
Psychological Constellations Assessed at Age 13 Predict Success 35 Years Later - michalu
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30694728
======
lostdog
A couple of funny tidbits from the paper:

> Of the 677, we were unable to find 27 males and 15 females in our Internet
> searches (we could not confirm their identities in our contact-information
> database). Given our method and criteria (Table 1), however, we believe it
> is unlikely that we missed an individual with a truly illustrious career.
> ... Our reasoning was that, if someone were truly eminent, then that person
> should be publicly conspicuous and therefore discoverable through online
> searches.

And a finalist for the irony in naming things award:

> We used Publish or Perish software (Harzing, 2007) to collect information on
> each participant’s number of publications, number of patents, and h-index.

~~~
itronitron
>> if someone were truly eminent, then that person should be publicly
conspicuous

rather doubtful, for a variety of reasons, but probably unlikely to affect
their numbers

~~~
icedchai
I try to keep a low profile, stay off of social media, and leave a minimal
fingerprint. I was a "gifted child" of the 80's. I took the SAT when I was in
7th grade, and did better than above average high school seniors.

I have "stealth wealth", most of it from savings and stock market investments.
I don't like to draw attention to myself.

~~~
hos234
"Impactful" individuals are those that impact society "e.g., full professors
at research-intensive universities, Fortune 500 executives, distinguished
judges and lawyers, leaders in biomedicine, award-winning journalists and
writers".

"stealth wealth" is not impact.

~~~
icedchai
Ignore the stealth wealth part. I think many "eminent" individuals would also
not want to draw unnecessary attention to themselves.

~~~
ftio
Eminent means famous.

~~~
icedchai
It has a different connotation. For example, almost no CS researchers or
professors are "famous" in the traditional sense. Yeah, definitely a few here
on HN, but not outside their profession, and certainly not to the general
public. Even if you look at "Fortune 500 executives", outside of a small
subset of CEOs, they're not "famous."

~~~
lazyasciiart
Do you think there are Fortune 500 executives that have managed to remain so
obscure that somebody who knows their name and life until age 23 would be
unable to find out that they held the position?

~~~
perl4ever
What's an executive? C-level? Some places everyone is a vice president, right?

It occurs to me that the Fortune 500 is not the _S &P_ 500, so I would
question whether information about them is necessarily even as accessible as
with a public company.

------
goodmachine
This is not the astrology paper I was looking for.

------
chromy
pdf:
[https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/smpy/2019-bernstein.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/smpy/2019-bernstein.pdf)

~~~
gwern
The rest of the SMPY papers can be found at
[https://www.gwern.net/SMPY](https://www.gwern.net/SMPY) btw.

------
kats
Summary: If you did well on the SAT or attended graduate school, you were more
likely to become a professor or receive NSF grants.

~~~
alasdair_
>Summary: If you did well on the SAT or attended graduate school, you were
more likely to become a professor or receive NSF grants.

This seems to measure people who have bought into "the system" in a particular
way, rather than measuring exceptional people.

Paul Graham's essay today
([http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html](http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html)) seems
especially apt. These people have learned to hack certain standardized tests.

~~~
knzhou
You can't just hack your way into being a STEM professor at a top institution.
You actually have to _do_ stuff, discover new things. It's analogous to
actually building a good product if you're a startup founder.

~~~
alasdair_
>You can't just hack your way into being a STEM professor at a top
institution. You actually have to do stuff, discover new things. It's
analogous to actually building a good product if you're a startup founder.

From my friends with PhDs, it seems like it's about 30% doing real stuff, 10%
fucking around with grant funding paperwork and 60% trying to turn a single
result into as many papers as possible in order to maximize impact scores and
other metrics.

~~~
knzhou
I'm getting a PhD and it's been 90% real stuff, with no regard towards impact
metrics. It probably depends a lot on the subfield. My subfield is less "hot"
than most, which some would take as a sign of unhealth, but it means we're
spared all these other problems.

------
moosey
The next question is how do we build as many people with traits like this as
possible, and I assume it to be high quality education with a low stress home
life. This is something that the US economy is not currently achieving, based
on happiness and education metrics.

What should not be learned from this is that there are high caliber people,
but instead that these traits call be learned, and I'm certain that there are
schools teaching them, but I assume that those are quite foolishly only
offered to specific subsets of people here, and that we will see further
advancement in other societies as they find solutions to that exact problem by
advancing educational practice through scientific experimentation on a
national scale.

~~~
lopmotr
There absolutely are high caliber people. We know that IQ is the most powerful
predictor of success and that you can't train it into people by any known
means so it would be a waste to treat everyone like these geniuses.

~~~
alasdair_
>We know that IQ is the most powerful predictor of success and that you can't
train it into people by any known means

One very simple way of increasing IQ is to repeatedly take IQ tests. There is
a noticeable uptick in recorded score for people who take the same type of
test the second time within a twelve month period.

~~~
emmelaich
That suggests a method for finding the "true" IQ; keep taking the same kind of
tests until your score plateaus.

