards with which we then have to play.
Try playing multiple games of monopoly with 4 or 5 friends (or run monte carlo simulations if you want a fun machine learning project, since Monopoly is a game that can easily be taught to computers), but randomly assign one player 10x the starting capital and $2000 every time they pass go instead of the normal $200.
But one of my theories in life is that power is money, not the other way around. We know that's something that the newly rich run into over and over. We even have movies with that story arc.
'They' are all too happy to see us get hung up on how much money we're going to allow them to have. They'll still be just as powerful and influential. Probably the easiest thing they spend that 'currency' on is to have enough money to cover the exchange rate with people outside their circles.
not
"Fortune rewards the prepared mind."
Although the latter is effectively Calvinism, which the US culture was founded on. It will probably echo through the ages.
Is there a such thing as my own willpower that allows me to improve my position more than an equivalently-placed person would, or is the willpower to act to improve my own situation derived from the blind luck of where and when I was born?
So you claim there is no correlation between, say, hours worked and money earned? That pay is some random variable not causally connected to any decision a person makes?
In his case, perhaps everyone who got in his way simply didn't have any luck.
I agree with this one.
> or where you are born
Not really agree with this, you can change the country you live in. And it's more important where you live not where you are born. For example lots of people from poor countries go to US or Europe and are quite successful there.
> 2,3 can be reduced to 1.
Don't agree either. 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 "success" than a person with well educated, well connected, and rich parents.
Even they are able to see that perhaps instead of a minute chance of success on par with winning the lottery, perhaps they ought to spend the present enjoying a movie. Many times, not being around the right people and environment leaves you in the dark about opportunities in the first place. I'm not saying that one should despair and sit at home watching movies, but it can be rational to feel that way. We need to do better as a society to even out the odds.
And even if you do change the country you live in, it won’t be equivalent to having been born there.
I could change country if I tried really hard but it isn't straightforward. And I'm an very experienced frontend dev. Other people would find it harder.
Have you noticed the existence of extremely anti-immigration politicians who are trying to reduce that number to zero by rewriting the rules in the most inequitable fashion possible?
There are plenty of prepared, hustlers who can capitalize on lucky events. For every one of them that becomes mega-rich, there are thousands who are exactly as fit who do not.
That is, 2 3 and 4 follow a normal distribution, wealth follows a power-law distribution. The attributes don't correlate strongly.
Makes me feel better to have a study confirm it.
You can certainly improve your odds via 2, 3 and 4, but some people will do all those and end up not doing well. The average person who does them all will end up a bit better-off than average, and some will end up very well off.
In other words, they help, but don't guarantee 'success'.
So now, is it the hard work that determined the end result, or just the luck again?
There are tons of people right now trying really hard to do all sorts of things. Many of them will fail, for a myriad of reasons. That's the idea of "luck". You can't know which reasons will lead to your downfall, because reducing labor and life to "hard work" is so absurdly reductive it's meaningless.
Basically, your individual circumstances are your own and comparing yourself to others might be helpful but it also might not and nobody can definitively tell you one way or the other if luck is even real.
* Receiving little or no schooling
* Having to labour as a child
* Being abused
* Having your primary carers be addicts of some kind
* Growing up in a relatively poor/deprived
* ...
Really this list is endless, and other than blind luck (a lotto win, something that can really elevate you out of this situation, as well as having the sense to use the opportunity correctly), no amount of 'hustle' is really going to get you out of this situation.
The kind of attitude in parent's comment is prevalent amongst people who have grown up in relatively rich, successful environments, and see vastly more lucky people than unlucky people (when in reality there are orders of magnitude more unlucky people than lucky).
They do though, the paper is focused on what you call "blind luck" in (1). I suppose it can be summarized as a evidence based counter argument to the cultural narrative weight given to 2,3,4, especially in the US.
I don't think it is complete of course, but it is interesting.
