10 ms·

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

• innagadadavida 6y ago
  All of these are good factors, but don't leave out ego. Many smart people would rather be "right" and preserve their ego than make money.
  • Ma8ee 6y ago
    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.
    • draugadrotten 6y ago
      “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
      • mellow2020 6y ago
        > 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.
    • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      See also: "If you're really so smart, why do you care so much about being rich?"
      • koheripbal 6y ago
        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...
        • theelous3 6y ago
          Do more of your version of good ;) Lots of rich well intentioned people doing harmful good. A tangent, I know.
        • Haga 6y ago
          For lots of money you have to rewrite your personality, loose interest in anything not related to money and you loose the ability to do pure good in the world without a return of power, money or status.
        • michaelt 6y ago
          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.
    • stjo 6y ago
      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?
      • joeberon 6y ago
        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
        • RaceWon 6y ago
          >>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.
        • kyuudou 6y ago
          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
      • coob 6y ago
        An expression of one's own values doesn't have to imply a judgement of others, especially if they're about what makes one happy.
      • Johnjonjoan 6y ago
    • heipei 6y ago
      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.
    • tarsinge 6y ago
      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.
  • AtlasLion 6y ago
    Or social skills, many highly gifted also have less developed social skills.
    • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      this implies that having social skills in themselves are not a gift someone can possess.
    • lostmyoldone 6y ago
      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?
  • catssie 6y ago
    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.
• Grustaf 6y ago
  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.
  • xtiansimon 6y ago
    Don’t forget good looks and a rich uncle to bail you out of a jam.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • mlvljr 6y ago
      How dare you, sir, attack the *n dream!
      • mlvljr 6y ago
        Haha, finally something caught a (down)vote, I knew you guys were reading ;)
    • fao_ 6y ago
      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.
      • deleted 6y ago
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      • 6y ago
• netcan 6y ago
  Agreed. 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.
• pritovido 6y ago
  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.
  • netcan 6y ago
    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.
• Hokusai 6y ago
  > 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.