------
mysterydip
Wouldn't the larger the study, the less statistically-possible success is?
There's a set number of fortune 500 executives, for example.

------
pfdietz
Hah! I was a subject in that first study.

~~~
smabie
Are you “successful”?

~~~
mkagenius
He reads hackernews how much more success does one achieves?

------
potatofarmer45
Looking at the comments, there needs to be a distinction between the "eminent"
career vs what people define as "success" in the title.

The success in this paper is the equivalent of the Forbes 30 under 30 rankings
except it's when you're 48. There will be genuinely eminent people who run a
fortune 500 company, illustrious careers in academia, but the methodology of
simply searching for someone years later has clear problems.

What if you were to win a Nobel prize at age 55 or 60 (very common). You may
have contributions earlier but didn't meet the criteria.

On the reverse, like with Forbes 30 under 30, there are always people who
master personal branding and PR over substance. Lot's of news articles about
you doesn't equate to being eminent in the usual definition of the world- just
well known.

FYI, I'm not disputing their thesis or suggesting their results are wrong, I
just find it odd that evaluating people at age 48, they couldn't find an
algorithm much better than Forbes 30 under 30 which we all know has a lot of
BS.

I'd be curious to the results at age 75.

~~~
knzhou
The methodology is much much better than Forbes 30 under 30. In Forbes you pay
to nominate yourself. The list is accordingly mostly people in obscure
startups seeking to use it to attract publicity. The "eminence" in this study
is based on what people actually did.

------
starpilot
It's interesting how "success" means "selective, high-workload, white-collar
career" in this study. In other cultures, it just means having
friends/relationships and not being stressed all the time. I suspect many of
these successful types are failures in this regard.

~~~
corndoge
What's more interesting is that the word "success" doesn't appear in the title
or abstract at all, the functional word is "eminent", and their definition is
definitely more complex than your summary:

"Eminent individuals were defined as those who, by age 50, had accomplished
something rare: creative and highly impactful careers (e.g., full professors
at research-intensive universities, Fortune 500 executives, distinguished
judges and lawyers, leaders in biomedicine, award-winning journalists and
writers)."

~~~
hogFeast
Yep, I really don't think that makes it better (can anyone explain why it is
always psychologists who invent these kind of measures? Is there some test we
can perform at age 13 so we can identify people who will go on to do this kind
of research? A follow up paper perhaps, this will surely add to the "eminence"
of the authors).

I have met my fair share of Fortune 500 executives, the majority are
borderline braindead. Equally, I am unclear what "award-winning"
journalist/writer might mean...it clearly doesn't mean success in any general
way..."eminent" is just a very weird definition. Equating "eminent" with
"highly impactful" and "creative"...dear God, are the authors actually human?

What is especially bizarre is this is a paper from psychologists who,
presumably, should understand that equating success with other people thinking
you are successful (which "eminence" clearly measures) is a fairly
dysfunctional habit...the irony never ends.

------
8bitsrule
I would guess that giving the establishment the finger would not bestow
eminence.

~~~
nurettin
It did fine for George Carlin

~~~
larnmar
There are always multiple establishments. If one establishment doesn’t suit
you, you can always go right next door to the other establishment labelled
“the anti-establishment” and enjoy the company of like-minded individuals as
you sneer at the other establishment and congratulate yourself on your
independent-mindedness.

Nowadays the anti-establishment is bigger and richer than the actual
establishment, which is why we all wear t-shirts to work and sneer at those
who have to wear suits.

Are there groups that exist outside both the establishment and anti-
establishment? Sure, but they’re weird and scary and if you join them you’ll
definitely be banned from polite society.

~~~
nurettin
I'm waiting to join the anti-anti-establishment group once they get stronger.

------
Zak
Paywalled. It's on sci-hub.

[https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/0956797618822524](https://sci-
hub.tw/10.1177/0956797618822524)

------
olliej
Ok so I see no controls for income/family wealth, etc

If anything I see selection for wealth: the samples in one of the bigger
studies selected from “the 15 best STEM graduate training programmed”, which
is broadly a proxy for wealth.

More over they don’t have negative samples: afaict their “study” was to take
the top X% of students from some already wealth biased institutes and compare
their performance to the overall average for everyone. What they should have
done is compare the performance of the X% of the class they sampled from with
the performance of the remainder of that class.

Then we could compare more similar starting points.

Obviously we would generally expect _some_ correlation between skill when
younger to 35 years later, but I would expect the entire group to do
significantly better than the general average. Eg a person who got into
Harvard because of their family history, and gets a C, is likely to do better
than a person with a 4.0 from a state university. (General averages, obviously
there can be outliers in every direction)

~~~
iandanforth
This is junk science that can best be used to reinforce existing
stratification or create/justify a self-fulfilling prophecy of success. Best
to ignore it and move on.

~~~
burpsnard
Their method would miss the likes of Blake, Van Gogh, Galileo, ...

