Life Is Driven by Network Effects
nfx.com
nfx.com
Reminds me of a line from Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: “There exist the kind of people for whom life is some kind of project. After talking to them, you stop feeling good for a few hours; life starts tasting like food cooked without salt.”
The most important node on the network happens before you were born - it’s the network between two people that had sex leading to your conception.
So, that’s pretty huge, and it’s very early in life. Finally, it’s the biggest, most important node in your life because everything in your life will flow from that node.
So yes, some decisions have been made. As an American, I’m mostly optimizing early decisions (and mistakes). But to a kid born between two refugees in Syria, his optimizations will look much different from mine due to the initial node in his life.
What would have happened to tech if a young Steve Jobs had said to himself "My father was a Syrian immigrant and my mother was pushed to give me up for adoption else be rejected by her family, so my life isn't likely to be a success."?
There are roughly 8 billion people on this planet, and only about 309 million in the US. Most people will never be able to come here just due to the large difference in numbers.
So who your parents are is hugely important in determining not just your worldview, but your actual world (or where you are on it).
That's why it's good to be part of groups when you move to a new town, groups that probably will have person with many similarities with you (and not the only one that made you choose them). Be part of a literature group and you'll have things in common that go beyond reading books, as being part of that group will have effect in your time, routes you take within the city, places you'll eat, stores that you'll go, and so on.
I think this is somewhat obvious. I have been hearing this from my dad since I was a kid. “Choose your friends wisely, they become your destiny”
Watch a child learn. My 1year old will watch me. Then try and do what I do. Children effectively “absorb” language from their environment- by watching and hearing us the parents speak.
Rather than giving up groups understand how the groups you belong to influence you and then apply some thinking. Take what works for you, reject what does not. Do it consciously.
Typical VC advise stuff, I'd say.
It is why people who are born into such desirable families can end up with so much more desirable things so much more easily. The effects of being born into that family will lead to a good high school which leads to a good college which leads to a good first job... And if your family raised you even half decently then you'll end up with a spouse who is likely similar to you because where you go is somewhat correlated with your upbringing. Many people meet their partner in college or the workplace after all. (And the activities you will have interest in can be correlated with your upbringing - and/or your ability to afford them)
Companies (which are netowrks too) would reach to you eventually, or as other are saying meetups, etc. But I think the key is signaling value.
For starters, wouldn't said person work at that new place? They can meet colleagues there and become friends with them. Or clients, or people working for clients, or suppliers, ...
Wouldn't they also go out at bars, restaurants, cafes, etc?
You'll have to introduce yourself over and over and of course the basic questions are where you were, why you left, and why you came to where you are. You have to do this often enough that it sort of becomes like a pitch that you need to refine to avoid boring others or exhausting yourself, so it's a good time to decide how you want to appear and basically redesign your life to the extent that you feel like doing that.
A downside from the economic point of view is your lack of an existing network, but then again you'll also be open to opportunities you might not have considered otherwise, and you'll also be the New Interesting Person for everyone you meet. If you can tell interesting stories about where you've been or what you've noticed in where you just arrived (without making them all about you), and are in turn good at asking questions and actively listening, then doors will open up for you.
Pay attention to appearances and think about yours (what you want it to be and how much work that will take to maintain) as it will have a big impact on your encounters and subsequent experience.
However I think there is a glint of gold somewhere in the dross of that article.
Those are all socialized by, and therefore downstream of, one's milieu, aka social network.
> temperament
Also, largely, socialized. Sad how you miss the forest for the trees, here.
Edit:
IQ, hilariously, is a supposed "biological" attribute, and yet has been shown to be more about one's acculturation into the proctors' cultural memes.
Irrelevant point because the topic is networks - you can be a node in multiple non-independent groups. Also highschool etc as in the article are also dependent (as presented in the article).
Can you post a source for this? As far as I'm aware, IQ is one of the best understood and well studied metrics in human behavior, and it definitely has a large genetic component.
