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It's possible that success isn't determined by something that's normally distributed like intelligence or hours worked. Say the key factor is what they call "gr
by hooande 5y ago
It's possible that success isn't determined by something that's normally distributed like intelligence or hours worked. Say the key factor is what they call "grit" or determination. If this occurs according to a power law instead of a normal distribution, you could have a situation where the average person has a score of 0.1 and an all time determined person has a score of 1, or 10 or 100.
We can see easily that no human has an IQ of 10x the average. But determination to accomplish a goal is difficult to measure, empirically or subjectively. I can't really say that super rich person X didn't just want it 10x or 100x more than everyone else.
It's interesting that the authors were able to come up with a simulation that roughly matched real world wealth distribution. But there are a large number of potential factors that they did not and could not account for in a model. I fully agree with the idea that all great wealth comes from luck and chance in some form or another. This article is definitely stating what I believe to be true. But I don't know if they really proved anything.
- Simon321 5y agoPersonality traits like that are also normally distributed and the concept of 'grit' specifically is controversial: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/15/04/problem-grit https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/15/04/problem-grit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)#Scientific_findings_and_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)#Scien...
- Ginden 5y ago> We can see easily that no human has an IQ of 10x the average. IQ is by definition normally distributed. If you define wealth the same way as you define IQ (basically as position in normal distribution), not even Jeff Bezos will have 10x "wealth IQ". He is richer than ~99.9999999857% of people, but he will score in such test test around ~6.3 standard deviations, as you can verify through https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1180573188 https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1180573188 That would correspond to score 250 IQ (Cattel scale). And about cognitive abilities in general - yeah, some people exhibit 10x times bigger working memory (roughly corresponding to RAM) than average.