19 ms·

How Not to Explain Success

186 points by rafaelc 10y ago

aaronharnly 10y ago
(I'm asking in all earnestness) Are online surveys now an accepted part of the social science repertoire? How do they compare to previous methods such as phone surveys, which I imagine had more uniform distribution to the population but had their own participation bias problems?
- eli 10y ago
  I'm not a social scientist, but online polls have been widely used and accepted for years. All forms of polling have bias and these can be adjusted for. Internet-only polls fared well in 538's analysis of 2012 election polling: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/?_r=0 http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-po...
  - throwawayrol 10y ago
    Internet polls are significantly different from Amazon turk; see my sibling post. Internet polling isn't nearly as problematic, especially for a study like this. crowd-sourcing platforms need their own bias adjustments and I'm not even convinced that it's possible to adjust for the bias caused by using these platforms, unless you really are interested in putting a lower bound on human ability. Not a statement about the quality of people on Turk, just the amount of effort they often (rightfully!) put into below-developed-world-minimum-wage work...
- detaro 10y ago
  Not an answer, but additional info: I was curious how they found participants and looked it up in the paper: they posted their surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk and paid participants 75 cents to complete it.
  - pbreit 10y ago
    So all the survey subject members were Mechanical Turk users? That sounds like a terrible representation.
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      Sadly it's still a thousand times better than the book it's disputing, which has little or no empirical backing.
      - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
        Bad statistics aren't better than no statistics.
        LionessLover 10y ago
        Looking at your comment I find this funny. All you make is an assertion.
        forgotpwtomain 10y ago
        If you take a group that's not representative of the population and you know nothing about the underlying distribution - that's not giving you better information it's just letting you be mislead into making statements which are erroneous.
- throwawayrol 10y ago
  Yes. Even and especially surveys where the participants are not only compensated for their time, but are also selected from a pool of people who are specifically seeking out such piece-male work (a la Amazon Turk). There's a big difference b/w posting flyers/ads in target-rich environments and providing a low friction way for people to get involved in the study. But if you do something on Amazon Turk you're basically guaranteeing a very particular type of person, because random guy with a high paying job probably isn't going to have a turk account and won't have the patience to create one just for your survey. In some cases you can make a good case that this doesn't totally invalidate any sort of generality in the results, but for the most part I throw out papers -- on face -- that proceed in this ways without extended, evidence-based discussion of why the hell I can expect any sort of conclusion except "our result generalizes to a population of people who really need an extra dollar or two (literally) and are looking for pretty much any way to get it."
- btn 10y ago
  "Social science" isn't a singular amorphous blob, and these methods aren't uniformly accepted. Online surveys are certainly becoming more popular as they are significantly cheaper to conduct than the alternatives, and yield publishable results that garner media attention. There are peer reviewers that will be sympathetic to these issues, regardless of the method's robustness. However, there are others that would say this reeks of dredging (p-hacking) in a very murky pool of data. Their "scepticism" rarely makes the New York Times (or a bestselling book), though.
- LionessLover 10y ago
  I think the (IMHO valid) point here is that that survey is a whole of a lot better than the anecdotes in the book that prompted them to do the research. It isn't about providing definitive evidence - but about providing better one.
bake 10y ago
I wish someone would similarly test Malcolm Gladwell's body of work. It's encouraging to see the scientific method re-injected into the popular press.
- verganileonardo 10y ago
  Yes, please! He is famous for creating theories based on one or two very specific stories. Even when he is based on real academic studies, they are usually featuref by small and biased samples (e.g., 40 harvard students). Would love to see the same for Blue Ocean Strategy!
- projektir 10y ago
  The Sports Gene book spends some time on it, on the 10,000 rule in particular.
- riazrizvi 10y ago