Not the OP and I don't have any studies at hand, but what I think he/she meant to say was that IQ tests only validate the worldview of said "proctors", which in our case happen to be proctors belonging to a technological society. We don't know if said IQ tests would hold any value in a hunter-gatherer society or in a society based on different things compared to the things that are seen as "smart" by our said technological society (my instinct is that they won't, and as such I agree with OP that IQ tests only serve to validate a certain state of things).
Later edit: Come to think of it the request itself of "show me the studies" represents a point of view specific to a certain "world" (that technological society I mentioned), your request would be null in a society "built" on different epistemic stuff (for example in Roman times one might have asked "show me if this is true based on how that crow flies" [1] etc)
>and it definitely has a large genetic component
There's a number of studies showing that IQ is "heritable", but this is different from saying it's genetic. The video above (around the 39:00 mark) and https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-psychology/cla... both get into this point. Wearing earrings is highly "heritable" despite being an arbitrary social custom, and having 10 fingers is not "heritable". It's also important to avoid falling into the conclusion that many people take about IQ that it being heritable means that educational efforts to improve it are worthless:
>Think about the relative heights of men in a poor village in an underdeveloped country 100 years ago. The average height for these malnourished men might be 5 feet 2 inches. The heritability in observed heights within this particular society can be quite high; men of tall fathers are on the average considerably taller than men of short fathers. However, this does not mean that a program of improved sanitation and nutrition could not significantly raise the average height of this group in a few generations.
Citation needed.
This makes someone not aware of said systems a puppet doesn't it? To the point you think you have freedom, but your attempts could be doomed to failure.
We are still free to shape our networks yes, and it requires work ... So success is a function of how good you are at Psyop then /s
And the more realistic model of such networks are cliques, and switching or merging cliques is hard - were it easy we would not talk of charisma and makers. To join a clique you have to be compatible with its selection process in some way, and certain cliques are made of birthright.
Face it, we're all elitist. We have to be or we would be socially overloaded or worse, exploited.
Ultimately, because there are statistics involved, there will be social butterflies and successful climbers, but they will be rather rare and it's hard to discern chance, opportunity and genetic (including environmental) source of said success from each other. It's extremely hard to run such experiments due to age number of social feedbacks involved.
I do not trust the "simple math" involved, though certain coincidences might have enough weight to statistically dwarf others. A lot of the alleged laws like Zipf's is trivial restatement of correlations between diverse subgroups of a group. They're not constructive nor prescriptive.
Cliques tend to not obey commands of individuals who are not influential nor even if influential ones if the command goes against the existence or success of the clique, and an outsider is especially not influential. (The degree by which they do is called stability.)
People tend to be in many networks but rather few cliques. Network is much less relevant than the cliques. (E.g. being a banker vs personally a few bankers in a specific bank vs knowing and working with Congress budget committee.) The overarching network effects tend to be shared by big groups and likewise can prove to be big barriers or boons, but they're not something you can change on your own or even as a society most of the time. It's often that genetic reasons cause the relatively even probability of being in or out to shift due to feedback effects, and feedbacks are rather hard to change.
Most importantly, few people have the resources to explore properly.
There's no question of probability of high achiever group when genetic causes are not in place as that clique will reject you. (At least earlier in life.) Likewise if you're ugly, good luck getting into cool kids club. It can change somewhat, but more often than not it doesn't.
Society tends to put social success on pedestal, while such aspirations might not be achievable by most due to lack of any of the necessary components that are unknown.
Edit: It's not about "life", in any general sense. It's about human lives.
One word: middle class.
Ive been remote for a year and a half and I feel I’m not making lasting connections. It’s probably different for single folks but it’s hard to visit coworkers with a family.
Working 100% remote wears on the soul, which needs and feeds off of in person connectivity. Collaboration tools are no substitute for a meal together.
I hope to build a coworking space (community in general) where I’m at soon similar to that which Mr Money Mustache built in Longmont, CO.