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Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

People mostly don't know how to measure advice. You ask one person and they tell you "it's all about marketing", someone else will say that "technical excellence is more important than anything else". Even though a lot of advice is contradictory and very context-dependent, people don't notice this and lap it up.

The truth is that probably most successful people can't tell luck, serendipity and hard-work from wisdom. Times change, opportunities change etc. so how much is advice really worth?

The only good advice is an answer to a specific question with very clear boundaries: "How much is a good amount to spend on Facebook advertising?", "If you have a product aimed at the mass market and you can correlate success of click-throughs, spend as much as you want as long as it's less than what you make per-click".

Otherwise you get stuff like, "Facebook is great value for money" or "Facebook is a disaster" both useless pieces of advice.

I also suspect that those with the correct brain for business probably don't need very much advice because they will quickly work things out themselves.

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The "learn the secrets of how $SUCCESSFUL_PERSON did $SUCCESSFUL_THING!" is almost always garbage content. Despite that, it's a massive, massive "industry," that will never die.

Once you see the extent of the Matthew Effect [1], it's hard to unsee it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

The other problem is that there's no reason to assume $SUCCESSFUL_PERSON even knows what made them successful. I was once hanging out with a friend of a friend who was pretty successful in finance, and he said he could no more explain how he succeeded than I could explain how to ride a bike. These things are often tacit knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge), or 'unknown knowns'.

In that friend's view - and I think mine too - that's the reason why 'how I succeeded' books by people like Warren Buffett or Bill Ackman almost always turn out to be total dross. Not because they don't want to share their secrets (after all, their secrets would require so much capital to apply as to be impracticable for most) – just that they have no idea.

They do know it, at least on some level. For many of them, they could do it again if they had to. They simply aren't consciously aware. (Like Auden once said: "I knew it all the time, but I never realised it before!")

Yup. Another analogy is that you probably have a friend (or maybe you are that friend?) who happens to very good attracting (romantic) attention when you go out in public. Ask them what their secret is. They might have some basic, universal things like "dress nicely", "have good hygiene", "get in shape", etc, and those things might help you (10% of the way there), but in reality, they just happened to have been handed some lucky genetics that made them attractive / charismatic, so none of the advice they give you will work (in fact, some of it might back-fire like "smile at strangers").

On the other hand, if you can find the person that _isn't_ naturally good at the skill but was somehow able to get decent at it, even if they're not the best at it, they're more likely to have beneficial advice.

>if you can find the person that _isn't_ naturally good at the skill but was somehow able to get decent at it, even if they're not the best at it, they're more likely to have beneficial advice.

This reminded me of the advice to learn how to run a marathon, don't look at what most people in the race were doing to train, look at the person who's doing well despite looking like they shouldn't be there.

I.e., don't look at the 140 lbs guys at the front of the pack for advice, look to the 280 lb guy in the middle of the pack.

Not sure how sage that advice is, but it was an interestingly different way to frame the problem.

I really like that take on this topic, my personal story about it was at the university.

While studying older students would start talking, how they get a good grade/easy questions because they gave cookies/whatever or how some prof was super cool for them in some way.

Of course thing was they probably were in a group that prof liked, they had a good connection, maybe someone from the group had good jokes that made that prof laugh. Maybe they were showing up with whole group to his classes and no one made a fuss or other silly stuff at his lectures.

Then freshmen would pick up the story and would try to "trick their way" with the prof that would of course backfire as they totally missed the context of why for the older guys prof was happy with some cookies to ask them "easy" questions.

Just being in shape without any context - like how much in shape - might backfire when some girls think you are a buff so probably aggressive and get scared instead of interested. So just trying to talk up a girl on the street while buffed might scare her much more.

I would not focus on "natural skill" but I would focus on understanding that there is infinite amount of details to life and whole context is missing if someone gives high level advice.

Not every woman is attracted to a buffed up man, but far more are than are not. It's all about tilting the odds in your favor.

That makes a lot of sense. Indeed the most charismatic and attractive people I've known rarely seem to have any idea how it works. It comes across as false modesty but it's likely indeed a mystery.

People I've known who are financially successful (some massively so) tend to fall into two categories though. Some will say that this and this and that happened just so, and they wouldn't begin to know how someone else could replicate it. Others will say it's just a matter of perseverance and not making stupid mistakes and anyone can do it if they just bothered to, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

> Some will say that this and this and that happened just so, and they wouldn't begin to know how someone else could replicate it. Others will say it's just a matter of perseverance and not making stupid mistakes and anyone can do it if they just bothered to, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

May be they are both right, since surely there's both a repeatable process [0] and a non-repeatable process [1] to get rich?

[0] acquire skill that's highly paid (doctors?); acquire skill needed by rapidly-growing sectors (crypto? biotech?)