  Gladwell's works Blink and Outliers both paraphrase important scientific works, in the simplified style the references are largely glossed over. In place of Blink, read Antonio Damasio's Descartes Error, the seminal book on emotional reasoning. Instead of Outliers read Anders Ericsson's The Road To Excellence. Both of these more formal books cite sources meticulously.
- barry-cotter 10y ago
  Malcolm Gladwell does not have a body of work. He is scientifically ignorant to such an extent that he had articles with "igon values". I'm unfamiliar with the literature, real scientific literature Blink was based on. 10,000 Hours or whatever it's actually called is based on the study of expertise in psychology. The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance covers it in depth. K. Anders Ericsson founded the field.
- akhilcacharya 10y ago
  I really wish his take on college admissions wasn't shared around this time every year...
- Fede_V 10y ago
the_cat_kittles 10y ago
i think "success" is a stupid and superficial term, but most damning is that its vague as hell. its one of those things that everyone defines in a way most beneficial to themselves. seems like a bad thing to base a study on.
dpweb 10y ago
Only if you measure success in money. Saying personal insecurity and good impulse control are traits of successful people, success defined by money, is like saying overeating is a trait of overweight people. Of course someone insecure/unsatisfied who does not overindulge themselves is likely to end up with more money. But if you were to measure success in, piece of mind, happiness, positivity, maybe the insecurity makes that more unlikely. We tend to only define success in having money however since it's so critical to have more stuff. If you're talking achievements or non monetary rewards, I'd expect insecurity. It fuels the person. Otherwise they would just live a common life it would be enough for them.
verganileonardo 10y ago
LPT: always study failures before defining what make people succeed!
kartan 10y ago
"In this case, our studies affirmed that a person’s intelligence and socioeconomic background were the most powerful factors in explaining his or her success" If success is defined from an economic point of view in absolutes it makes sense. As the best predictor of your wealth is your parents wealth. "Intelligence" is harder to add to the equation as it is more difficult to measure than parents wealth and there are known bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) that makes people think that they are smarter/more competent that they really are. So it is even possible that a superiority complex or insecurity are relevant even when the participants in the survey don't think so. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Package https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Package) This results show the consequence of a diminishing socio-economic mobility. The same traits and skills in a high mobility society are going to have a big weight in "success" achievement. In an stagnated society where the system is rigged to make poor stay poor and rich stay rich "success" becomes an inherited trait making "socioeconomic background" the only and best predictor.
- PeterWhittaker 10y ago
  Why is this down voted? It is quite insightful. Is HN that much of an echo chamber for the self-made-person myth? A shame that our collective intelligence would harbour this blind spot.
  - themartorana 10y ago
    I have no idea. I don't fit the mold - doing well, grew up poorer than many, so my success wasn't dictated by my parents, but that doesn't mean GP's post is wrong at all. I upvoted it. Edit: while I'm sure I'm smart (who isn't sure the are?), luck has a lot to do with any success I've had.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      > luck has a lot to do with any success I've had. Does anyone expect that by sitting around doing nothing they'll get lucky and become successful? Do one's choices mean nothing?
dwmtm 10y ago
Please correct me: The Triple Package says successful individuals are in some sense drawn from populations that inculcate certain traits. The article discusses success as an individual trait, and not a group trait. Narrow reading, misreading...?
99_00 10y ago
I don't even understand the internal logic of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother". The reasoning seems to go like this: Asians-Americans make more money. Chinese-Americans are Asian-Americans. Raise your kids the way Chinese parents do. If you look at the stats, Chinese-Americans don't do especially well. You'd be better off raising your child in the "Filipino style" if such a thing exists. Indian American : $127,591[2] Taiwanese American : $85,566[2] Filipino American : $82,389[2] Australian American : $76,095[3] Latvian American : $76,040[3] British American : $75,788[3] European American : $75,341[3] Russian American : $75,305[3] Lithuanian American : $73,678[3] Austrian American : $72,284[3] Scandinavian American : $72,075[3] Serbian American : $71,394[3] Croatian American : $71,047[3] Japanese American : $70,261[2] Swiss American : $69,941[3] Slovene American : $69,842[3] Bulgarian American : $69,758[3] Romanian American : $69,598[3] Chinese American: $69,586[2] (including Taiwanese American) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
