While I agree with the article, it is important to distinguish the macro from the micro point of view.
From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one.
On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater than that of finding there very talented ones, because moderately gifted people are much more numerous and, with the help of luck, have - globally - a statistical advantage to reach a great success, in spite of their lower individual a priori probability.
I think it's mostly just that intelligence is not terribly important for success. Tenacity, street smart, charisma, connections, passion are all more important than IQ.
Taleb wrote extensively on this. IQ only statistically relevant at the bottom end of the scale (barrier of entry) but meaningless for "success" otherwise.
Exactly. People on here seem to forget that almost every single rich person that can be named had hereditary money.
Jeff Bezos now has more money than can be made if an American family earned 63k for 2 million years. He also had parents that gave him a so-called "three hundred thousand dollar investment" (more money than most people see in a lifetime even while working hard for their family, dedicating most of their life to work and barely managing to enjoy life), while ignoring or dodging every single tax he can get away with.
It's weird how most people are fine with that, because they seem to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed billionaires, or because they aren't able to understand the sheer amount of money.
> He also had parents that gave him a so-called "three hundred thousand dollar investment" (more money than most people see in a lifetime even while working hard for their family, dedicating most of their life to work and barely managing to enjoy life)
Jeff Bezos also had a teen mother, a biological father that abandoned him, and a Cuban immigrant father that came to the US alone at 16 with nothing and no ability to speak English.
After passing through a refugee camp, just six years later Mike Bezos was raising Jeff as his own and had successfully gone to college.
If - having survived all of that well enough to build a decent life for himself - Mike could afford to invest into his son's business, then it's a remarkable accomplishment that should be cheered, rather than attacked.
I don't know much about Jeff Bezos so I try to reserve my judgement about him. But I am confused - how does one come from a poor family and then receive a $300k loan from said family?
Sure, I didn't mean to sound like I am stomping on the Dream. What I meant was, how specifically did this family that came from poverty accumulate $300k?
Quick research says that Mike Bezos worked as an engineer for Exxon after graduating college, and saving that money wisely can add up to $300k.
That does not change the calculus in my mind, because the situation goes beyond just money. How did the Sr. Bezos land such a well paying job with Exxon? An engineer position puts him in a privileged class. We have to look back further generations to see how his family was in such a position to raise a successful engineer?
Let alone that Sr. should have the knowledge and support he required to manage his money so well. I look at the Jr. Bezos having a privilege to have a father who he could turn to for advise, or who may have guided his development. Not saying he did, cuz I don't know the family, but it sounds like it was a real possibility. Who saves all that money, only to entrust it to his estranged son who he don't know or trust--as if he haven't had a hand in imparting the necessary temperament, sensibility, and wisdom for his son to be successful in some way in the economy? LOL.
How many people today are fortunate to have grown up in this time, in this is a period of unprecedented economic growth and social change, who have squandered their earnings, because they didn't have the support of knowledgeable and trustworthy parents or family?
Sounds to me like a chain of great decisions, luck or both.
I can give a counter example. I moved to an affluent town on the North Shore of Long Island, NY. I met a woman in my neighborhood who described to me her career at the local hospital, as a nurse, for over 20 years. She's African American, and landed this job in the late 70s early 80s by my calculation. She benefited by the social changes at the time that accepted African Americans as nurses in a largely white community. I also met her son, and he struggles with under-employment in his career. I had the impression she didn't understand why he was in that situation. She was proud of her success. I imagine it was difficult for her to reconcile her career in nursing, and her son's struggles. She had success, why not him? Unlucky, more like it.
Right now--that hospital is part of one of those large health care corporate systems. If she had this job today, its very possible she would not have seen her salary increase year after year, nor enjoyed a pension, nor stayed with the same organization for so long just being a nurse. There will always be new nurse graduates with more energy with just enough knowledge who are more manageable by corporate. That's the reality of hospitals and healthcare today, despite growth in this field.
Fortune goes to the right person who is in the right place at the right time. And if you frack up and fall out, someone else is ready to take your place, hey. Who in a great position can say they did it entirely alone? Meag Lottery winners. haha.
Fine with what, that his parents helped him start a business or that he's so enormously wealthy?
I hope people don't mind the former, but the latter is a bit problematic. When individuals can control that much wealth, democracy breaks down, they can control politics. It wouldn't hurt capitalist incentives at all if the richest of the rich were limited to earning say $100 m.
