Current Events > Computer model: wealth is down to chance, not talent

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've seen you overlook the same sin TC is guilty of when it suits you, and even rely on it yourself.

But your reaction ITT, holy shit-balls!
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COVxy posted...

FLUFFYGERM posted...

I mean literally all of those questions you just asked are answered in my posts. You obviously didn't read them

No, no you didn't. "Maybe it would be different if they included x" is not sufficient lol.

I didn't say anything remotely like that, and anyone who has an ounce of honesty in their bones can see that for themselves. Sorry to see you degenerate this much in the course of this topic.
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Sphyx posted...

I've seen you overlook the same sin TC is guilty of when it suits you, and even rely on it yourself.

But your reaction ITT, holy shit-balls!

Can you give me an example of when I made a mistake and didn't admit it? I've admitted being wrong more than once on CE, and I like to admit when I'm wrong because I'm interested in perpetual learning and growth.

Whereas TC (and individuals like Omnislasher and averagejoel) have only ever demonstrated a commitment to the Marxist narrative at all expenses, regardless of how thoroughly they've been spanked.
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Antifar posted...

But the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent).

Colour me surprised. /s

COVxy posted...

COVxy posted...

Though, i think you are underestimating the value of simplified preparations in discovering fundamental principles. You might want to think about that some more.

Sums it up pretty succinctly.

Lmao simplified preparations are fine trying to correlate wealth to chance but when it comes to correlating the increased rate of crime in relation to influx of migrants, we need an acamedically rigorous study. Pathetic
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

COVxy posted...

FLUFFYGERM posted...

I mean literally all of those questions you just asked are answered in my posts. You obviously didn't read them

No, no you didn't. "Maybe it would be different if they included x" is not sufficient lol.

I didn't say anything remotely like that, and anyone who has an ounce of honesty in their bones can see that for themselves. Sorry to see you degenerate this much in the course of this topic.

Then explain, in the context of their results, what would be different and provide the appropriate reasoning for it, given fixed vs variable wealth. Havent seen that lol.
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

For example, they assume that everyone starts out with the same amount of capital and that the agents operate over a period of 40 years, enduring or enjoying "chance" events. They don't precisely define what chance events are, and they assume that a chance event has roughly the same impact on someone - either doubling or halving their capital.

They don't assume that everyone has the same amount of capital, they're trying to measure the effect of this model by fixing the amount of capital that everyone starts with. In addition, if you're doing a random walk in a space determined by a power law, you WOULD assume that you're moving exponentially (e.g. always halving or doubling).

FLUFFYGERM posted...

In fact, this type of concession is not beyond the writers. After all, in a section later on they run an exercise where they assign a value to the amount of education individuals (and the collective) have. In an effort to show that more education can increase the probability of succeeding if you have high talent. In other words, more education can mitigate the adverse effects of bad luck.

So if they're able to bake in that type of assumption into one of their runs, they could have easily ran a session where each agent acted responsibly by investing some portion of their proceeds over a 40 year period and ended up very wealthy. But they didn't, because they care about their narrative more than they care about reality.

They modeled education by changing the distribution of talent (increasing the mean in one case and the standard deviation in the other). That's a fairly easy thing to change in the model. I don't know how you would suggest changing to include "good investment". You could have a group of people who less than double their capital, but in exchange they less than half their capital on bad luck. But you'd still get the same overall effect among those people (since what's mathematically causing most of this is that your random sample of talent has a reduced effect overall compared to how many lucky events you encounter).

FLUFFYGERM posted...

What if unlucky events don't actually occur with the frequency they chose? (Six months).

Unlucky events in the model don't occur every six months, it's that every six months you move within the world and can encounter an unlucky event.

I'm not going to go into too much of the rest of it, but most of your arguments are based on making the model more complicated. The merits of the simplified model is that there were very few decisions made by the authors; ultimately, they chose the parameters of the distribution on T and the ratio of lucky events to unlucky events, both of which they explored the effects of changing. For example, your suggestion that talent should impact how often you encounter lucky events is based on the assumption that the study is trying to explore. If your model assumes "Higher talent gives you more opportunities to double your capital" (and in this case succeeding at this opportunity is only dependent on your talent), you'll of course come to the conclusion that talent has a bigger effect on your capital. Because you set it up that way!