- dmoy 10y ago
  The tiger mother thing isn't coming from the stereotype of what it's like to be a descendent of a southern Chinese immigrating in the 19th century. It's coming from the current wave of Chinese, which is not accurately captured from that wiki article. There's a lot of not super wealthy older Chinese families in the US, who came over a long time ago. Contrast that with Taiwanese American families, they're coming more from the 60s & 70s of the 20th century (not all, but more). There's also like an order of magnitude or two more (non-Taiwanese) Chinese American than there are Taiwanese American. It would be more like if you cherry picked out the current class of very rich Chinese who send their kids to Uni in the US and buy up investment visas, and then were surprised when their descendants were richer.
  - 99_00 10y ago
    In 1960s there were 237,292 Chinese-Americans. In 2010 there are 3,794,673. I suspect that increase is due to new wave immigration rather than natural population growth. So I don't think the poorer old time families are a factor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_Americans#Statistics_of_the_Chinese_population_in_the_United_States_.281840.E2.80.932010.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_Americans#S... >It would be more like if you cherry picked out the current class of very rich Chinese who send their kids to Uni in the US and buy up investment visas, and then were surprised when their descendants were richer. Actually, I think if we included the super rich mainland Chinese who buy their way in we'd see even lower declared incomes. Study reveals awfulness of Canadian investor immigration [most of whom are Chinese]; income tax averages C$1,400 per millionaire http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1929324/study-reveals-awfulness-canadian-investor-immigration-income-tax http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1929324/study-reve...
c3534l 10y ago
This confirms all my anecdotal evidence about how lawyers think. They're professors and it never even occurred to them that their ideas could be verified, they thought their arguments were enough. Now if only someone would run a study confirming or denying that's how lawyers reason about the world.
forgotpwtomain 10y ago
> We conducted two online surveys of a total of 1,258 adults in the United States. Given the self-selection bias that's involved, that doesn't sound very reassuring, granted the paper probably has a better discussion of methodology. Still as it stands it's pretty much impossible to guess the significance of the result from the news article.
marcus_holmes 10y ago
Studying the traits that successful people have is pointless without also studying the traits of unsuccessful people. If you identify that 56% of successful people have Trait X you have no idea if Trait X is associated with success unless you also discover how many unsuccessful people have Trait X. Trait X can be "belonging to a given subculture". Taking the entire population and subtracting the successful people does not leave you with the unsuccessful people. Unless you are prepared to define someone who is in the process of attempting something as unsuccessful. That's apart from the pointlessness of defining "success" for a large population of individuals (happiness? wealth? freedom? connectedness?).
kan1shka9 10y ago
partycoder 10y ago
If you have a model that predicts success, then you can build a process that targets those metrics and reliably get success. We are not there yet. Most of the time what I see is the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. "The name comes from a joke about a Texan who fires some gunshots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the tightest cluster of hits and claims to be a sharpshooter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
- erikb 10y ago
  Also the basic goal is not achievable. The moment you find method X creates success everybody is doing method X and "success" gets redefined.
smm2000 10y ago
Average IQ in Ghana is 70 and Einstein IQ is assumed to be ~160 so he was (is?) 6 standard deviation away from average person in Ghana now. Using Excel it's easy to compute that we can expect to find 0.02 Einsteins in Ghana (out of 25M population) and ~800 people with IQ > 130 (IQ 130 is a standard cutoff for gifted programs in US). So the answer is statistically considering population growth in Africa no person born in Ghana since Earth was formed had IQ of Einstein but there are still some smart kids there.
- kilburn 10y ago
