Secrets of The Great Families | Hacker News Reader

Secrets of The Great Families

astralcodexten.substack.com

58 pointsjger1526 comments

I think scott is kinda stretching the argument thin. They are accomplished in the sense of being notable enough to have Wikipedia pages about them, but being an astronomer, a historian, or being a chair of some royal society is a far cry from codifying the theory of evolution. It's like saying someone is an engineer is a major accomplishment when his dad founded a fortune 100 tech company. Yes, an engineer is a good profession, but far from being the CEO of google or something like that. The son being an engineer is noteworthy only because his dad is CEO/founder of a huge company.

Agreed, I don't think his premise of "families keep producing such talent, generation after generation" is solid.

On a side note, I was also surprised the Bernoulli Family wasn't mentioned.

The "hero license" concept he concludes with seems pretty close to "90% of success is just showing up," and stories about how much a good attitude has an effect on performance. However, family, education and class can all create the hero license condition. While I don't think he linked it, there is some anecdotal data (and now that I looked it up, research! https://jumpmath.org/us/research/) from teaching kids math using an analogous hero license can have outsize results.

I'd even take it a step further and suggest the hero license comes from a teacher who can act as a real coach invested in your success as opposed to someone just transmitting received knowledge. The greatness of the family members in the article suggests the means to transmit that license were present in each case.

"90% of success is just showing up,"

You have to show up and be competent. Showing up is necessary but insufficienct.

One viewpoint is that for each opportunity, 90% of competent candidates don't show up. Showing up gets you ahead of 90% of competitors.

It’s not as strong as that. You have to show up and eventually be competent.

I'll defend the more boringly obvious answer of "privilege".

My points:

Although some women get mentioned here, they are outnumbered. Why didn't one of their sisters become a general in the British or Indian army? Was that genetic, obviously not since they wouldn't even have got the chance to find out. Instead, marrying another famous person is listed as one of their achievements. The ones that do make the list have tales of the many obstacles they overcame.

More widely, I read a history of science and it was remarkable how often "rich, idle guy devotes all his time to the newly emerging science and buys all the new toys" re-occurs as a story. Does that mean they were dumb, no, but they clearly were in the right time and place with the right situation compared with other human beings on the planet at the time.

Similarly Bill Gates, was he the smartest natural computer guy in the world at that time, or from the big set of people with the genes for IQ was he the one that was a white, American, male who went to a private school with early access to a computer and who had a mom that has a fellow board member that was on the board of IBM. Any one of which would have been a handicap to his dramatic success if it hadn't been true.

Obviously the latter.

A further recent trend, pop stars all having a background of family wealth and connections. Genetics? No.

Basically, meritocracy is a story we tell ourselves, because reality is harsh. And most of the genetic nonsense derives straight from that.

> You just get one chance, she said. You live for maybe seventy years, and if you’re lucky you get one chance.

> Think of all the natural skiers who are born in deserts. Think of all the genius blacksmiths who were born hundreds of years before anyone invented the horse. All the skills that are never used. All the wasted chances. -- Pratchett

> ...as Wired puts it, Elite Soccer Players Are Smarter Than You Are - “and the sharpest of them score more often than dimmer teammates.” Since Harald Bohr was a soccer player, this sort of checks out.

The extreme intelligence of elite sports players never ceases to impress me. While many of them got where they are due to pure physical attributes, the top ones in any sport seem to genius level IQs comparable to chess grandmaster. E.g, Lebron James demonstrating his extreme memory: https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2020/2/21/21147213/lebron-james...

it should not be that surprising. being good at a team sport means you have to process the action of many people at once

Every professional player SHOULD be able to recite their games. As a racer, I'm able to recite start and first corner shuffles of the whole pack and recall all notable happenstances of not only my performance, but also competitors around me. Without deep analysis of these information, I could not have made any intelligent decision and it just so happens, that thoughts tend to stay with us.

On the other side, I can't for the love of the sport, remember who is who and what happened in an event I had watched and wasn't part of.

I wouldn't necessarily use the phrase "extreme memory". When you have a lot of experience in a sport, you start to recognize (and create new) patterns which make recall easier. Otherwise known as strategies and tactics. Lebron is recounting a structured offense versus a structured defense. A lot of the "memorization" occurs weeks or months before the play itself.

> And also, none of these families except the Tagores were fantastically rich; there are thousands or millions of families richer than they are who don’t have any of their accomplishments.

This is reversing cause and effect. Extra wealth doesn't make you smarter. However, lack of wealth can sure cause "dumb".

Wealth is the prerequisite to being smart. It gets you to the starting line.

You didn't get a university degree in the late 1800's/early 1900's without quite a lot of money which gave you the leisure to not be a laborer as a child. There was a reason why there were so many immigrants coming to America in that timeframe--Europe SUCKED SHIT if you weren't wealthy. Working in a dangerous steel mill in America was an improvement over Europe that people were willing to die for--cogitate on that.

And this is before we start considering things like "pedagogy and teaching did not have an even geographic distribution". We take for granted that if you want to become a baseball pitcher or a violinist, you can be educated in those quite a long way before you hit a ceiling that requires you to change your geographic setting. That was definitely not the case historically.

Something to consider is that, as a survival mechanism, a child copy his parents behaviours. It mimicries his environment in order to survive. We all do a lot similar than our parents and familly. Those habits are also very hard to unlearn. This is well documented specifically in the psychology field.

That is known as privilege.

It can be. Some people grow up in abusive households and replicate that behavior.

I get your point though, someone who grows up exposed to the inner-workings of business has a head start compared to someone without such exposure.

A head start in running a business. Maybe they would rather be a musician and are disadvantaged compared to kids from musician families.

True, or maybe not so much because coming from a wealthy family they could feel comfortable pursuing a career in the arts knowing they have a trust-fund to fall back on.

We could come up with a million scenarios.

They could also never amount to anything because their wealth made them lazy and complacent.

This could go on forever, of course people have privileges that they don’t take advantage of. Doesn’t change the fact that they posses it. What’s your point?

I see this point made a lot, and people seem to think they are disagreeing when they say it but the fact that some people have abusive parents is the exact same point the poster made.

Kid has rich parents -> has privilege compared with those that have poor parents

Kid has non-abusive parents -> has privilege compared with kids with abusive parents

Has parent with some skill or trait to model -> privileged compared with kids that don't who in turn are privileged compared with kids who model bad behaviour from their parents.

Kid has parents -> privileged compared to those without parents.

There lots of things that make you who you are that you don't immediately consider to be contributing to your relative success in life, that's what the concept of privilege tried to remind people of.

I wasn’t disagreeing in case that wasn’t clear, I was attempting to point out that it’s complicated and possibly why people can’t always see it. I did a poor job of that though.

Privilege is too broad and doesn't really apply to the parent comment. Bad habits are also passed on and/or learned by children. There are advantageous behaviors that can be learned and will increase the chances for success.

A good example of why the concept of privilege is so useless.

Privilege is a good thing.

We should try to give everyone privilege.

With IQ being ~80% hereditary, this isn’t too surprising.

EDIT: Had somehow missed half the article, which goes into detail on this. I’d still guess IQ is a big part of it though.

The genetic impact of a talented ancestor diminishes rapidly after generations (say multiply 80% several times it quickly turns small) if no other factors comes into play.

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