They used a normal distribution for "Talent", but that's false. There is plenty of evidence that , like everything in life , it's power-law distributed
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-myth-...
http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/11/16/power-laws-reve...
And the assumtions of the model are rather childish: each random event either doubles or halves your capital (In real life, the multiplier can be much much higher or lower). In fact that's the most flawed point of their tiny "model": by changing the factor 2 and the multiplier distribution they can come up with any result they want.
Also, everyone meets lucky/unlucky events in the same frequency - the presumumption that smart people make paths that provide equal opportunity as the rest or take chances with equal frequency is just false.
They could at least have compared the lifetime wealth fluctuations with real data for a sense of how wrong thir model is. This is a model of a very simple casino game, not real life.
The paper has no discussion, no justification for its parameters, no critical presentation of its limitations , no sensitivity analysis.
Good conversation piece, everyone has an opinion on the subject, but the experiment is rubbish.
But actual talent, like human height or average running speed, is probably normally distributed.
Talent would be normally distributed if it was e.g. the sum of your partial talents, as a result of Central limit. There are different kinds of talent though, and gifted people are talented in one thing, but may even suck badly in others. If there are 5 talents, a person barely above average, with 0.6 in everything has total talent 3 and Mozart who has 1.0 only in music has total talent 1. That's not how talent works though: extremely gifted people are almost unstoppable. It would take extremely adverse circumstances for Mozart of Maria Callas or Michelangelo to not be successful. So, i don't think Talent works at all like a bell curve. It's futile to make parallels with IQ (which IS a sum of variable representing partial skills).
That's why i think those studies find those power laws (and frankly, there are not many ways to measure talent directly). Also: Note that they didn't measure the wealth of the artist, but the price of their works since the time they lived , as a long-term testament to their talent.
Agreed. The paper also seems to be promoting a view of wealth inequality that would support modern socialist policies.
The paper seems to be trying to scientifically support redistribution of welfare, without actually doing or saying anything, or posing the question directly.
Someone is warping the numbers to fit their agenda. Since it's a popular (and polarizing) agenda, of course everyone will have an opinion to chime in with.
Did the guys who went to work for Google take any additional risk? Yet, they are now millionaires. How about the entrepreneurs? A few are super rich now. The guy who went to work at McKinsey is now a pubco COO making millions.
Yes, by my direct observation, it’s mostly chance.
Wait, what? Are you sure you're reaching the right conclusion? It sounds like your anecdote supports the opposite once you stop looking inter-your-small-group, and start comparing groups. Have you compared median wage data for your elite university versus median wage data for the country you are in? I suspect the difference is noticeable.
It appears you are making the mistake of comparing a group of successful entrepreneurs, failed entrepreneurs, and people who went to work at Goog and McKinsey with each-other, but you really need to compare that group to people who couldn't get a job at Google or McKinsey at all. Obviously life is not nearly that uni-dimensional, but I'd wager your median "all really smart" colleague is wildly beating the median person, even if some of them are broke.
They probably are smarter though! If they weren't, they wouldn't get in.
I've contracted with Google a couple times, just like >50% of their workforce.
Would I like millions? Sure. Do I have that? No. Would I work myself to death for it? No. Do I believe Google [or whatever FAANG company you want] is The Greatest Everest Of All? I'm smarter than that and you should be as well.
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 symmetric about an average value. 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.
The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else."
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.
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.
However, from what I can tell -- and these studies are always controversial and not convincing -- IQ is only tangentially related to financial success. If I recall, a little helps but a lot doesn't help more.
Comparing IQ as a measurement to measuring height would require we create a non linear unit of measurement so that humans fit into a normal distribution of "Height Quotient" where most humans are 100 units tall. Then every few years we adjust these units so that most humans are always 100 units tall
100 IQ fifty years ago wasn't the same as 100 IQ today
'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 missing something?
[Edit: I read the paper when it came out (2018) and it seemed mathematically sound. Was I mistaken?]