  Your reasoning is mathematically correct, but your assumptions man... just make me sad. Quoting wikipedia: > "The current scoring method for all IQ tests is the "deviation IQ". In this method, an IQ score of 100 means that the test-taker's performance on the test is at the median level of performance in the sample of test-takers of about the same age used to norm the test." Now, you are comparing average IQ over a large population size (mean IQ in Ghana normalized over mean IQ in the entire world) against average IQ over an even larger population size (mean IQ over the "entire world"). You get 70 vs 100. How can that difference be explained? Well, there are basically two ways: 1) People in Ghana is extremely dumber because of biological reasons. They are just very inferior in this regard. 2) IQ tests are rigged by education. Better education leads to better IQ scores, and Ghana's average education level is just worse than the world's average education level. You chose to believe hyphotesis 1 is true. That is the part that makes me sad.
  - Malician 10y ago
    Lots of possible environmental causes 1. lack of very early childhood education/stimulation / abstract thought messing with brain development 2. epigenetic influence from parents' hard lifestyle, if you believe it is effectually hereditary in that manner (I don't think it's likely) (this is environmental in the sense it would only persist for a limited # generations) 3. parasite load 4. trauma from infectious diseases 5. severe nutritional deficiency (iodine, creatine, antioxidants, nutrients, whatever else we don't know about you can miss out on) I can't prove what I think you're implying by #1 isn't the case, but I'm quite sure that 1 and 3-5 from my list do apply.
kriro 10y ago
My totally unscientific approach would be to build some sort of "curiosity index" and the higher that is for a child up to a certain age the more likely they are to be successful. For extra credit calculate a delta to see if the curiosity stays at the same level (or increases/decreases) with age.
erikb 10y ago
A high degree of impulse control is not linked to success? I thought that was one of the oldest and most well proved success requirements, also sometimes called "delaying reward". Also if you say "my group succeeded because we believe in our group" then you need to not analyse one generation but several generations together, because that statement is not about a single generation. E.g. the question is not why is the Jew John Doe successful, but why are Jews on average more successful now despite having faced a lot of trouble in the past? While this article seems logical in itself, to me it actually gave the idea that the book may very well have a point, exactly because of common sense.
imakesoft 10y ago
I could write a book "How NOT to be successful" and maybe in some reverse way people could benefit what NOT to do. :)
- simonswords82 10y ago
  That's kind of what Scott Adams (the Dilbert cartoonist) did in his book How to fail at almost anything and still win big.
sbardle 10y ago
I used to know a "Success". He owns a profitable company. He has a beautiful wife. He lives in a gated mansion and drives expensive cars. But he was also a cruel person, who liked to hang out with other cruel people. I decided if that's what being a success in life means, I'd rather be a failure.
vslira 10y ago
Has anyone here played The Binding of Isaac? Awesome game. Hard as hell, though. Every time you start the game all the levels are randomly generated. Each level has a treasure room which contains an item that may give a boost to your status or give you a special ability. Some items make the playthrough a lot easier, some can make it even harder. The items you get are basically down to luck. The game is still hard anyway. There's no item that guarantees you'll win and, fortunately, there are strategies that help you make the most out of what you got. If you're good enough at the game the items may not even matter, you're just that good. Unfortunately we don't have infinite tries at life like we do in a video game to learn how to get better. You have to learn while you play the only run you've got. That's how I see the whole issue of luck vs. merit.
- Malician 10y ago
  If you believe in a deterministic world and no cartesian duality, there's no "spirit/soul outside the game" to do better or worse. Your willpower and moral goodness and empathy and adaptability are all the result of genetics and environment in some form or another. It's all stats and items and situations, and the choices you make come from what you were born with and happened to you.
studentrob 10y ago
> We found scant evidence for Professors Chua and Rubenfeld’s theory. Cool to see some popular pseudo-science debunked. Things like this could bring us back to awareness and appreciation of science that actually follows the scientific method.
talles 10y ago
Researchers always go into finding what's common about who's successful. What about who's not successful? That seems to me a very important part of the equation if you're to imply some sort of causation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias Edit: Did HN changed the points to start with zero or are people downvoting really fast today?