[1] right place at the right time

Oh phooey. I know people who are not handsome, and had little success with with the opposite gender. They studied the problem, read everything they could find about it, and applied it. They've become ladies' men.

Even unattractive people can do a lot to improve their looks with clothing, diet, and a fitness regimen.

But that's exactly my point. You want advice from that person (the not-so-good-looking who found ways), not from the naturally good-looking who didn't need to do anything else.

My point is that there are people who do know why they are successful, because they deliberately set out to find out why they failed and not make those mistakes again. I bet they outnumber the ones who don't by a wide margin.

Or assuming that it can be replicated even if it is known. I suspect this is more true of other types of elite performers rather than financially successful people, but imagine asking Mozart or LeBron James how to perform at their level. There is literally nothing you can do until we figure out how to transfer consciousness to a new body.

Yeah, totally agree. That factored into my answer too: "their secrets would require so much capital to apply as to be impracticable for most" was my explanation for why they probably wouldn't mind explaining it if they did know.

After all, it nets you lots of extra money in book sales, with no real concern that anyone will genuinely read your book and then supplant you.

LeBron James reportedly works harder than anyone else. That's certainly a factor in him being more successful than the others.

As a teenager I marveled at how I rode a bike. It was a complete mystery how turning was done. I thought about turning, and my bike turned. I finally figured it out, by carefully watching what I did when riding very slowly.

To turn left, I turned the handlebars ever so slightly to the right. This caused the bike to lean to the left, then I turned the handlebars left.

I know many successful people. I know why they are successful. None of them blame others for their problems. They take responsibility. When they fail, they take responsibility, get up, and try again (and do things differently) until it works.

Reminds me of this essay by Chesterton (The Fallacy of Success): http://web.archive.org/web/20200216164109/http://www.gkc.org...

It is indeed an old phenomenon: https://www.commonlit.org/texts/the-fallacy-of-success

I once have heard the phrase "the poor have every reason to work". Why not let them?

I know its overly simplistic but isn't the reason why the Matthew effect exists that we deny opportunities to poor people? If there are opportunities that make people not poor then shouldn't we allocate them to the poor first?

There's a joke a rabbi I admire likes to tell to illustrate how random "success" is.

He was watching the news and they interviewed the richest man in Canada. The interviewer asked, "How did you make your fortune?"

"Well, when I came to Canada, I had nothing but five cents. I used those five cents to buy an apple. I sold the apple for ten cents, and then bought two apples to sell. I sold those apples for twenty cents, and then I got a telegram that my uncle had died and left me three billion dollars."

> The truth is that probably most successful people can't tell luck, serendipity and hard-work from wisdom. Times change, opportunities change etc. so how much is advice really worth?

The ability to work hard is also always 100% luck.

Humans do not control their DNA or what environment shaped them to be able and have the desire to work hard.

Are there any credible studies demonstrating a strong link between genetics and motivation/drive/work-ethic? I don't doubt that DNA plays a part, but I'm hesitant to accept claims that it's 100% genetic.

DNA is just one puzzle piece that explains human behavior, together with many other factors.

Those factors are not yours to control. Even if you are able to influence some of them, the ability to do so is dependent on factors you do not control.

That's a rather fatalist view to take - I don't actually disagree with it but being unable to control your development doesn't free you from responsibility for it. We don't actually control anything at a basic level - we are just responding to different environmental effects with the learned behaviors we got from earlier environmental effects - in that way we are just perpetuating machines that will echo observations from earlier times. That isn't to say we can only parrot what we've seen - we can compile quite a complex response from all the experiences we've garnered... but we are nothing except some genetic starter (which we can probably mostly write off as just experiences we gained before birth as a genetic super-organism) and experiences.

That all said that still leaves us with our individuality, desire to act and responsibility. And it leaves us with as much control over our ability to act as any other control - you can accept that our actions are rather mechanical results of prior experiences but not reject the fact that they're still our actions.

Biology and especially neurobiology has made huge steps to understanding the brain and how human behavior comes to be. DNA (Genes are only a very small portion of our DNA, the interesting stuff happens in the other 95% of our DNA) interacts with the prenatal environment, the culture you grow up, the relationship with your parents, the levels of hormones in your blood, how warm you feel, how long ago your last meal was and many more factors to form human behavior.

> And it leaves us with as much control over our ability to act as any other control

No, there is no fundamental ability to control. We have some illusion of control. Don't mistake this for saying that humans can't change, we just have no control over how we change.

Judges that decide over parole won't attribute their decision on the last time they ate, even if it is the single most important factor to their decision.

It will be interesting to observe how society will react to this in the next 50 years when the science will become harder and harder to deny.

> Judges that decide over parole won't attribute their decision on the last time they ate, even if it is the single most important factor to their decision.

