
Success in academia is as much about grit as talent - laurex
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/05/10/success-in-academia-is-as-much-about-grit-as-talent
======
konschubert
> suggesting that early-career setback appears to cause a performance
> improvement among those who persevere.

I think this might be simply because a career setback event crates selection
pressure in the months following it, purging the bad candidates from this
pool. As a result, this purged pool then outperforms the no-setback pool for
simple statistical reasons.

I see no reason to conclude that the individual scientists’ behavior was
changed by the event.

Therefore I don’t follow the conclusion cited above.

And it’s also not clear if the people who drop out from the setback pool are
necessarily the non-gritty people, or maybe the not-so-smart people.

Therefore I don’t follow how they come to the conclusion about grit vs
aptitude cited in the headline.

~~~
glial
The paper states:

> By focusing on grant proposals that fell just below and just above the
> funding threshold, we compare “near-miss” with “near-win” individuals to
> examine longer-term career outcomes.

This is an example of a 'regression discontinuity analysis'. The underlying
assumption is that applications just-above and just-below the NIH funding
threshold have roughly the same merit, and falling on either side of the
threshold can be explained by noise in the review process. So they're
explicitly comparing scientists whose applications are _equal_ with respect to
merit - meaning the people dropped were not 'bad candidates' and the people
funded were not 'better candidates'.

Since candidates are (assumed to be) equal in terms of merit, comparing the
eventual outcomes of the two groups is a way to infer the causal effect of
early funding or rejection on career outcome.

~~~
mattkrause
The _applications_ just below and above the payline are presumably of similar
merit, but the people are not necessarily matched and there’s only a tenuous
link between person-quality and grant-quality (to the extent that either are
real constructs that can be measured even sorta accurately).

------
whymsicalburito
link to actual paper:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.06958.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.06958.pdf)