186 points by rafaelc 10y ago

(I'm asking in all earnestness) Are online surveys now an accepted part of the social science repertoire? How do they compare to previous methods such as phone surveys, which I imagine had more uniform distribution to the population but had their own participation bias problems?

eli 10y ago
I'm not a social scientist, but online polls have been widely used and accepted for years. All forms of polling have bias and these can be adjusted for. Internet-only polls fared well in 538's analysis of 2012 election polling: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/?_r=0 http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-po...
- throwawayrol 10y ago
  Internet polls are significantly different from Amazon turk; see my sibling post. Internet polling isn't nearly as problematic, especially for a study like this. crowd-sourcing platforms need their own bias adjustments and I'm not even convinced that it's possible to adjust for the bias caused by using these platforms, unless you really are interested in putting a lower bound on human ability. Not a statement about the quality of people on Turk, just the amount of effort they often (rightfully!) put into below-developed-world-minimum-wage work...
detaro 10y ago
Not an answer, but additional info: I was curious how they found participants and looked it up in the paper: they posted their surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk and paid participants 75 cents to complete it.
- pbreit 10y ago
  So all the survey subject members were Mechanical Turk users? That sounds like a terrible representation.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    Sadly it's still a thousand times better than the book it's disputing, which has little or no empirical backing.
    - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
      Bad statistics aren't better than no statistics.
      - LionessLover 10y ago
        Looking at your comment I find this funny. All you make is an assertion.
        forgotpwtomain 10y ago
        If you take a group that's not representative of the population and you know nothing about the underlying distribution - that's not giving you better information it's just letting you be mislead into making statements which are erroneous.
throwawayrol 10y ago
Yes. Even and especially surveys where the participants are not only compensated for their time, but are also selected from a pool of people who are specifically seeking out such piece-male work (a la Amazon Turk). There's a big difference b/w posting flyers/ads in target-rich environments and providing a low friction way for people to get involved in the study. But if you do something on Amazon Turk you're basically guaranteeing a very particular type of person, because random guy with a high paying job probably isn't going to have a turk account and won't have the patience to create one just for your survey. In some cases you can make a good case that this doesn't totally invalidate any sort of generality in the results, but for the most part I throw out papers -- on face -- that proceed in this ways without extended, evidence-based discussion of why the hell I can expect any sort of conclusion except "our result generalizes to a population of people who really need an extra dollar or two (literally) and are looking for pretty much any way to get it."
btn 10y ago
"Social science" isn't a singular amorphous blob, and these methods aren't uniformly accepted. Online surveys are certainly becoming more popular as they are significantly cheaper to conduct than the alternatives, and yield publishable results that garner media attention. There are peer reviewers that will be sympathetic to these issues, regardless of the method's robustness. However, there are others that would say this reeks of dredging (p-hacking) in a very murky pool of data. Their "scepticism" rarely makes the New York Times (or a bestselling book), though.
LionessLover 10y ago
I think the (IMHO valid) point here is that that survey is a whole of a lot better than the anecdotes in the book that prompted them to do the research. It isn't about providing definitive evidence - but about providing better one.

bake 10y ago

I wish someone would similarly test Malcolm Gladwell's body of work. It's encouraging to see the scientific method re-injected into the popular press.