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 you need me to do a computer simulation? Will that make the argument stronger? Even if the argument is mathematical?
Or will you look at my simulation and say, "ah, I think you made an error here by not accounting for sleep efficiency fully, so I think this theory is wrong."
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?
But even in the instance you are talking about -- let's just abstract away everything else -- we know that the output of a gaussian process over time will be a very wide dispersion.
If you assume stock prices follow some kind of gaussian distribution (yes, I know they don't), and just follow them in time you get this crazy wide distribution.
Its a "stylized fact". And running it as a metaphor for some other process doesn't give me more insight. But I fear this explanation is even more confusing, and not less.
Usain Bolt was only a tiny bit faster than other sprinters, but in this prime he won basically all the races he competed in.
It wasn't luck that had him winning them all despite such a small advantage. It was the nature of competition.
That's how science works in general. Build a model and make it match the observations. That model is what will be used to test the hypothesis. Without a model, it is just speculation with little value.
I realize this is the politically correct world view in many circles, but it’s simply not true. The variation in cognitive ability is enormous. You can ask yourself for example how many randomly selected people would you need to produce a score aver 200 on an IQ test, produce a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem or build something like the SpaceX Falcon.
(Now that fact is not a justification for the enormous economic inequality we see on this planet. Neither is it proof that luck is not a major component in success.)
It's been proven time and again that IQ numbers are more or less meaningless. Setting that aside, I think the point of the article is exactly that you might not need a huge sample to find someone with the potential to do these things, key word here being "potential", nor these things require a different order of magnitude in talent or intelligence, just the right combination of drive, luck, inspiration, opportunity, etc...
> I think the point of the article is exactly that you might not need a huge sample to find someone with the potential to do these things
If it is then I'm quite sure this conclusion is in no way backed by the referenced scientific article.
> nor these things require a different order of magnitude in talent or intelligence, just the right combination of drive, luck, inspiration, opportunity, etc...
It would be great if this was true, but it's just not. For example, I see myself as a few standard deviations out on the mathematical talent/ability scale, but I would not stand a chance against somebody like Andrew Wiles or Terence Tao. Why is it so important to pretend that it isn't so...?
I don't think people typically realize it as much because they don't benchmark themselves against their classmates when they get older.
You can have both good things in your life again. Dust yourself off, learn what you need to learn and find someone who will uphold her commitments (I'm making some assumptions about your vows)...
Nobody is perfect, and there are so many women out there. The chance that you had the most "optimal" one is very small.
You have what my wife would call a "limiting belief". Believe that you can find an even better match than before, and maybe you will. I'm sure the chance of that happening is higher than you think.
The people who had a lot of experience hunting and fishing tended to know how long it would take them to find food and went about it with much more urgency.
I do remember bad luck striking as well for sure, but it seemed like strategy was at least as big of a factor as luck for many of the contestants.
I agree that no matter how hard your will, you can't make it past certain things, but a lot of contestants hamstrung themselves right off the bat by badly underestimating how many calories they would need or not accurately predicting which sorts of problems would instantly end their bid.
That's a reality TV show, not a documentary.
That aside, the conditions for basic survival in harsh, solitary, conditions are vastly different that those for economic success in first-world society.
Regardless of this, now that I am an adult, I find that I would love to spend my time learning. It's a primary value. I have children, and have to focus on their upbringing as well, which is a massive drain on the time that I can bring to bear on learning new things - and I mean taking classes to advance my understanding of mathematics, not learning a new programming language.
When I think about being wealthy, I actually think about spending my time going to classes, doing research, and advancing human knowledge. I know others who would use their time for leisure, and probably a dozen other possibilities.
