How much does merit contribute to success? A rosy view is that success is mostly due to merit, while a dark view is that success is mostly not due to merit, but instead due to what we see as illicit factors, such as luck, looks, wit, wealth, race, gender, politics, etc.
Absolutely. I'd really like to see the GINI coefficient on number of hours per week dedicated to work plus that for number of hours cumulatively dedicated to directly developing marketable skills.
There's a great deal of grumbling about the absurdity of the Horatio Alger "myth," but his stories (as far as I can tell, having never read them) were not about becoming a billionaire that can live a life of lavish decadent consumption and never working. It was about becoming a respectable gentleman of middle class standing who has escaped poverty. That one cannot in a single generation launch easily, effortlessly, and reliably from poverty to opulence has been advanced as an argument against the simple accessibility of a comfortable life out of poverty and with reasonable security.
You've got the causality backwards. Believing that you have no control and placing the locus of control over your life outside your personal means to affect change is what leads people to follow a path of least resistance. This leads to reduced advancement in life. Conversely, anyone who believes they can control their own fate is far more likely to actually make the sort of concerted efforts needed for sustained personal advancement.
That is because knowing the coordinate system does not provide you with information that may affect your conclusion about whether the car is pulling to the left. Pulling to the left does not have that kind of relation to being in a particular coordinate system.
Being biased *does* have that kind of relation to being correct.
Absolute free will cannot exist: an information processing machine (which the human mind is) is always subject to its preexisting preferences, routines, its limited knowledge and outside influences. That does not mean you should not correct someone: after all, punishment, rewards and explanations change the outside influences and knowledge of a mind and can therefore change its future decisions and a prison sentence for a dangerous individual can protect the rest of society (just as you would cage a dangerous animal). People like Dalrymple are stuck in an old religious (specifically Christian, but Islam, Judaism and Hinduism have similar concepts) view of morality, but the idea that you should only correct people if you think you can attribute their decisions to some magical and inherent free will that is somehow independent from genes and experience (ie. the view that you're "sick" when the gene or experience that made you different has been discovered already, but if it hasn't been discovered yet you're just "evil" because you "chose" to be different) is also a leftover from those old religious views.
Does a version of this apply to Dalrymplism? Dalrymple thinks he has made made good choices, and his patients bad ones. But are any of them making free choices? Maybe they just follow the tracks laid down by their families and environments, and maybe he does too...the psychologists view rather than the economists.
"Darius Kazemi's XOXO talk, in which he explains how he became a successful lottery player, is a brilliant send-up of the "how I succeeded as an artist" talk."
"Kazemi's point is that most people who set out to earn a creative living fail, and that the thing that distinguishes the successes from the failures is a combination of luck (winning the lottery) and persistence (buying a lot of lottery tickets). This is a hugely important and vastly underappreciated point -- you can try and try and try and never succeed, through no fault of your own (but the more you try, the more chances at success you have)."
You can figure out if your car is not aligned and pulling to the left without knowing the absolute angle or position of your car in a cosmological coordinate system.
Isn't that equivalent to searching for your keys under the light because it's easier to see there?
If you need to figure out the facts before figuring out the biases, and figuring out the facts is impossible, then that just means that figuring out the biases is impossible too. You can't figure out the biases anyway, without the prerequisite, just because it's easier.
If you're implying that there are trust fund baby who would've ended up homeless if it wasn't for their rich family, or golddiggers who rely entirely on the success of their spouse, then I agree, but I'm not sure what would be the point of mentioning that. I'm not a golddigger or a trust fund baby, I've merely taken advantage of government programs that are available to everyone in my country, to get my education.
It is easy to forget true and useful facts when there are so many to remember. Don't underestimate the value of being reminded of the obvious now and again.