verganileonardo 10y ago
Yes, please! He is famous for creating theories based on one or two very specific stories. Even when he is based on real academic studies, they are usually featuref by small and biased samples (e.g., 40 harvard students). Would love to see the same for Blue Ocean Strategy!
projektir 10y ago
The Sports Gene book spends some time on it, on the 10,000 rule in particular.
riazrizvi 10y ago
Gladwell's works Blink and Outliers both paraphrase important scientific works, in the simplified style the references are largely glossed over. In place of Blink, read Antonio Damasio's Descartes Error, the seminal book on emotional reasoning. Instead of Outliers read Anders Ericsson's The Road To Excellence. Both of these more formal books cite sources meticulously.
barry-cotter 10y ago
Malcolm Gladwell does not have a body of work. He is scientifically ignorant to such an extent that he had articles with "igon values". I'm unfamiliar with the literature, real scientific literature Blink was based on. 10,000 Hours or whatever it's actually called is based on the study of expertise in psychology. The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance covers it in depth. K. Anders Ericsson founded the field.
akhilcacharya 10y ago
I really wish his take on college admissions wasn't shared around this time every year...
Fede_V 10y ago

the_cat_kittles 10y ago

i think "success" is a stupid and superficial term, but most damning is that its vague as hell. its one of those things that everyone defines in a way most beneficial to themselves. seems like a bad thing to base a study on.

dpweb 10y ago

Only if you measure success in money. Saying personal insecurity and good impulse control are traits of successful people, success defined by money, is like saying overeating is a trait of overweight people. Of course someone insecure/unsatisfied who does not overindulge themselves is likely to end up with more money. But if you were to measure success in, piece of mind, happiness, positivity, maybe the insecurity makes that more unlikely. We tend to only define success in having money however since it's so critical to have more stuff. If you're talking achievements or non monetary rewards, I'd expect insecurity. It fuels the person. Otherwise they would just live a common life it would be enough for them.

verganileonardo 10y ago

LPT: always study failures before defining what make people succeed!

kartan 10y ago

"In this case, our studies affirmed that a person’s intelligence and socioeconomic background were the most powerful factors in explaining his or her success" If success is defined from an economic point of view in absolutes it makes sense. As the best predictor of your wealth is your parents wealth. "Intelligence" is harder to add to the equation as it is more difficult to measure than parents wealth and there are known bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) that makes people think that they are smarter/more competent that they really are. So it is even possible that a superiority complex or insecurity are relevant even when the participants in the survey don't think so. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Package https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Package) This results show the consequence of a diminishing socio-economic mobility. The same traits and skills in a high mobility society are going to have a big weight in "success" achievement. In an stagnated society where the system is rigged to make poor stay poor and rich stay rich "success" becomes an inherited trait making "socioeconomic background" the only and best predictor.

PeterWhittaker 10y ago
Why is this down voted? It is quite insightful. Is HN that much of an echo chamber for the self-made-person myth? A shame that our collective intelligence would harbour this blind spot.
- themartorana 10y ago
  I have no idea. I don't fit the mold - doing well, grew up poorer than many, so my success wasn't dictated by my parents, but that doesn't mean GP's post is wrong at all. I upvoted it. Edit: while I'm sure I'm smart (who isn't sure the are?), luck has a lot to do with any success I've had.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    > luck has a lot to do with any success I've had. Does anyone expect that by sitting around doing nothing they'll get lucky and become successful? Do one's choices mean nothing?

dwmtm 10y ago

Please correct me: The Triple Package says successful individuals are in some sense drawn from populations that inculcate certain traits. The article discusses success as an individual trait, and not a group trait. Narrow reading, misreading...?

99_00 10y ago

I don't even understand the internal logic of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother". The reasoning seems to go like this: Asians-Americans make more money. Chinese-Americans are Asian-Americans. Raise your kids the way Chinese parents do. If you look at the stats, Chinese-Americans don't do especially well. You'd be better off raising your child in the "Filipino style" if such a thing exists. Indian American : $127,591[2] Taiwanese American : $85,566[2] Filipino American : $82,389[2] Australian American : $76,095[3] Latvian American : $76,040[3] British American : $75,788[3] European American : $75,341[3] Russian American : $75,305[3] Lithuanian American : $73,678[3] Austrian American : $72,284[3] Scandinavian American : $72,075[3] Serbian American : $71,394[3] Croatian American : $71,047[3] Japanese American : $70,261[2] Swiss American : $69,941[3] Slovene American : $69,842[3] Bulgarian American : $69,758[3] Romanian American : $69,598[3] Chinese American: $69,586[2] (including Taiwanese American) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