In the end, I simply don't value money beyond giving me the basic necessities of life. I find my time outside of work is best used focusing on studies like what I described (I mean, they are all free now, for the most part). I find that people who are focused on wealth, unless it is inherited, put most of their time in gaining new wealth. I just don't see anything revolutionary in gaining more power, which is what wealth is to me. True revolution comes from technological development, which is typically done by the public sector. Sadly, work there is poorly rewarded by the private sector (companies making billions on the internet don't donate money back to DARPA for more research, or for that matter GPS, chip technologies, etc.).
I just think it's a difference in values. Getting to where I wish I could be at this point of my life would come at too much cost to my family, so now I find myself working for profit for the rest of my life. Not so bad, of course... I have some time for the leisure that allows me to expand my knowledge, and maybe catch up enough to understand the incredible things that are happening in the space of scientific advancement.
Even if these qualities are distributed on a normal curve, the result of possessing the right combination of qualities will have an extremely large effect in a winner take all world.
Sure, there will be some randomness involved. Start with two kids who both have the same optimal qualities, and only one will end up a billionaire. But my guess is that the second kid will also end up ahead of the average. If the simulation did not end up with this result, then my guess is that something was left out of the simulation.
My point is, we praise captains for industry for their unique insights, but I doubt they’re really that clever. Yes, they have skills, but not skills as rare as their wealth would suggest.
Want to require less luck? Open some kind of store/service yourself and it'll pay off faster than investing in a startup most likely.
A friend of mine runs a shipping office, single location. Not a giant or complicated business with 99.999% uptime. He always has much nicer race cars too.... :)
Anyway plenty of people are terrible with their money from a young age. When I'm a parent I hope I can instill better money management practices in my kids. :)
First. You had an idea and went with that one that worked out, that’s luck. Also luckily, you had the physical, mental and monetary capacity to follow through with it, is lucky to have these resources.
Second way to look at it. You were smart to reject many ideas because you had the experience and smarts to say no to non-sense. Also you had the grit and persistence to grind it out despite all the challenges.
Ok which way was it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591908
including the Pluchino paper (scroll/search on the above page to find the reference).
More seriously: without reading the work more in depth, this seems to show that luck is sufficient to have the current distribution, not that it's necessary.
Anecdotally, there sure seem to be people out there that are 10x or 100x as productive, not by doing the same tasks faster but by identifying a different set of tasks that accomplish the same thing, or by imagining new possibilities that others couldn't. Clearly, some luck is involved in that, but so is some skill, and this paper seems to exclude that as a possibility.
Inflation-adjusted federal minimum wage is lower today than it has been most of the time since the 1956, and if you measure against minimal needs it's even worse because CPI also includes hedonic adjustment. Sure, by historical standards (both before and since) the “Lost" Generation, the Boomers, and (to a lesser extent) the leading edge of Gen X spent all or a substantial share of their adulthood in times where, especially if you were a White man at least, there was unusually strong economic opportunity for the working class.
It is pathological to even consider sacrificing your happiness and compromising your life to chase higher and higher paying jobs.
Knowing when to settle and how to be content in life with what you have is a form of intelligence rarely praised.
Successful people might be LUCKIEST, but it's not mostly luck.
If you wish to be successful, you need more than luck, hard work, determination, grit, laser like focus, working on the right stuff, working smart, proper time management, proper project organization, scheduling and prioritization of activities will make you successful.
We can't all be billionaires, but if your come from a family making an annual wage of $40k with a net worth of $0 to $10k and you one day are making $100k+ and have a net worth of $500k or a million, you are successful. Success is relative to where you start from.
It's true that some have a head start, but it is what it is. Anyone in the western hemisphere who is healthy and has their freedom can really move themselves forward if they are willing to work and apply themselves.
It's the uncomfortable truth, but the sooner you embrace it the sooner you can get on the right path if you're not already on it.
Note: we were born in Africa moved to NA and slept in a one bedroom apartment with our parents like sardines. Fast foward to now and life is much better. I am not rich by any stretch.
