Comment by lordnacho

I do.

108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently.

Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent.

So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many billions? If you're posting on HN you've probably got "success" in that extreme even if you've never applied yourself or excelled in anything of any note.

What they want to believe is that their wealth is in proportion to their hard work and talent. But even ignoring luck, in a "tournament market", rewards are a strongly nonlinear function of inputs. Being no 2 in a market which is a natural monopoly has limited rewards.

You can believe it's positive, but not buy the idea that someone is millions of times more hard working or talented than ordinary people.

The guy who has made billions needs the stronger form of this karma-like idea.

I don't personally know any people who believe that hard work and talent have zero positive correlation with success. However I know many people who believe that parents' socioeconomic status, genetics, luck, birthplace, and lack of scruples are all much more significant factors.

I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.

Hard work and talent are related to success. But when the outcome is "become the richest person in the world", hard work and talent are a rounding error compared to luck. Does anybody really think Zuckerberg is even in the top 5% hardest working or talented people in the world? A decision as inconsequential as rewriting Facebook to a different language in the early days could have derailed the entire enterprise. There is a lot of luck involved.

My take: "winning the lottery" in a Facebook sense requires a floor of talent and work at the early stages, but the odds of winning don't correlate with how much talent and work exists, nor are continued talent and work required once a critical mass of success has occurred. External factors - being in the right place at the right time, having some cushion of familial wealth, etc - dominate once you're over the floor.

Neither talent nor hard work have anything to do with helping humanity.

The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily.

The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself.

It’s just plainly evident in every sector of our economy. You don’t have to pay for the bad shit you do. Look at tobacco. Tobacco is a zero-value or negative-value industry. The sheer existence of tobacco actively makes the world a worse place.

But guess what? They don’t pay for your COPD medicine. They don’t pay for your congestive heart failure. But they will happily take your money for a carton.

All bad costs are externalizer, and all profit is kept. The end result is obvious. The more good you do, the stupider you are. The more evil you do, the more money you make.

"if hard work was all you needed to get rich, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire".

The clothes I'm wearing right now were probably made by a sweatshop laborer working 12 hours a day under awful conditions, getting paid something like 1% of what I make in my tranquil 7 hour workday sitting comfortably at a computer.

I therefore think that just hard work has an almost zero correlation to success by itself.

If you add in "addressing a valuable market", then yes, hard work helps, in that more effort spent addressing that market will likely yield higher rewards. But working hard on something people don't want will not yield success, in my view.

At school I used to play marbles. I had no skill whatsoever so I did "set ups" where I put a marble down and other kids threw theirs from a standard distance to hit it. If they missed the marble was mine. More valued marbles got more chances.

I got "marble rich" because I knew who the good players were and when one came a long I put my foot over my marble. Once you knew the trick it was impossible not to win on average and be a few marbles better off every day. Even a slight positive over a few weeks turns into a lot.

At a certain point I stopped finding this desirable and felt a bit guilty about it - the marbles were of no use to me really and it was enough to know that I had the trick of succeeding.

I wonder if this is roughly how people get wealthy in real life other than that they don't think "enough".

>Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success?

On average or for a particular person? Maybe on average there’s an effect (r=.4), so there will be many people for whom that correlation is in their individual case actually negative. Some struggle with this notion, and assume success must signal talent or hard work in individual cases. How one defines success matters a lot too. If one is comparing zuck to some random CEO, say collison, can you say zuck is more hardworking or talented? He is more successful on paper, but I doubt he is significantly more hardworking or talented.

A lot of people seem to think of success as the sum of a bunch of independent variables: positioning + insight + hard work + talent + luck - scruples ... Then, they argue about the relative magnitude of each term.

It's obviously more complex than this, but I think it's more useful to think of it as a product. You don't need a high value in any of them to succeed, but a tiny value in even one means you need an astronomical value somewhere else.

Do you actually believe that Mark Zuckerberg worked harder and is more talented than (rounded to the nearest person) every other person on the planet?

But negative, but success is correlated to success so much that at some point work and talent are irrelevant. Let's say Zuck has an idea to make something. He has enough people around him discussing ideas that he can basically pick one he likes and it's already pre-filtered. Then he can give it to basically anytime he chooses, with arbitrary skills threshold and resource allocation. Then he's got a whole support network to make it work. And if it falls? A loss of a few millions means nothing to him and he can try again.

Every step of that is inaccessible to someone hardworking and talented. So let's say you got lucky once or was born with wealth available to you - you can skip the whole talent and work thing.

