Hacker News Reader

Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

I've long noticed this. I used to hang out with a group of Stanford graduates, two of them started extremely successful companies, one of which has a valuation > 5B. I think they were just simply better, and in many facets. Height over 6'2, BS/MS in CS from Stanford, played sports at a near professional level, while still being sociable. In my head I wanted to say it was their network that lead to the success, and it no doubt did, but when it came down to it, they were just able to build companies and see market opportunities that others cannot. And they weren't working around the clock.

I will add one more point. Most people have simply never come into contact with truly elite people. Work at any large company and probably zero actual elites work there below the highest levels. VP at Google is not elite. This is where the confusion comes from

View on HN

I think you might have to consider how "simply better" is actually circumstances beyond their control. Their height cannot happen without nutrition. Their sports proficiency cannot happen without early exposure, which often requires parental resources(money for equipment, time to commute to games...) . The ability to get an education is heavily dependent on health, parental investment, lack of childhood trauma, et al. (For example, the burden to get a BS/MS from Stanford increases if your parents commit a hate crime against you for being gay.)

If anything this is a group of comparatively highly successful people and discussing nuances between their success. But statistically much of that is opportunity and luck.

I agree, people only see the "success" and not what made it possible. That's why I find the "that person is simply better" argument nonsensical. Better at what? Rich guys what went to an expensive school , with other rich guys , then use their network of other rich guys to fund/use/advertise their product, which funny enough, most of the time get acquired into a bigger company that just dilutes the product into their ecosystem.

It's like pottery.

If 2 equal bits of clay are made by two different potters, one who has experience and years of artistry behind their hands and the other is thrown together by a teenager who has no interest in even finishing the job, even though the starting materials were exactly the same the end result couldn't be any more different.

One becomes a glazed vase with intricate artwork that would stand in any museum, and the other becomes an unglazed ashtray for a parent that doesn't even smoke, destined to be thrown away or smashed in a fit of rage.

These people are definitely a cut above, but only because their families and social circles started with good clay and spent decades perfecting the vase.

Sure, there are all sorts of life circumstances that could stop them. Luck is involved. But the degree of raw talent was shockingly high.

The point being made here is that "raw talent" is frequently the removal of barriers via socioeconomic factors. The best predictor of whether a child will graduate college is whether their parents also graduated college.

Most "naturally talented" people are "simply" people allowed to reach full human potential due to circumstances of birth, where "less talented" people frequently could have reached similar potential, but for:

- lower socioeconomic status

- less- or un-educated parents who don't know what opportunities to put their children into for maximum growth

- parents who themselves experienced significant trauma as children and didn't have the opportunity to process it due to lack of money or access to mental healthcare, and then subsequently inflict similar trauma on their own children

The lower socioeconomic status one in particular contains a host of other potential potential-limiters:

- less money for healthy food (or enough food at all) means less growth potential and worse overall health for the rest of your life

- if your parents don't have money for the equipment, you likely won't be allowed to participate in sports (happened to my wife) which means your brain will miss critical early wiring opportunities with the sport-specific mechanical tasks, which will result in lower potential skill ceiling later in life

- no money for travel means less exposure to world cultures, and unless living a in large city less exposure to foreign languages, and exposure to foreign languages as an infant is critical for later foreign language success due to pruning of connections for unused phonemes during early development.

There are many, many more things that go into the development of "raw talent" I haven't even touched on beyond "just" parent socioeconomic status, like poor people being more likely to have to live near major roadways and its influence on the rate of asthma in children.

The takeaway here is that very often people with "raw talent" weren't born that way, they were simply allowed to grow.

This is all victimhood garbage

If the person you responded to founded and runs a $10B company with a net worth of $3B, would it still be victimhood garbage? That’s even more successful than the Stanford example!

You have provided no proof or explanation of any of your statements. The only thing you've done is gushed over the abilities (and height !!) of some anonymous people. Great you have a crush that's very nice but it doesn't really replace actual arguments or analysis.

I'm not pointing out they may not be talented, I'm pointing out that you are making a fundamental misattribution error by assuming that talent has a direct and causal factor to success and therefore observing success is equivalent to observing talent. Success is at best a weak indicator for talent having been fostered, which is a very different and vitally important distinction. The reason why this is important is because we do not live in a society with equal resource distribution.

Increasingly I'm convinced that the signifiers only demonstrate meaning in a shorter-term sense. They aren't nothing, but someone in their 20's is mostly whatever they've been groomed for. And good grooming can definitely "set you up for life", except that as a survival strategy it relies on staying in your lane and playing to win precisely the kinds of social games you were taught you should be playing.

Nothing's wrong with winning like that - we seem to gravitate towards the behavior when there is social competition - but it just isn't the same as surviving. Someone can be brilliant, athletic, held in high esteem, and die young in a self-inflicted car crash. Personal survival is the ultimate filter but only manifests over the course of decades; someone at 20 "has potential" simply because they haven't been cut down yet. And each time a generational cohort narrows itself down a little, some of the people left over become winners by default, and consequently have more room to define what winning looks like based on their own experiences as survivors, which has upsides(raw experience) and also downsides(survivorship bias). I think that's a major differentiator in the young elite's success from that of older people with more modest backgrounds; the older cohort survived until opportunity appeared, the younger ones had a maximum of opportunities dangled near them from the beginning.

There's a definite limit to how much opportunity can go around at any given moment, and much of it is because of how society currently coordinates itself, not an intrinsic limit on our resources. But in terms of "sufficiently smart and motivated given the chance", it's mostly about that near-term readiness to step in and play a highly specific role that unlocks the access to resources, not their overall level of development as a human; being the best and being good enough are not that far apart. There are tons of people that sideline themselves from ambition because they'd just rather not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com