> I hope people don't mind [that his parents helped him start a business]
parents != parents
maybe i'm stating the obvious, but "if you want to get rich, come up with a good idea and work hard" is way easier when your parents can invest 300K in your startup and you have that safety net to fall back on. as in, that's a substantial factor into somebody's "self-madeness" that's often overlooked
(i know that's not what you said, but imo it's a common sentiment re: creating a successful business)
These two things are more important than most people are prepared to admit. Very few people ever do the "rags to riches" thing. The few that do are probably good looking. Some people are just born with the ability to be far more successful than others.
And I'm sure that's a great comfort to the vast number of people who are born with every bit as much potential for greatness as <insert personal favourite genius, celebrity, or billionaire here>, but never have the opportunity to realize it due to crushing poverty.
They may never be able to achieve even modest financial security and live in constant dread that they'll lose one of their 2-3 jobs and be on the street, but hey, they can define success as meaning a family that loves them, so that makes absolutely everything OK! /s
No idea why this would be downvoted, this is absolutely true - there is not just one version of what a successful life looks like. Deciding how you define success is a principle part of forming yourself as a person.
While this sounds great, it's a bit like when people say you can "choose what to believe". You cannot, in fact, choose what to believe. You either believe something or you don't. Similarly, with feeling successful, you either do feel that or you don't. It's not really under your control.
But what you can do is realise that things aren't always under your control so not to worry about them. Instead just concentrate on things you do have and things you can do. You have the power to be useful to society so do that. You have the power to do good things so do it. How you feel doesn't really matter.
In a sense, it's like skill in any domain. Being good at something isn't strongly correlated that strongly with being successful at it, at least if success is taken to mean fame and fortune.
In that sense, the most successful CEO isn't necessarily the smartest individual/CEO in the same way the most successful artist isn't necessarily the best one on a technical level.
Perhaps also there are more definitions of success? Some people find success in moderate income but good family happiness. Others find success in taking care of their community.
Intelligence is hugely important for any kind of outlier success. It's no coincidence that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Jim Simons are undeniably brilliant.
The claim that charisma, street smarts, or connections are more important than intelligence is absurd. There are so many fields in which those things just don't matter. If you're not charismatic don't pursue a career in a field that requires charisma. Simple.
It's easy to think that intelligence isn't a strong predictor for success because there are many intelligent people who don't accomplish much. But there are many more charismatic and well-connected people who don't accomplish much! But we don't culturally expect charismatic people to automatically become successful, like we do for smart kids. That's where the real difference is.
> If you're not charismatic don't pursue a career in a field that requires charisma. Simple.
I'm sorry, what field would that be?
I have yet to see a field where extraversion, persuasiveness, and regularly going out and having beers with the boss is less likely to get you promotion than being utterly brilliant, doing an amazing job at what you do, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
At least in America, charisma has a massively outsized influence on your success in anything but the very most menial of fields.
Sure they are smart, but you'll find smarter people at any theoretical physics department, if we're talking IQ. Also, I don't think we are talking about rich as in global top 100, what I at least meant more mundane financial success, like earning $1 m a year.
At that level, you definitely don't need to be a genius, I'd say if anything a genius is much less likely to make a million a year.
People who don't try to become rich probably won't. That much is clear. When people pursue theoretical physics they knowingly choose a career that cuts off almost all paths to wealth. The question "so, why aren't you rich?" doesn't apply to people who aren't even trying.
For success within theoretical physics you see, again, exactly how important raw intelligence is. Charisma and people skills are nice, but top researchers are disproportionately brilliant. This isn't nearly as true in those scientific fields where research results are unverifiable. We've seen this in the recent months with the embarrassing quality of epidemiological modeling.
Earning $1m a year doesn't require exceptionalism of any kind, but there is a huge gap between $1m a year and the global top 100. And intelligence becomes more dominant and other traits start to matter less as the stakes increase.
"For success within theoretical physics you see, again, exactly how important raw intelligence is. Charisma and people skills are nice, but top researchers are disproportionately brilliant. This isn't nearly as true in those scientific fields where research results are unverifiable. We've seen this in the recent months with the embarrassing quality of epidemiological modeling."
I actually believed physics has repeated run into the problem where large swaths of research is in fact unverifiable and exists purely on a theoretical basis until technology has caught up with the theory. Wasn't there a large discussion within the past 12 months or so about the many flaws of the field of physics, including the repeating of the same mistakes due to not wanting to stray too far from the existing literature? Doesn't this field also have large swaths of theories with plenty of mathematics behind both that are also mutually exclusive?
If I would think about a field with a long history of verified research, physics would most certainly not be up there. I'd say chemistry has physics beat there for example.
Additionally, epidemiological modeling has to deal with real data from sources whose trustworthiness are largely only somewhat known and somehow project this into the future. This is a garbage in, garbage out situation and I don't know if this should reflect on the field overall. It'd be like judging ML as a field based off of a problem case in which all training data has untrustworthy labels.