This finding doesn't replicate[0]. In the original study, there was a more mundane explanation: "Defendants without representation have their hearings scheduled at the end of sessions, before breaks."

You have much more confidence in the current research than I think is warranted. Genes are indeed a small portion of our DNA, but your statement that "the interesting stuff happens in the other 95%" is unbounded and poorly defined.

Personally, I think we have some control over things, and probably less control than most people perceive themselves as happening. But this research is in its infancy and having trouble with basic replication, so holding a strong opinion is a recipe for making poor decisions off it.

[0] https://www.annieduke.com/no-judges-dont-give-harsher-senten...

Thanks for correcting the judge study. It seems that cases with a higher chance of success are also scheduled earlier as the time it takes is less certain.

My understanding is that a portion of the remaining 95% are responsible for turning genes and whole chains of them on and off or something in between.

There is no place in the physical world where this control could come from.

The factors that influence are hugely complex and very hard to separate. Just because we do not understand how certain factors interact and influence our behavior doesn't mean we have control.

Agreed! The really fascinating part to me is how we define control over ourselves. In the end, however, I suspect it doesn't matter - it's kind of like a reverse Pascal's Wager: it's better to think we have control, because otherwise why even try?

Put a little differently, regardless of what the absolute truth resolves to - it's in my best interest to take the illusion of control.

I think the world would be a better place if we accepted that we do not really have controll.

Poverty and Crime are not moral failings.

Presumably we would make the lives of such people far better if we attribute their missfortune to just bad luck.

Redistributing wealth from people that got lucky is also simpler than if we'd attribute their success to their goodness.

That's an interesting perspective. Are you saying that humanity as a whole would be better, if we built societal structures that acknowledge how much less control we have than we perceive?

My comment was mostly about my own orientation towards the world. Maybe I do have control, maybe I don't - but I feel better (and hopefully have better outcomes) with the illusion of control/actual control, instead of letting go. OTOH, I also get a lot of stress relief from letting go and not trying to control things during meditation.

Living is hard.

> No, there is no fundamental ability to control. We have some illusion of control. Don't mistake this for saying that humans can't change, we just have no control over how we change.

Again - in a way this is something I entirely agree with but not in the important way. We are all automata in a society and society can attempt to fix broken components. Even if all your actions are just a result of past experiences - you yourself are no more meaningful and it's thus appropriate to assign you responsibility for your actions. If your experiences had shaped you differently then you'd probably make different ones - but you are who you are because of how you were shaped - and the you who is shaped in that manner is responsible for the actions you've taken. Hypothetical other yous that had slightly different experiences don't exist and are therefore irrelevant - but you're responsible for what you do.

> you yourself are no more meaningful and it's thus appropriate to assign you responsibility for your actions.

I don't follow this.

We don't blame people for actions when we think that they don't have control over these actions.

If someone has their first epileptic episode while driving a car and they kill someone because of it, we understand that they had no control and don't hold them responsible for the accident. Why should it be different if the causes are more complex and harder to trace back?

I think that that difference we draw - the line between having responsibility for your actions and not - is pretty arbitrary. I think it's good that it exists since when we're at our most vulnerable it exists to protect us from ourselves (and some people spend their entire lives in such a state if they have a debilitating developmental condition) - but it mostly exists to give all of us folks in society a good deal of comfort that if things ever go really off the rails we'll be given more of an allowance to recover - thus preventing some doom spiraling where feeling mentally unbalanced makes you paranoid about what you're going to mess up in your life which leads to more unbalancing.

And, on the otherside, we are a funny animal that takes comfort in the fact that we control our own destinies so, even if we don't - we'd like to empower ourselves as if we were in some manner. At a basic level our misunderstanding might be the fact that the ability to choose equates responsibility - without any responsibility (good and bad) your choices have no power - choosing to not do the shitty thing lets you avoid a penalty and so you can be happy with yourself. This equation of choice and responsibility is why punishment is so necessary (both big-j Justice like cops jail and the like - and little-j justice like being shunned, not getting a raise and failing to find an equal partnership in a relationship) so responsibility exists to add meaning to our lives. In fact denying it to people permanently (i.e. the developmentally disabled) does come with a strong cost to their sense of self - a lot of folks who live in support systems can struggle to define themselves, but, at the same time, neurodiversity means that different folks can find contentness in different ways.

It's all terribly complicated I think.

> Why should it be different if the causes are more complex and harder to trace back?

Because if you go that far you deny the whole concept of individuality and humanity even, up on which all of our moral and legal system were built. What are we but cogs in a machine?

It's not that there isn't any logic in it, it's just not an useful thing to contemplate about while you obviously still cling on to your sense of self so far as to having an argument with others.