dmoy 10y ago
The tiger mother thing isn't coming from the stereotype of what it's like to be a descendent of a southern Chinese immigrating in the 19th century. It's coming from the current wave of Chinese, which is not accurately captured from that wiki article. There's a lot of not super wealthy older Chinese families in the US, who came over a long time ago. Contrast that with Taiwanese American families, they're coming more from the 60s & 70s of the 20th century (not all, but more). There's also like an order of magnitude or two more (non-Taiwanese) Chinese American than there are Taiwanese American. It would be more like if you cherry picked out the current class of very rich Chinese who send their kids to Uni in the US and buy up investment visas, and then were surprised when their descendants were richer.
- 99_00 10y ago
  In 1960s there were 237,292 Chinese-Americans. In 2010 there are 3,794,673. I suspect that increase is due to new wave immigration rather than natural population growth. So I don't think the poorer old time families are a factor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_Americans#Statistics_of_the_Chinese_population_in_the_United_States_.281840.E2.80.932010.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_Americans#S... >It would be more like if you cherry picked out the current class of very rich Chinese who send their kids to Uni in the US and buy up investment visas, and then were surprised when their descendants were richer. Actually, I think if we included the super rich mainland Chinese who buy their way in we'd see even lower declared incomes. Study reveals awfulness of Canadian investor immigration [most of whom are Chinese]; income tax averages C$1,400 per millionaire http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1929324/study-reveals-awfulness-canadian-investor-immigration-income-tax http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1929324/study-reve...

c3534l 10y ago

This confirms all my anecdotal evidence about how lawyers think. They're professors and it never even occurred to them that their ideas could be verified, they thought their arguments were enough. Now if only someone would run a study confirming or denying that's how lawyers reason about the world.

forgotpwtomain 10y ago

> We conducted two online surveys of a total of 1,258 adults in the United States. Given the self-selection bias that's involved, that doesn't sound very reassuring, granted the paper probably has a better discussion of methodology. Still as it stands it's pretty much impossible to guess the significance of the result from the news article.

marcus_holmes 10y ago

Studying the traits that successful people have is pointless without also studying the traits of unsuccessful people. If you identify that 56% of successful people have Trait X you have no idea if Trait X is associated with success unless you also discover how many unsuccessful people have Trait X. Trait X can be "belonging to a given subculture". Taking the entire population and subtracting the successful people does not leave you with the unsuccessful people. Unless you are prepared to define someone who is in the process of attempting something as unsuccessful. That's apart from the pointlessness of defining "success" for a large population of individuals (happiness? wealth? freedom? connectedness?).

kan1shka9 10y ago

partycoder 10y ago

If you have a model that predicts success, then you can build a process that targets those metrics and reliably get success. We are not there yet. Most of the time what I see is the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. "The name comes from a joke about a Texan who fires some gunshots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the tightest cluster of hits and claims to be a sharpshooter." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

erikb 10y ago
Also the basic goal is not achievable. The moment you find method X creates success everybody is doing method X and "success" gets redefined.

smm2000 10y ago

Average IQ in Ghana is 70 and Einstein IQ is assumed to be ~160 so he was (is?) 6 standard deviation away from average person in Ghana now. Using Excel it's easy to compute that we can expect to find 0.02 Einsteins in Ghana (out of 25M population) and ~800 people with IQ > 130 (IQ 130 is a standard cutoff for gifted programs in US). So the answer is statistically considering population growth in Africa no person born in Ghana since Earth was formed had IQ of Einstein but there are still some smart kids there.