Wee need to teach thiss type of logical reasoning about statistical information at the high school level. It needs to be instinctive, and our default instincts are completely wrong for the task.
Statistical information has become extremely salient. Covid-19 is the current example. Most information is statistical. The same is true in many work contexts, where companies generate statistical knowledge that people need to interpret.
Meanwhile, this logic toolset is typically much weaker than our other ones. Average numerical ability is actually quite good, comparatively. The average person would perform ok on classic logical reasoning (Socrates is a man...). Throw in some statistical information... bogus conclusions (or no conclusion) are more common.
It's doable. Nothing too hard here. It's on par with simple algebra. We just haven't adjusted education to the needs of the times.
You are over simplifying the world. You are doing a mental exercise and reducing everything to a single variable: Talent.
So if someone success without talent, you explain it with another monovariable: luck.
By the way, for me being talented in something is just another version of luck. So we can say that you believe in just one variable: Luck is everything.
The world is way more sophisticated and complicated than a single variable.
Because of my work I have met people that are today highly successful. For example I have met motorcycle's world champions when they were children, that now earn tens of millions of dollars.
The most interesting thing is that for every world champion I know, I have met way way more incredible talented children that never became world champions and don't earn much or work in other areas.
They are human beings that took and take different decisions in their lives.
Some of them were very hard workers(and did not success after all the work), some of them were lazy(and succeeded anyway).
Some of them loved going to parties, others prefered to play guitar or read. Some were very social, others had few friends. Some were impulsive, some were analytical. Some were perfectionistic, others only care about doing things as fast as possible. Some had impulsive sex, other preferred stable relationships. Some accepted others helping them and listened, others refuse to learn or advice from others.
At the end of the day, there are hundreds of variables out there. There are usually some patterns that emerge on successful people on each specific discipline.
For example, in motosport you find that most successful people are highly competitive. They are obsessed with winning. I played ping pong with one of the kids and won. He could not stand it and trained and trained until he could win me(a year or so later). This kid is rich and famous now.
By the way, Success is different for different people. For me success could be not having a boss, working in front of the beach everyday without stress,and able to support my family.
For other people, being successful means earning millions of dollars, even when this means living for work inside a concrete hive watching numbers all day on a computer screen, and not having children until you can pay for a house that you never have time to visit.
Not necessarily in sports, but in other domains success may also often be the outcome of a stochastic process, because there are so many factors involved. This is often overlooked and successful people don't like to hear it, but the fact that they are among the successful whereas others with similar prerequisites aren't can often be attributed to pure chance.
There is a lot of survivor bias in the assessment of success.
I believe that successful people tend to have a high base level of intelligence, often high social intelligence, are often very persistent, and rich parents and good looks also help a lot. But it's equally important to happen to be at right place at the right time and meeting the right people.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are good examples in my opinion, had they been born ten years later they might have ended up in only moderately successful software business, or selling printers and go out of business by the early 90s, or creating a failed video game console. They started their businesses at exactly the right time, met the right people, and made good decisions in some early, very dynamic and emerging markets.
The op is not reducing everything to talent, or even implying that talent is especially important. If you are thinking about this statistically (the OP is), than these examples don't matter.
The implication is a distribution of outcomes, not definite outcomes.
The argument works regardless of the definition of success used.
> the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater than that of finding there very talented ones, because moderately gifted people are much more numerous
That is exactly what Bayes' theorem predicts.
Many other conclusions , erroneously, seem more intuitively right, thou. Statistics is hard to master as our brains biases are strong forces.
And that many smart people have better things to do with their time than making more money. I have everything I need and really want. I much rather play with my three year old son in the garden than being able to afford a new Tesla.
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
> This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
A lot of money simply isn't useful for anything interesting or valuable. Surviving is great, some comfort is nice, but after a certain order of magnitude, it's not so much people having money, it's money having people. While large scale projects are also important and those need money and other resources to be pooled in some form, but they don't require any involved person to be filthy rich.
And maybe that if you are smart (or think you are, based on previous success) you might be more relaxed about not optimizing for maximum monetary gain at every step of the way since you think you will always have plenty of good options down the road since your smarts is not a random one-off occurrence but something you can tap into repeatedly.
Personal anecdote: I used to be very anxious about making the absolutely "best" choice at every fork in my life and would agonize and analyze every decision meticulously. A few years into my career, I have had enough positive experiences and successes under my belt that I feel much more relaxed about the choices I make because I think I'll always have the ability to correct or pivot if I make one wrong move right now.