When people born here (western world) say being rich isnt worth it I laugh. You're used to a certain level of safety net that we know is not sustainable and is soon to disappear (in my humble opinion). We are Zimbabwean (left 2001)
If someone just hands you $1 million, then sure, it's great. But if you're sacrificing your mental or physical health to earn that $1 million the hard way, you could definitely come out the other side rich and worse off.
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,
Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck
By definition, this can't be completely true, as pure luck would mean pure randomness, and apparently, both tails (the most and the least talented) are never the richest. Such situation is at odds with a random distribution.
So there is a missing part of the model that may explain it, but it's not random.
That being said, I'm not trying to nit-pick the work they've done. Clearly there is something at play here that has huge social significance for every person on the planet.
Fascinating work - I'm looking forward to seeing how this research grows over the coming years.
Getting rich involves doing stupid things.. things that others would look at and think would fail but you do it anyways. So getting rich involves stubborness and fearlessness and the ability to detact from reality.
They are using talent as a variable in their model, but what do they mean by "talent"?
"talent Ti (intelligence, skills, ability, etc.)"
Throwing "intelligence, skills, ability, etc." together doesn't make much sense to me.
Out of these three, only intelligence (assuming they meant IQ), is an established measure, at least from what I understand. What does "skills, ability, etc." even mean?
It's not surprising to me that their conclusion doesn't seem to correspond with reality:
"An important result of the simulations is that the most successful agents are almost never the most talented ones, but those around the average of the Gaussian talent distribution - another stylised fact often reported in the literature" (what literature??).
I can't comment on this "talent" variable as a whole since it doesn't make much sense but in terms of IQ it's certainly not the 100 IQ individuals that tend to be the most successful ones.
I also question the "luck" variable, because:
"...does not change this fundamental features of the model, which exposes different individuals to different amount of lucky or unlucky events during their life, regardless of their own talent."
I find it unlikely that "talent" and "luck" are completely independent from each other.
For example, if I recall correctly, reaction time correlates with IQ, so wouldn't that make more intelligent people less prone to accidents?
Finally, I'm dubious of their results that show that distributing funds equally among all scientists would lead to most scientific discoveries.
From what I understand, people with a specific set of traits, aka geniuses, are over-represented in scientific discoveries.
If that's the case, wouldn't deliberately seeking out geniuses and throwing money at them lead to more discoveries than distributing funds equally?
Again, I only skimmed this paper, but it seems to me that the researchers didn't look at the data we already have, and instead made up their own models that don't appear to correspond with reality.
Also, given that this is a Hacker News comment, not a scientific paper, I can't be bothered to cite anything :D
"The team shows this by ranking individuals according to the number of lucky and unlucky events they experience throughout their 40-year careers. "It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones," they say. "And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones."
This article kind of assumes everyone wants to be rich, or makes that a primary goal in their life. That's not really the case.
Some people are more career-driven, more ambitious, more interested in making money. Others have various psychological issues that prevent them from working effectively or sometimes getting or keeping a job at all. Is that just bad luck?
I grew up despising money and looking down on people who chased after money. I didn't want to be that guy. I did reluctantly get work, but I never tried to climb the corporate ladder, refused offers of promotion to management, took many years off work and lived off my savings instead, and I've burnt out many times, my career suffered as a result. Is that just bad luck?
I had a chance to work at Google early on, pre-IPO, but I decided not to. I worked at a small financial company for a year, was offered a big promotion and turned it down and quit instead, because I was burnt out and just not interested in that job. That company wound up becoming one of the largest financial companies in the world.
Being depressed much of my life, I didn't really care to plan for or save for my long term future, because I thought I wouldn't have one. This has become a self-fulfiling prophecy in some sense, though not how I expected. I didn't think I'd live, but I did live, just not with as much financial security had I pursued money money more and saved for the long-term.
In many ways I've been lucky. I grew up mostly in safe suburbs when I was young. I went to some great schools, some of the best in the country, but also dropped out of those. I'm not ambitious. I get bored easily. I like to follow my own interests rather do boring work other people tell me to do. I suffer from depression and just generally don't feel I fit well in this world, but also consider that I'm not rich (actually close to becoming homeless at this point) due in large measure to my own choices rather than pure luck.