kilburn 10y ago
Your reasoning is mathematically correct, but your assumptions man... just make me sad. Quoting wikipedia: > "The current scoring method for all IQ tests is the "deviation IQ". In this method, an IQ score of 100 means that the test-taker's performance on the test is at the median level of performance in the sample of test-takers of about the same age used to norm the test." Now, you are comparing average IQ over a large population size (mean IQ in Ghana normalized over mean IQ in the entire world) against average IQ over an even larger population size (mean IQ over the "entire world"). You get 70 vs 100. How can that difference be explained? Well, there are basically two ways: 1) People in Ghana is extremely dumber because of biological reasons. They are just very inferior in this regard. 2) IQ tests are rigged by education. Better education leads to better IQ scores, and Ghana's average education level is just worse than the world's average education level. You chose to believe hyphotesis 1 is true. That is the part that makes me sad.
- Malician 10y ago
  Lots of possible environmental causes 1. lack of very early childhood education/stimulation / abstract thought messing with brain development 2. epigenetic influence from parents' hard lifestyle, if you believe it is effectually hereditary in that manner (I don't think it's likely) (this is environmental in the sense it would only persist for a limited # generations) 3. parasite load 4. trauma from infectious diseases 5. severe nutritional deficiency (iodine, creatine, antioxidants, nutrients, whatever else we don't know about you can miss out on) I can't prove what I think you're implying by #1 isn't the case, but I'm quite sure that 1 and 3-5 from my list do apply.

kriro 10y ago

My totally unscientific approach would be to build some sort of "curiosity index" and the higher that is for a child up to a certain age the more likely they are to be successful. For extra credit calculate a delta to see if the curiosity stays at the same level (or increases/decreases) with age.

erikb 10y ago

A high degree of impulse control is not linked to success? I thought that was one of the oldest and most well proved success requirements, also sometimes called "delaying reward". Also if you say "my group succeeded because we believe in our group" then you need to not analyse one generation but several generations together, because that statement is not about a single generation. E.g. the question is not why is the Jew John Doe successful, but why are Jews on average more successful now despite having faced a lot of trouble in the past? While this article seems logical in itself, to me it actually gave the idea that the book may very well have a point, exactly because of common sense.

imakesoft 10y ago

I could write a book "How NOT to be successful" and maybe in some reverse way people could benefit what NOT to do. :)

simonswords82 10y ago
That's kind of what Scott Adams (the Dilbert cartoonist) did in his book How to fail at almost anything and still win big.

sbardle 10y ago

I used to know a "Success". He owns a profitable company. He has a beautiful wife. He lives in a gated mansion and drives expensive cars. But he was also a cruel person, who liked to hang out with other cruel people. I decided if that's what being a success in life means, I'd rather be a failure.

vslira 10y ago

Has anyone here played The Binding of Isaac? Awesome game. Hard as hell, though. Every time you start the game all the levels are randomly generated. Each level has a treasure room which contains an item that may give a boost to your status or give you a special ability. Some items make the playthrough a lot easier, some can make it even harder. The items you get are basically down to luck. The game is still hard anyway. There's no item that guarantees you'll win and, fortunately, there are strategies that help you make the most out of what you got. If you're good enough at the game the items may not even matter, you're just that good. Unfortunately we don't have infinite tries at life like we do in a video game to learn how to get better. You have to learn while you play the only run you've got. That's how I see the whole issue of luck vs. merit.

Malician 10y ago
If you believe in a deterministic world and no cartesian duality, there's no "spirit/soul outside the game" to do better or worse. Your willpower and moral goodness and empathy and adaptability are all the result of genetics and environment in some form or another. It's all stats and items and situations, and the choices you make come from what you were born with and happened to you.

studentrob 10y ago

> We found scant evidence for Professors Chua and Rubenfeld’s theory. Cool to see some popular pseudo-science debunked. Things like this could bring us back to awareness and appreciation of science that actually follows the scientific method.

talles 10y ago

Researchers always go into finding what's common about who's successful. What about who's not successful? That seems to me a very important part of the equation if you're to imply some sort of causation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias Edit: Did HN changed the points to start with zero or are people downvoting really fast today?