There is a possible equivocation on "successful" here that confuses things.To be in the extreme right tail of successful people-- billionaires, nobel laureates, famous artists & performers--I think everyone agrees you need to have tons of skill (say, 99.9 percentile in the relevant dimension) plus tons of luck. After all, 99.9 just means best out of a thousand, and there are many thousands of people. So, the more narrowly you define "successful" the more luck will appear to predominate.However, if you refer to "successful" with respect to the whole distribution of the population, the overwhelming importance of merit becomes obvious. Income is highly correlated with IQ and conscientiousness, for example. Students who study more, certeris paribus, tend to better grades. Athletes who practice more, certeris paribus, tend to perform better. The modern rich are workaholics, rather than lazy.This suggests that holding a strong form of the dark view is a product of poor framing and/or self-delusion
I don't think it's overdoing anything to suppose that the vast majority of them have multiple serious merit-issues.
But that doesn't even address the narrow version of the question presented. The question is how common are multiple merit issues in those who aren't homeless. (Affluenza, anyone.)
[To give another example of this tendency: my comment that the white poor in America mostly have character issues, being based on direct observation, was no doubt overstated. (I say this a priori, based on the kind of bias involved.)
Part of this is the fundamental error of attribution, which can be translated via construal-level theory as a far-mode bias. Those distantly below us (or above) are viewed in far mode, to the detriment of those below and benefit of those above (because the role of chance is minimized in far mode).]
In my country only 0.2-0.3% of the population are homeless, a typical rate for Western Europe. I don't think it's overdoing anything to suppose that the vast majority of them have multiple serious merit-issues.
And again, I don't think anyone "deserves" to be homeless, merit carries no moral connotation for me, just an economic one.
The unsuccessful don't all hold (or even espouse) the merit theory because they are concerned to signal that their status is unjust or at least not their fault.
I think signaling theory would predict that what they signal depends on the salience of their failure. The very poor all say they were victims of bad luck. (But they not infrequently believe they'll get rich, which suggests that they think it's a meritocracy at the top.)
From the study: "For 117 male undergraduates, scores on the scale were related positively to authoritarianism and to the expectancy for internal control of reinforcements."
The confound with authoritarianism might be critical. The boring task was assigned by an authoritative experimenter.
Just world has conflicting effects. It can also demoralize you in face of failure (anti-grit).
Absolutely. I'd really like to see the GINI coefficient on number of hours per week dedicated to work plus that for number of hours cumulatively dedicated to directly developing marketable skills.
There's a great deal of grumbling about the absurdity of the Horatio Alger "myth," but his stories (as far as I can tell, having never read them) were not about becoming a billionaire that can live a life of lavish decadent consumption and never working. It was about becoming a respectable gentleman of middle class standing who has escaped poverty. That one cannot in a single generation launch easily, effortlessly, and reliably from poverty to opulence has been advanced as an argument against the simple accessibility of a comfortable life out of poverty and with reasonable security.
You've got the causality backwards. Believing that you have no control and placing the locus of control over your life outside your personal means to affect change is what leads people to follow a path of least resistance. This leads to reduced advancement in life. Conversely, anyone who believes they can control their own fate is far more likely to actually make the sort of concerted efforts needed for sustained personal advancement.
That is because knowing the coordinate system does not provide you with information that may affect your conclusion about whether the car is pulling to the left. Pulling to the left does not have that kind of relation to being in a particular coordinate system.
Being biased *does* have that kind of relation to being correct.
Absolute free will cannot exist: an information processing machine (which the human mind is) is always subject to its preexisting preferences, routines, its limited knowledge and outside influences. That does not mean you should not correct someone: after all, punishment, rewards and explanations change the outside influences and knowledge of a mind and can therefore change its future decisions and a prison sentence for a dangerous individual can protect the rest of society (just as you would cage a dangerous animal). People like Dalrymple are stuck in an old religious (specifically Christian, but Islam, Judaism and Hinduism have similar concepts) view of morality, but the idea that you should only correct people if you think you can attribute their decisions to some magical and inherent free will that is somehow independent from genes and experience (ie. the view that you're "sick" when the gene or experience that made you different has been discovered already, but if it hasn't been discovered yet you're just "evil" because you "chose" to be different) is also a leftover from those old religious views.
