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While I agree that the strawman "hustler's ethic" presented by the article is false, there are mindsets that correlate with wealth. There are numerous sociolog

While I agree that the strawman "hustler's ethic" presented by the article is false, there are mindsets that correlate with wealth. There are numerous sociological studies presenting the high correlation between conscientiousness and income/wealth [1]. It would be very difficult to separate the cause and effect, but in action you are left with a Pascal's wager scenario: Knowing that conscientiousness correlates to wealth, and knowing conscientiousness to be a virtue in and of itself, should you try build a mindset rich in conscientiousness? The conclusion seems obvious to me. It's possible that you can't change your personality enough for it to matter, but that's just another facet of the Pascal's wager. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/

Analemma_ 9y ago
I'm curious that you're using Pascal's wager as an argument for believing in something, when almost everyone uses it as an illustrative example of flawed reasoning. Do you also believe in God because of Pascal's wager?
- psyc 9y ago
  I don't know about every objection to Pascal's Wager, but overall it's quite different. In PW it's the belief itself that might be the key to heaven, and you can't have an authentic belief that you adopted simply because you had an incentive to adopt it. With conscientiousness it doesn't really matter what you believe or how strongly, all you have to do is behave conscientiously and see if it helps.
  - Can_Not 9y ago
    The objection is that you have 5 major world religions to choose from, there could be 1,000 to 1,000,000 minor religions to choose from, the gatekeeper of heaven might be selecting only non-believers who non-believe for the right reason, the gatekeeper of heaven might have an even more arbitrary or unpredictable criteria than laid out by your geographically predetermined choice of religion. The religion could represent actual spiritual phenomenon, but the entities could have lied about who they are or what's to be expected. Not to mention that we could be a random occurrence of life in a universe created for a set of aliens we could never meet. The wager is flawed because you have to consider a near infinite number of evidence-less hypothesis about getting to heaven, which might not exist or might not even have a gatekeeper.

Analemma_ 9y ago

I'm curious that you're using Pascal's wager as an argument for believing in something, when almost everyone uses it as an illustrative example of flawed reasoning. Do you also believe in God because of Pascal's wager?

psyc 9y ago
I don't know about every objection to Pascal's Wager, but overall it's quite different. In PW it's the belief itself that might be the key to heaven, and you can't have an authentic belief that you adopted simply because you had an incentive to adopt it. With conscientiousness it doesn't really matter what you believe or how strongly, all you have to do is behave conscientiously and see if it helps.
- Can_Not 9y ago
  The objection is that you have 5 major world religions to choose from, there could be 1,000 to 1,000,000 minor religions to choose from, the gatekeeper of heaven might be selecting only non-believers who non-believe for the right reason, the gatekeeper of heaven might have an even more arbitrary or unpredictable criteria than laid out by your geographically predetermined choice of religion. The religion could represent actual spiritual phenomenon, but the entities could have lied about who they are or what's to be expected. Not to mention that we could be a random occurrence of life in a universe created for a set of aliens we could never meet. The wager is flawed because you have to consider a near infinite number of evidence-less hypothesis about getting to heaven, which might not exist or might not even have a gatekeeper.