Now, you could argue that we really have no free will. If that's so, then yes, where you are could be said to be "just chance". But to the degree we could make good or bad choices, we bear some responsibility for where we end up, though clearly luck plays some role, and it's good to be in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.
You seem to be blindly lucky and do not really appreciate that...
It can take more than intelligence and luck, it could take a desire and a choice to make money a big priority in your life, which it rarely was for me.
If Bill Gates had said "Fuck Microsoft, I don't want to do this shit anymore" and quit early on in his career, (which, if he had free will, he could have done at any point) then he probably wouldn't have wound up the richest person in the world, no matter how lucky he was.
He chose to do what he did (didn't he?), and that (in large part) was what made him unimaginably rich.
Its clear that you need to be lucky to become a billionaire but i think a more interesting question is how much luck is involved in becoming a multi millionaire.
Parenthetically, I was born poor. My family had very little money when I was born, and what little they had they left behind in the old country when we immigrated to America. So I was poor when I was really young, and middle class by the time I left high school, thanks to the hard work (and maybe luck) of my parents.
But your point is taken... if I was really poor when it came time to work and I refused to do so, then I'd feel the lash of the economic whip, as I'm just about to do so now as I've burnt through my savings yet again....
So, while I think that personal responsibility is a valuable perspective, I do think that ultimately what you describe boils down to "luck".
The part that sticks out to me is the variation in the talent param. It's N(0.6, 0.01), so the mean person has a 60% chance of capitalizing on their luck. I wonder if perhaps that number is actually substantially lower.
Well, just a thought. I found the paper's methods interesting (simulating the agents and events random-walking until they encountered each other, etc.).
I'm not familiar with the process and rigor that goes into a study like this, but it seems to me that for experiments like this it would be hard to prevent researchers from adjusting parameters until they get the answer they are looking for (which multiple runs doesn't really address).
Visit Bogleheads.org, where many wealthy people hang out and discuss finances.
You'll find that for a great many wealthy people, the secret is simply living below your means, saving and investing for decades, and keeping costs low. That's it. Not lucky. Not necessarily smarter. Just disciplined, and having the basic knowledge of the simple steps described.
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation...
The claim it is making is that wealth and intelligence are not correlated linearly.
Its not even claiming they aren't positively correlated, and the surely are to some degree, more or less getting into some type of causality as is implied by the title.
We live in a frothy time when a relatively jr software engineer in SF can make $300k/year. It wouldn't take that much discipline to save 60%-70% as a single person and have a million saved in a few years time with the right mix of discipline and investing.
This is just a lie.
I know very few people who rent a 1-bedroom by themselves. If you're renting a room you might be paying $1500-$2000.
Huh, interesting hypothesis. Certainly a strong claim. They must have done some really impressive and thorough work to come to this conclusion.
> a new computer model of wealth creation confirms.
Sigh.
I'm well aware of the option. Sacrifice my happiness for how many years in the process?
Making money has never been a primary goal of mine. I'm lucky that my interests are moderately lucrative. I know that "very lucrative" is just around the corner. But so is the liquor store, and I don't drink.
What you need is a talent that earns revenue and the foresight to retain the net income and increase revenue. "It's all about leverage".
Another approach I have personally done is taking out a $30k loan, invested it and doubled my money paying back the loan. What does that mean, I started with zero, and ended up with $30k. I then took my newly made $30k and continued to invest it (without a loan).
My point being, you aren't rich because you didn't take a "chance". You didn't increase your net worth.