Because have lots of money gives you the economic power to survive adversity, pursue interests that are more fulfilling, do more good in the world, etc...
I think what TheOtherHobbes means is you can survive adversity and pursue fulfilling interests without rising to the level of 'rich' - unless your interest is something like having colleges name buildings after you!
Indeed, it would be a poor reflection on our society if you had to be in the top percentile for income to merely be economically secure.
Yeah the underlying causality between intelligence and wealth/success is always strange for me. Researchers, artists, philosophers... There are a lot of smart people actively choosing to pursue interests that are not valued by the market/don't bring shareholder value. Is this a cultural thing? It's a bit caricatural but where I live I find it's the opposite, "real" smart people should not pursue such lowly material and gross goals as money, being rich is kind of suspicious. But maybe there are nuances in the different kind of smartness that are talked that I miss.
TIL: Didn’t know I was stupid for having different goals than starting a family.
In non mockery voice: I think there is nothing wrong in being smart and perusing academic titles, wealth or recognition. Can’t I be happy travelling the world because I have so much passive income that I don’t care how much I spend? Can’t I be happy running megacorporation without a child?
If you calmly re-read the post you were replying to, you will see that they didn't question different goals than theirs, at all. They said "many smart people", not all, and they didn't say that those outside that subset are stupid.
If that makes you happy then fine, but it's wrong to assume that it's the ultimate goal for everyone to be mega rich. Honestly it's a very common mistake for people to be totally sure that everyone in the world desires to be rich and famous
>>that everyone in the world desires to be rich and famous
Keep the fame, I just want the freedom that money buys. I was never famous; but I have been asked for autographs and been stared at by total strangers with hero worship in their eyes--it is bizarre, and it made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I can't imagine anyone wanting that.
I think it was Naval Ravikant who said recently that the ideal is to be rich or financially independent enough to not worry too much, + anonymous. Rich AND famous is a never-ending nightmare and poor + famous is pretty much the worst outcome because you have such reduced freedom and privacy and don't know who your real friends are.
I don't care about being kicked out of the 9-zero club or whatever, I just want to lay about all day or if I want to take a week trip to Kenya or Moscow... and NO BOSS
That was one of the more butt hurt of all possible interpretations of what I said. And without knowing anything at all about you, and only judging from your comment, my guess is that hit a bit of a nerve. Why is that?
And I didn’t mean to say that playing with three year old kids in the garden is the only thing that is worth pursuing. It was just an example close to my hearth right now in my life in my circumstances and in my part of the world. Of course there are many other worthy pursuits. My point was only that trying to get a bigger pile of money than other people I don’t consider one of them.
Of course you can. True happiness is something that can't be controlled. So anyone who tells you you can't be happy doing a particular thing isn't right.
Granted there are some things we shouldn't be happy doing but I think that we all know what they are and it goes without saying.
Generally, happiness is a reward from doing what your genes want you to do. The greatest happiness therefore, should be found in the process of breeding and caring for offspring.
Social status (consumption, skills and achievements) helps you secure higher quality mates and offers greater security to your offspring. That's why gaining social status, feels worthwhile, but without kids it feels a bit empty.
Before kids, I knew the breeding was pretty good fun, but my genes gave me no indication that having kids would be fun too.
Perhaps thats just to ensure those genes are spread far and wide and to concentrate on social status before the all consuming process of caring for offspring begins.
> Generally, happiness is a reward from doing what your genes want you to do.
I disagree. Generally happiness comes from being happy/content/thankful for what you have (as opposed to "having a lot"). You can be happy having no children, no fortune, no fame, etc. Conversely all of these do not guarantee happiness - Robin Williams committed suicide despite having them all, I think it's fair to assume he was not happy.
Is this actually true, except from a normative perspective?
Onne would definitely expect the highly gifted to think/act differently socially as well as in several other areas, but is it actually correct to say they have less "developed skills", except possibly in the sense that they probably has had less reason to, and fever opportunities to develop these skills with their peers?
Every time I am wrong, I rejoice, because it means I learned something new, I just objectively became less dumb. Ego is the bane of learning. Smart people with ego usually aren’t as smart as you think, it’s usually more luck, performance, and privilege.
Besides, “Mo money, mo problems”. I have a couple thousand square feet of house, few thousand square feet of yard and garden. It’s way too much for just me, I have a dedicated VR room. Billionaire or bust mentality is a sickness.
From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one.
On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater than that of finding there very talented ones, because moderately gifted people are much more numerous and, with the help of luck, have - globally - a statistical advantage to reach a great success, in spite of their lower individual a priori probability.