The fact that we have no "free will" and that there's always a reason for our actions at the end of the day doesn't constitute useful advice for automata like us trying to do better in the world nonetheless.

Except maybe in how we think about justice perhaps. But that's not useful now.

> Except maybe in how we think about justice perhaps. But that's not useful now.

This is a big one.

Income and wealth inequality is another one.

The only reason why someone should have more than someone else is to incentivize to increase the total cake. But you probably can redistribute far more without reducing the total cake too much.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5068715/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#:~:text=Ear....

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://www.gwern...

So genetics plays a significant part in personality traits and iq. Having high conscientiousness is the trait that correlates with work ethic and drive.

It's definitely not 100% but genes play a big part. Twin studies are cool - even though there's usually something tragic involved with twins separated at birth, it gives you an excellent way of assessing genetic influences on a huge array of factors.

You can get there from the definition of phenotype.

Doesn't work if you think humans are special and above biological definitions though :)

Is this just a thrown away observation or meant to be some sort of insight?

Determinism isn't exactly useful as a personal guideline, or anything. So I don't know why some people keep digging that hole.

It is insightful on how to direct your energy. For many people, some activities should remain enthusiast hobbies because it wont take them anywhere.

it's not, it just tells you that everything is a waste of energy because none is of your control.

I'm sure there are ways to interpret this as: this arbitrary list of things is achievable, the rest is out of your reach. But then it's your job to find out what those things are, the determinism "insight" is useless.

Its useful for me, and surely this or any sample size of 1 undermine your point as otherwise your point is unfalsifiable.

I am familiar with a key difference here:

Some people find nihilism to be demotivating

Some people do not

For me, it helps me remember to try to recognize my privileges, support systems and luck. I respect people that play the cards they are dealt. Any child prodigy with a lot of resources could just as easily done nothing with them, so the nihilistic approach more so helps me not resent people that won a birth lottery and also appreciate what I do before I forget and start giving generic success advice.

I think I share this view with you, even though I am one of those who find it demotivating.

"Justice, What's the right thing to do" is one of my favourite books. I'm sure you know it.

Order placed, thanks!

It's an interesting point but I don't think it's valid.

1) We still don't really understand the effects of DNA on human behavior.

2) Environment is influential, but it's an influence not something that shapes you in stone forever and ever. Plus, there are all sorts of characters from all sorts of environments.

I'm sure there are some exceptions, but I'd say it mostly comes down to a personal decision to nurture willpower.

One of the best things about modern science is that we’re learning how different peoples minds work. It seems pretty clear that a lot of what has been attributed to lack of “willpower” is more accurately explained by differences in learning styles and access to social networks. Giving so much weight to this “willpower” thing seems misplaced in this light.

I'd like to read more about this. Can you recommend anything?

This article does a good job of explaining what recent studies have shown us:

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/wi....

Thanks. Very interesting read.

Still, it poses tons of questions.

As the article suggests at some point, it could very well be that people who have decided to work harder have found they enjoy the work. So it could really begin with a personal decision and not some lucky random factor as a previous comment suggested.

All the factors that lead up to that decision are outside of the control of an individual.

This doesn't mean that working hard shouldn't be rewarded, it creates value.

> All the factors that lead up to that decision are outside of the control of an individual.

That's a pretty bold claim.

So where does the control originate from?

If I had to guess, many sources.

Cultural influences, biological influences, prenatal environment, etc.

I will agree that it's probable our conscious part of the brain is less in control that we tend to believe. Still, the rest of the brain is still part of an individual.

I consider hard work to be a lazy substitute for figuring out what you want to do. Just fill your day with busy hard work and you don't have to think about what you want to do. If you knew what you wanted you wouldn't have to work so hard and even the hard work you have to do wouldn't feel very hard compared to what you want.

this.

I'm a dev/tech blogger, and I can say, following the right people is half of the success.

Not just because of the things they say, but because they can share your work.

Every time my work was shared by an influencer in the field, I got one or multiple job/project offers and over the years I made a good living out of it.

"being good at tech" only helps in the next step, when you need to proof that you can write better about a tech topic than the average marketeer/content creator.

Success is multifaceted. If there's a formula or equation for success, it's a combination of luck, talent, work ethic, and several other things. And not to mention every facet is fungible with every other facet.

If you're lucky enough, talent and work ethic matter less. If you're talented enough, maybe you don't need as much luck. Etc. But for the vast majority, there's going to be a combination.

I think that's what people don't truly get. You can work as hard as possible, but you do need a little luck to get that work noticed.

I've noticed that people are uncomfortable with nuance.

Some advice that actually works is:

Take responsibility for things that happen to you. Taking responsibility means you can do something about it if it isn't what you want.

Assigning responsibility to others means there's nothing you can do about your situation.

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