For most of human history yes, the amount of hard work you did was negatively correlated with success. Kings, Queens, and Pharos sat on thrones while peasants built the pyramids, farmed the land, etc.

Even today high effort jobs tend to be low paying, paper shuffling, or keyboard tapping tends to pay better.

"The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence"

“The top earners among the current taxpayers were found to have already been at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago,” Barone and Mocetti note on VoxEU. The study was able to exploit a unique data set—taxpayers data in 1427 was digitized and made available online—to show long-term trends of economic mobility.

<https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...>

The question is how much ones starting position (that is, birth conditions) predict adult-period wealth and status. Yes, there's clearly movement within ranks, and more at the very top of the rankings than most. But familial wealth trends are empirically quite strongly rooted in status-at birth, from this and numerous other studies.

To add, it isn’t just hard work and talent but also the willingness to take a calculated risk when an opportunity presents itself. Most talented and hard working people I know are so risk averse that they would let multiple opportunities to make billions pass them by.

I think you can certainly make some of your own luck via hard work, but there is a difference between actually making on your own, and starting on 3rd base.

Who should be promoted and/or given a raise?

The person working hard with the same company for 15 years with extensively proven track record and well known impact across the organization?

Or the interview candidate with 5yrs experience?

Yet every time, companies roll out the red carpet for the new guy. He’s probably at least half bluffing and the new company has little concrete evidence of his past performance.

To throw some controversy onto the mix, they are related, but in the same way that [some race] is correlated to [some behaviour] in the extremes of the probability distribution, but mostly makes no difference at the overwhelming core of it.

And therefore when people say [some race] makes no difference in [some behaviour], and other people say "Why is it always [some race] when we see [some behaviour]", and others say "the observation that [some race] leads to [some behaviour] is false because 50% of the time I see [some other race] being worse than [some race] in terms of [some behaviour]" they are all completely right, but just focusing on different properties of the distribution.

So back to your example, yes, in the extremes, many people who are ultrawealthy may have had those behaviours. But by far and large those behaviours don't make much of a difference to the overwhelming majority of the population, and therefore it's likely that other factors were far more important in terms of making an ultrawealthy person becoming ultrawealthy in the first place. At best, someone who was destined to be ultrawealthy didn't make it because they didn't have those behaviours, but that's more like winning the lottery and being too forgetful to go cash it in, rather than having characteristics that will help you win the lottery in the first place.

It's obviously a combination of talent, hard work and luck. Usually in that order. The luck in Zuck's case was being in the right place at the right time. Obviously he made the most of it with talent and hard work.

I suspect talent and hard work are pretty well correlated with becoming wealthy (say >$10m), but I think you then need a big injection of luck to take you from wealthy to ultra wealthy.

Depends on what you define as talent.

For example there're studies that intelligence over 120 is negatively correlated with success as a leader.

I think that, broadly speaking, hard work and talent strongly predict success. But the circumstances can dramatically affect the magnitude. I have no doubt that Zuck would've been successful in 1880, but not one of the richest people who ever lived. The leverage that comes from being an introverted hacker type was not as great then.

I agree with you that there is positive correlation.

I also believe those two things are correlated with genetics (and of course environment/upbringing)

Enormous numbers of humans work hard and are talented at the things they do. Hard work and talent gets you a middle-class existence, at least if you were born in the right country and with the right resources to go to university, etc.

In the case of Zuck, he basically did play a lottery ticket, and a perfect confluence of being in the right place at precisely the right time yielded some success. A million other programmers, working just as hard and just as talented, were trying to make their web app hit at that time and failed.

That's how life is. It is a lottery ticket that Zuck is super rich. And it's a strawman to act as if pointing this out means that hard work and talent don't matter.

And FWIW, the overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy. I am kind of a broken record on this, but I think Meta's entire business is basically the oxycontin of the online world, and that everyone involved should feel absolute shame about the negative value they bring to the world. Non-sociopaths would have felt shame and changed course when they realized they were getting rich on the mentally ill, conspiracies, misinformation, etc.

I have no idea. What I do know is that there's no degree of hard work or talent that will make me a billionaire.

I think they’re like linearly correlated to a point and then other things take over.

I do think that the primary factor that can lead to billionaire status aside from luck is sort of moral flexibility / shamelessness / irrational risk tolerance above and beyond hard work and talent.

[dead]

> Does anyone actually believe

> I firmly believe that it's positive for both.

Alright, setup an experiment and prove it. Should be easy.

Speculation is free. Can't ever be wrong in the land of uncertainty.