Best predictor of professional success isn’t cognitive performance | Hacker News Reader

Best predictor of professional success isn’t cognitive performance

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43 pointsrbanffy19 comments

"it’s whether your parents have money"

There is one sentence about this in the article, stated without support, possibly as a joke. The rest of the article is about replication failure in social science studies.

It's a quotation from a researcher who's being interviewed for a popular news article. Be reasonable. What do you expect?

It's in the title, and is the most important part of the quote, which had to be used for brevity, but should have kept that instead.

> “We’re not talking about mental health,” Sanabria clarifies. “That’s a different subject.”

This quote was the explanation from the article for why they dismissed physical exercise as a valid way of improving one's cognitive performance. Because it only directly improves mental health and not your cognitive performance.

That is a rather strange take. Sure, yeah, if we remove the one thing (mental health) that arguably nets the most improvement to your own life that affects every single area of it, including how others perceive you, then yeah, sure, we can dismiss exercise. Not sure why one would want to do that though, since their "that's a different subject" take doesn't sound that convincing, unless they want to argue that being mentally healthy doesn't contribute to cognitive performance (which imo would contribute to being more successful in a professional environment).

Title shouldn't have been changed to be so clickbaity.

Real title is: "Daniel Sanabria, psychologist: ‘The best predictor of professional success isn’t cognitive performance, it’s whether your parents have money’"

HN doesn't allow titles that long. How would you have reduced that to 80 characters?

“Best predictor of professional success is family wealth.”

https://www.ctpublic.org/education/2019-05-15/georgetown-stu...

https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/schooled2lose/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16334883

The original title is also incredibly clickbaity and has little to do with the actual article.

It's not just having money, it's keeping it. Plenty if stories if lottery winners being back where they started soon enough. Plenty of poor athletes and musicians too who once had it.

It takes intelligence and discipline to build wealth and if your parents have it they may pass that on to you. Sometimes that doesn't make you wealthy but they are still good things to inherit from your parents.

> It's not just having money, it's keeping it.

It’s easier to keep it if everyone around you has it too

> Plenty of poor athletes and musicians too who once had it.

Again, easier to lose it if those around you don’t have it. Then you help out, buy mom a house, pay for medical care. Pay for nephews school, cousin’s rehab, brother needs a loan, etc.

But look at some of the Asian immigrant communities who came to the USA dirt poor and worked the lowest tier jobs. Asians as a class now out-earn whites[0].

That they've managed this in the face of rampant anti-Asian discrimination in the US is all the more to their credit.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/233324/median-household-...

Sure, look at the Hmong in the US. Poor and rural before they came to the US, and still, on average, pretty poor and doing pretty badly in the US.

Meanwhile, I have a lot of Chinese, Hongkongese, and Korean coworkers whose families are well-off enough that they don't need to work for a living, have relatives who don't work for a living, etc.

So yes, lots of first-generation immigrants in US come from serious money overseas, and the ones who don't have worse outcomes on average.

No surprise. We over-worship smartness and education. Doing, trying, and attitude are probably much more important beyond basic intelligence.

Absolutely.

Agree completely. You only have to spend a little time on Hacker News to see how over-rated intelligence can be.

There are plenty of people who can make articulate, complex arguments on a topic but are just not connected to reality. Often it can just mean a greater capacity for self-delusion.

The world is full of "clever fools".

Or successful patents often have successful kids?

Patently true

TLDR exercise and such don’t actually boost cognitive ability, and the full title ends with “it’s whether your parents have money”

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