It’s not about the problem at hand, but every day has been experienced differently
the richest people i know (with wealth in the 10M range) are the most amoral in their thoughts and actions, and it makes a big difference financially. note that i said amoral, not immoral; they aren't malicious, they simply don't care.
they don't refuse a business opportunity because the business would be explicitly unethical; they do it, and profit from it. the same is true if the business produces negative externalities. it simply doesn't matter to them because money is money as far as they care.
they don't craft their investing strategy with the goal of investing in companies that behave well; they chase the money regardless of the ethical problems that they may be directly incentivizing.
overall, this gives these people a much greater range of freedom when it comes to making large volumes of additional money. while i don't know for sure if being amoral helps people become rich in the first place, i assume that it does because having more options on the table is never a bad thing.
so, maybe the answer to the question of "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich" is "i refuse to act unethically to make money".
in my personal experience, i think this argument is pretty good. in 2010 or so, i realized that there was a then-latent market for TDCS / consumer nootropic brain stimulation systems, and considered making a company around producing and selling them to consumers.
however, at the time, i knew that brain stimulation hadn't been proven safe to use in the long term, and selling it to consumers would require working around the FDA's rules about medical devices to essentially evade their oversight. in short, i refused to start a company whose time had come because i knew that i'd probably be harming people as part of the core business. i would have been one of the first in the space, and while i don't think i would be rich today if i had done it, i know that it would have been a chance to get rich and certainly that there were some people who did get rich. and of course, there have been plenty of consumers who have been harmed by these products, often in unidentifiable or subtle ways.
so what's the moral of this story? having morals is expensive, and it sometimes precludes you from becoming rich even if you're lucky enough to be at the right time to take action.
For example, if you take a massive loan and then it doesn't work out, you can just declare bankrupcy, then you just wait a few years and you can start again. You can change country, then you get a clean credit history and you can try again.
You could borrow some money from the bank, bet it all on a coin toss; if you win, you can retire, if you lose, you just need to wait a few years then try again. If you do it enough times, it's very likely that you will win and retire within your lifetime.
The real losers of our society are all the honest, hard working people who are not prepared to gamble with other people's money. This is what loans are; loans expand the money supply - So when someone makes a reckless bet and they go bankrupt, it's as if everyone else was paying for that person.
Then we're surprised why the greediest and most reckless people win...
The system is not fair. Rich people already know this but it doesn't matter because they are not the ones who keep the engines of capitalism turning. So long as the majority of people believe that the system is fair, the engine will keep on running and becoming progressively less fair.
Rich people don't care about what is fair or ethical, they will do anything and say anything to get more money. Regular people are different. For example, most regular people would probably vote against a referendum to seize and nationalize all corporations with a market cap of above $1 billion... Even though such nationalization would almost certainly benefit them personally. Rich people, on the other hand, don't need any kind of justification or moral argument in order to take someone else's money; if they can do it, they will do it; simple as that. If all regular people had the mindset of rich people, we would be living in anarchy; there would be no government, only mafias and we would be killing each other over resources (of which there would be very little since we'd be spending most of our time and energy scheming and killing each other instead of creating value).
But the reality is that the rich have managed to create a society in which most people can be reared, prodded and milked like cattle under an obviously false pretext that they are the ones creating all the value.
1. The article assumes that IQ is "normally distributed" and that there are no extreme outliers, but how true is this really? First of all, IQ is a constructed metric that consists of multiple dimensions, and is normalized to mean 100, std 15. That's means it will be approximately normal, but not actually. In particular, AFAIK IQ tests can't reliably distinguish between extremely high IQ scores (140+). So we don't really have reliable data about the tail of the distribution... what we do have is strong anecdotal evidence that some people are extreme outliers (in either intelligence or performance) (Ramanujan, Elon Musk, John von Neumann, Steve Jobs). We also know from other examples that extreme outliers are possible, even though they're rare - example is breeding (of plants like corn or animals like chicken [1]), where just (unnatural) selection can produce phenotypes (from combinations of existing genes) that are multiple standard deviations above the original average.
2. Ok, so we have a model that produces some result. Does that make it a good model? Not necessarily! The point of Central Limit Theorem is that all models (within certain constraints) produce the same outcome.
