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Comment by lostdog | Hacker News Reader

A couple of funny tidbits from the paper:

> Of the 677, we were unable to find 27 males and 15 females in our Internet searches (we could not confirm their identities in our contact-information database). Given our method and criteria (Table 1), however, we believe it is unlikely that we missed an individual with a truly illustrious career. ... Our reasoning was that, if someone were truly eminent, then that person should be publicly conspicuous and therefore discoverable through online searches.

And a finalist for the irony in naming things award:

> We used Publish or Perish software (Harzing, 2007) to collect information on each participant’s number of publications, number of patents, and h-index.

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>> if someone were truly eminent, then that person should be publicly conspicuous

rather doubtful, for a variety of reasons, but probably unlikely to affect their numbers

I try to keep a low profile, stay off of social media, and leave a minimal fingerprint. I was a "gifted child" of the 80's. I took the SAT when I was in 7th grade, and did better than above average high school seniors.

I have "stealth wealth", most of it from savings and stock market investments. I don't like to draw attention to myself.

this study isn't gauging wealth at all. which I think is refreshing, but limiting. and I think it also highlights how we are trained that "success" is some arbitrary form of linear or exponential wealth advancement that is assumed to be permanent

"Impactful" individuals are those that impact society "e.g., full professors at research-intensive universities, Fortune 500 executives, distinguished judges and lawyers, leaders in biomedicine, award-winning journalists and writers".

"stealth wealth" is not impact.

Ignore the stealth wealth part. I think many "eminent" individuals would also not want to draw unnecessary attention to themselves.

Eminent means famous.

It has a different connotation. For example, almost no CS researchers or professors are "famous" in the traditional sense. Yeah, definitely a few here on HN, but not outside their profession, and certainly not to the general public. Even if you look at "Fortune 500 executives", outside of a small subset of CEOs, they're not "famous."

And those researchers would publish papers, which would have turned up in their searches.

Do you think there are Fortune 500 executives that have managed to remain so obscure that somebody who knows their name and life until age 23 would be unable to find out that they held the position?

What's an executive? C-level? Some places everyone is a vice president, right?

It occurs to me that the Fortune 500 is not the S&P 500, so I would question whether information about them is necessarily even as accessible as with a public company.

My rule of thumb is eminent people do not mention their PSAT scores as a reason why they are eminent.

It's like, say, bringing up your Mensa membership in a job interview.

Sorry if I burst a bubble but that's not even close to "eminent".

Well since they aren't just trying to determine if people got rich at some point in time but only looking for public accolades, this is a self-fulfilling outcome

I'll add it to the gradient of life, but I'm more interested in socioeconomic movement

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