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This is the old story of "if you work hard enough you will be just as successful" and it is of course bullshit. There is an easy proof for this: Income distribu
by sprash 14y ago
This is the old story of "if you work hard enough you will be just as successful" and it is of course bullshit. There is an easy proof for this: Income distribution.
The income distribution would be a Gaussian distribution like intelligence, body height and all other kinds of human traits, if it were truly determined by accomplishement.
But since the income distribution has a rather exponential shape the underlying events must be independent and poissonian distributed, similar to a series of small lottery games or to put it simply: luck!
The first of those lottery games in your life is the question of: are your parents rich or not.
- Domenic_S 14y agoIf you were born in a first world country, then yes, your parents were rich. We are the global 1%. Your income distribution analysis is flawed in a few ways though. You can't have negative height or negative intelligence, but you can have negative income. Likewise, there is an upper bound on human traits, but no functional upper bound on income. Moreover, money grows logarithmically but human traits inherit very slowly. Anyway, that's not the point. You sound unhappy. You should fix that. Start by realizing that money won't fix it.
- hazov 14y agoA Gaussian need not to have a 0 mean and a 1 variance.
- michaelochurch 14y agoActually, the upper-half of the IQ distribution is log-normal when ratio IQs are measured. Adult deviation IQs are percentile rankings coerced into a Gaussian distribution (which is why measuring adult IQs above 145 is hard: small samples). This suggests that the "true" IQ is the log-normal distribution, which has support only on (0, infinity).