Have we tried any alternative models? Basically their model is, Success = payoff * (a * luck + b * talent) and they argue that a is much bigger than b. But what if a was 0? In the present world, with companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon - i.e. a "winner-takes-all" scenario - I'd argue that even if success was completely skill-based, as long as the winners get outsized gains, you'd still expect 80-20 (or worse) wealth distribution.
3. Can we improve on it? Does it really make sense for the society to allocate resources / rewards equally to everyone? Maybe in academia (I'm not too familiar with that area), but in general, I'd argue not. The problem is, what means equally? Ok, so we had Fleming who discovered penicillin by chance. So, we should equally reward him, as well as the 9 other researchers that were also doing research in X and could have also stumbled upon the same substance, but were unlucky and didn't. But the bigger picture here is that we discovered antibiotics. I'm sure there were uncountable other lines of research that didn't yield any useful products or results or discoveries! (I've no experience with research, but I've read on Gwern that math discoveries are distributed with geometric (memoryless) distribution, i.e. more time spent on it does not increase your chances of solving it... that parallels my experience with math competitions, where you can be the smartestest of all but if you're approaching the problem along the wrong direction, there's no way for you to reach the goal.) Also, "same reward for same effort" sounds like a metric that can be very easily gamed.
So, in general, while I'd argue for more meritocracy and more equal rewards for producing results (i.e. inventors / workers get more money, not just investors / owners), I'm fairly biased against rewarding mere effort, and this article (X) definitely doesn't tilt my bias otherwise.
[1] https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/10/big-chickens.html
(X) I think it's definitely possible that the article is much worse than the study, and that the study actually addresses all of my concerns... Journalism is mostly sensationalism these days, especially science journalism.
Whowhat?
I'll be honest: I'm not quite to the point where if someone tried to thrust a million dollars into my hand, I'd say no. (That isn't even necessarily enough to take you out of "middle class" anymore as a one-off payment, honestly.) But I think I'd say no to 10 million and I'm fairly certain I'd say no to 100 million. Or really wish I had about a year later. (In "reality" I might try to do something where I take it but dump it into causes I approve of really quickly; for the sake of this argument I'm assuming that I'd have to actually step into that level of wealth permanently.)
That level of wealth forcibly inserts you into a class of games that I don't want to have to play.
If you wanted to be smart you could invest it in any number of ways to not lose wealth to inflation, but that's by no means necessary.
I feel I have that mentality of valuing the security the money gives me because I read books like Millionaire Next Door, Intelligent Investor, FIRE subreddits, etc and come from a family that has similar ideals.But I’m also aware that a lot of people are very different from that, and are known to end up playing differently with their money (status symbols, lifestyle upgrades, etc). Cultural aspects of many societies value the latter more than the former.
There's a really interesting documentary called "Born Rich", which was made by one of the heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, where he interviewed a lot of his friends who were all also born in to very wealthy families. They all had different ways of dealing with their circumstances, and I remember one of them did reject his family's fortune and tried to live an "ordinary" life.
But honestly, even at my low-end Silicon Valley salary living in the midwest I sometimes end up a bit more detached and cavalier about some things than I'd like.
>it says a lot that when confronted with an objectively dumb rich dude like trump (no working memory, can't apply grammar consistently, childish vocabulary, shallow concepts) people will choose to believe he's secretly smart rather than that wealth isn't a result of intellect
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 nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.
Same here. If average work hours is 8 hours per day, and someone works 17 hours, then again, standard deviation cannot be applied? Am I right or making some error here?
Edit: thanks for clarifications on IQ, I got it, my bad for not doing a research. The question of working hours stands, however.
I can't find a particularly ironclad source, but I read recently that the test structure is such that scores over, for example, 175, are not meaningfully variable. At that point, the test isn't capable of or effective measuring further differences.
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.
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 :)