There are different ways of building the model that would come to different results, but calling it trash because they didn't match yours is short-sighted, especially since your gripes seem to have more to do with the conclusion (luck is more impactful than skill) than the math behind it, so you're hunting for "flaws" in an attempt to reverse the conclusion.
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do_ob_tpkillr posted...

Antifar posted...

But the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent).

Colour me surprised. /s

Please see post # 71 here:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/400-current-events/76374164/897073014
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Kazi1212 posted...

COVxy posted...

COVxy posted...

Though, i think you are underestimating the value of simplified preparations in discovering fundamental principles. You might want to think about that some more.

Sums it up pretty succinctly.

Lmao simplified preparations are fine trying to correlate wealth to chance but when it comes to correlating the increased rate of crime in relation to influx of migrants, we need an acamedically rigorous study. Pathetic

Damn
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TomNook20 posted...

Seriously, what a dumb clickbait article.

Creepifar wouldn't post it if it wasn't
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Squall28 posted...

Funnily enough that condom example is in the model. It includes bad situations. If your talent is low, you make the bad decision and get penalize.

No "talent" is involved in the process of not making dumb life decisions. You don't need to be an especially cunning individual to get through high school and not make babies before you're financially stable.
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The problem with your argument is that you are misinterpreting what the conclusion is of people linking the study. It isn't saying that talent doesn't matter. There's an obvious correlation between talent and wealth. The point is the focus on the upper end of wealth aka the very rich.

but very often the most successful individual is a moderately gifted agent and only rarely the most talented one."

So the statement, that you're rich because you're lucky is completely true. It's not disproven by the correlation between talent and wealth in the middle.

This brings up another point. The argument has never been that talent doesn't matter at all or that social mobility is impossible. The point is that certain people will have an easier time climbing due to stuff outside of their control.
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Please re-read post #71 very carefully.

And then re-read the follow-up posts where I dissect the study itself.

It is NOT arguing that people who are rich are rich because of luck. There are scenarios where someone becomes rich because of luck, at the extremes of the distribution. But that is not at all what happens on average, even if we assume the model is worth anything. There are individuals who become rich because of talent and effort, and the majority of people could become wealthy without luck.

There are literally people in this topic who are arguing that success is all luck. TC and averagejoel are examples.
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Chance plays a part, talent plays a part, effort plays the biggest part for most people.

computers r dum
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

Please re-read post #71 very carefully.

And then re-read the follow-up posts where I dissect the study itself.

It is NOT arguing that people who are rich are rich because of luck. There are scenarios where someone becomes rich because of luck, at the extremes of the distribution. But that is not at all what happens on average, even if we assume the model is worth anything. There are individuals who become rich because of talent and effort, and the majority of people could become wealthy without luck.

There are literally people in this topic who are arguing that success is all luck. TC and averagejoel are examples.

I think you are the one that needs to reread.

the most successful individual is a moderately gifted agent and only rarely the most talented one."

The rich are what we are interested in. That's why we are concerned with the extreme of the distribution and not the average. You don't see people protesting for their slightly more wealthy but still average neighbor to get a tax increase. They want the very rich to pay for it.

I don't believe any of the sensible posters in this topic believe talent has no correlation with wealth. The argument has always been that outside factors make a big difference.
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You can be rich without being the most successful individual in that model. That's why I said that one of the reasons the study sucks is that they didn't focus enough on the middle of the distribution, IE the average person.

And note once again that there are individuals in this topic who were attributing all success to chance rather than talent/effort. In fact the fucking topic title for the topic you are posting in says as much, dude.

And it's arguable that there's still no real evidence for the claim that outside factors make the majority of the difference. So I'm not convinced even with your more moderate interpretation, although I'd really prefer if leftists like Antifar and Omnislasher and averagejoel adopted at least that perspective.
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FLUFFYGERM posted...

That's why I said that one of the reasons the study sucks is that they didn't focus enough on the middle of the distribution, IE the average person.

I mean, they plotted the entire distributions and statistics across the entire distribution. They plotted individual examples for the purposes of demonstration. They didn't "focus on the extremes".
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If you are average, you are not rich. I'm not arguing that you can't do very well for yourself, but the people at the very top has a little more than talent and that's who liberals are usually hating on.

In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based model, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our knowledge, this counterintuitive result - although implicitly suggested between the lines in a vast literature - is quantified here for the first time. It sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others.

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Proud, I took the time to respond to some of your criticisms in Post #108, in case you didn't see it.
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