
How Not to Explain Success - rafaelc
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/opinion/sunday/how-not-to-explain-success.html
======
kartan
"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.

~~~
pacala
> As the best predictor of your wealth is your parents wealth.

Coming from an Eastern European country, my parents were making less than
$10000 a year combined in the '80s and '90s. Nowhere near "wealthy" by western
standards. However, they gifted me with a strong STEM education, which
translated in material affluence 25 years later on a different continent.

Might consider that the biggest transferable wealth across generations is a
good education and a life long example of thrift and hard work.

~~~
vintermann
I'm sure giving your kids a good and useful education is one way to transfer
wealth between generations. However, it sometimes fails.

Direct ways of transferring wealth between generations never fail. And there's
a lot of those going on too.

Transferring values is hard. Transferring cash is easy.

~~~
Donzo
"Direct ways of transferring wealth between generations never fail."

Sure it does.

Plenty of heirs "lose the farm."

It's been said that the first generation builds the business, the second
generation manages it, and the third generation loses it.

Maintaining and growing wealth are different than receiving and spending.

~~~
theoh
"Clogs to clogs in three generations":
[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/clogs_to_clogs_in_three_gen...](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/clogs_to_clogs_in_three_generations)

------
99_00
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_U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income)

~~~
sien
Australian Americans are #4. Awesome.

I'm drafting 'The Bushwacking hymn of the Tasmanian Tiger mother' as we speak.

The secret to great kids is:

1) Call them Bruce. 2) Give them a proper knife 3) Plenty of prawns of the
barby 4) Regular croc wrestling

~~~
randycupertino
Don't forget to tell them to go catch and cook mudcrabs bare handed:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44aNi4UgYAo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44aNi4UgYAo)

------
bake
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.

~~~
Fede_V
Gladwell is a wonderfully gifted writer who has a fantastic talent for weaving
engaging narratives. Unfortunately, when it comes to science, this is NOT a
good thing.

Scientific discoveries don't follow narratives: narratives are things we
impose post-facto to make it easier to tell an engaging story. For example,
the 10,000 hour rule makes for a nice story about effort, and Gladwell brings
up a lot of examples: of course, if you look at the meta analysis, it turns
out that it's completely wrong: [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-
news/10000-hour-rule-not...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-
news/10000-hour-rule-not-real-180952410/?no-ist)

The problem with having a nice narrative is that it's too tempting to fit
facts into your story for the sake of having a clean, linear narrative. If you
were to write an honest book about the latest findings in social psychology,
it would spend several chapters discussing statistical power and meta
analysis, it would be incredibly cautious, and it would be full of results
which are contradictory.

The only thing worse than social psychology in this regard is business school
books. The numbers are even smaller, the tendency to pursue narratives even
bigger, and the professors get paid a lot more.

~~~
markdown
> Unfortunately, when it comes to science, this is NOT a good thing.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is an awesome book.

------
aaronharnly
(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
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-
po...](http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-
best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/?_r=0)

~~~
throwawayrol
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...

------
vslira
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
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.

------
marcus_holmes
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?).

------
erikb
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.

------
the_cat_kittles
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.

------
forgotpwtomain
> 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.

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

------
c3534l
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.

------
dpweb
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.

------
dwmtm
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...?

------
partycoder
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
Also the basic goal is not achievable. The moment you find method X creates
success everybody is doing method X and "success" gets redefined.

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

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

------
kriro
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.

------
studentrob
> 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
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?

------
sbardle
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.