Does a version of this apply to Dalrymplism? Dalrymple thinks he has made made good choices, and his patients bad ones. But are any of them making free choices? Maybe they just follow the tracks laid down by their families and environments, and maybe he does too...the psychologists view rather than the economists.
"Darius Kazemi's XOXO talk, in which he explains how he became a successful lottery player, is a brilliant send-up of the "how I succeeded as an artist" talk."
http://boingboing.net/2014/...
"Kazemi's point is that most people who set out to earn a creative living fail, and that the thing that distinguishes the successes from the failures is a combination of luck (winning the lottery) and persistence (buying a lot of lottery tickets). This is a hugely important and vastly underappreciated point -- you can try and try and try and never succeed, through no fault of your own (but the more you try, the more chances at success you have)."
You can figure out if your car is not aligned and pulling to the left without knowing the absolute angle or position of your car in a cosmological coordinate system.
Isn't that equivalent to searching for your keys under the light because it's easier to see there?
If you need to figure out the facts before figuring out the biases, and figuring out the facts is impossible, then that just means that figuring out the biases is impossible too. You can't figure out the biases anyway, without the prerequisite, just because it's easier.
If you're implying that there are trust fund baby who would've ended up homeless if it wasn't for their rich family, or golddiggers who rely entirely on the success of their spouse, then I agree, but I'm not sure what would be the point of mentioning that. I'm not a golddigger or a trust fund baby, I've merely taken advantage of government programs that are available to everyone in my country, to get my education.
It is easy to forget true and useful facts when there are so many to remember. Don't underestimate the value of being reminded of the obvious now and again.
There is a possible equivocation on "successful" here that confuses things.To be in the extreme right tail of successful people-- billionaires, nobel laureates, famous artists & performers--I think everyone agrees you need to have tons of skill (say, 99.9 percentile in the relevant dimension) plus tons of luck. After all, 99.9 just means best out of a thousand, and there are many thousands of people. So, the more narrowly you define "successful" the more luck will appear to predominate.However, if you refer to "successful" with respect to the whole distribution of the population, the overwhelming importance of merit becomes obvious. Income is highly correlated with IQ and conscientiousness, for example. Students who study more, certeris paribus, tend to better grades. Athletes who practice more, certeris paribus, tend to perform better. The modern rich are workaholics, rather than lazy.This suggests that holding a strong form of the dark view is a product of poor framing and/or self-delusion
What are they trying to countersignal? Merit? I'm not sure if that makes sense.
I don't think it's overdoing anything to suppose that the vast majority of them have multiple serious merit-issues.
But that doesn't even address the narrow version of the question presented. The question is how common are multiple merit issues in those who aren't homeless. (Affluenza, anyone.)
[To give another example of this tendency: my comment that the white poor in America mostly have character issues, being based on direct observation, was no doubt overstated. (I say this a priori, based on the kind of bias involved.)
Part of this is the fundamental error of attribution, which can be translated via construal-level theory as a far-mode bias. Those distantly below us (or above) are viewed in far mode, to the detriment of those below and benefit of those above (because the role of chance is minimized in far mode).]
In my country only 0.2-0.3% of the population are homeless, a typical rate for Western Europe. I don't think it's overdoing anything to suppose that the vast majority of them have multiple serious merit-issues.
And again, I don't think anyone "deserves" to be homeless, merit carries no moral connotation for me, just an economic one.
The unsuccessful don't all hold (or even espouse) the merit theory because they are concerned to signal that their status is unjust or at least not their fault.
I think signaling theory would predict that what they signal depends on the salience of their failure. The very poor all say they were victims of bad luck. (But they not infrequently believe they'll get rich, which suggests that they think it's a meritocracy at the top.)
From the study: "For 117 male undergraduates, scores on the scale were related positively to authoritarianism and to the expectancy for internal control of reinforcements."
The confound with authoritarianism might be critical. The boring task was assigned by an authoritative experimenter.
Just world has conflicting effects. It can also demoralize you in face of failure (anti-grit).
[Discus ate my first attempt, too.]