Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure · HackerPapers discussions

Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by toomuchtodo

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:18:21 GMT

> Nothing quite dampens your belief in hard work paying off Such a belief was not grounded in data to begin with. Like a religion, its based in faith. Humans are tricky, emotion and vibe driven; suboptimal mental models die hard. Humans want to believe in free will, they want to believe that their success was because of hard work and not luck. Older cohorts benefited from a golden period in US macro history that will not repeat. They were born at the right time, acquired assets at the right time, and had little job competition with great comp and working arrangements (single income could…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by toomuchtodo

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:18:08 GMT

How did you come to the conclusion that being that wealthy was because of intelligence? Elon has been at the right place at the right time to compound capital through luck, connections, and selling ideas in return for purchase of equity. Most YC companies fail in some way. 90% of startups fail. Were those founders not smart? I think the majority are/were, they just were not lucky enough [1] [2] [3]. If your belief system and mental model cannot internalize that the deciding factor is luck over skill, well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [4] [5]. Review the data, update your priors and improve the mental model to…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by toomuchtodo

Thu, 28 May 2026 16:55:53 GMT

The scope of my comment you cite is the usual "extremely wealthy people using loopholes to avoid taxes while burdening your average joe with them instead". This is not "your math is slightly off and we're going to be punitive." This is defending against tax evasion strategies by those with the wealth and power to attempt them. If you don't believe in taxes, or don't believe the wealthy should have the majority of the burden, certainly, we will not find common ground. My mental model is "You are very wealthy because you are very lucky. The cost to you for the societal socioeconomic system…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by toomuchtodo

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:18:05 GMT

> It sounds as if you have an emotional issue with the idea that people can change their own situation. On the contrary, I am simply data informed. It sounds like you're operating from a mental model that overweighs ability in outcomes. I have provided links below to help you improve and evolve this model. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-... ("The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized") https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-... | http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 ("Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by toomuchtodo

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 14:52:58 GMT

> They aren't facts. The number of millionaires in the U.S. has exploded. Many are benefiting from the markets. It's not luck. Are you sure it's not luck? https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol... ("The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized") https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-... | Ref: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 ("Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure") https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-i... ("Analysis: If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by rojobuffalo

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 17:15:22 GMT

Agreed. If you, as the interviewer, can't ascertain an applicant's ability to do the job, after chatting with them for an hour or two, you aren't qualified to hire for that position. The idea that you can pinpoint someone's skill level (and estimate their performance potential) through additional hours-long exams is arrogant. Job performance has more to do with the environment than the incoming skill set. When it comes to promotions, there was a paper this year that won an Ig Nobel prize, which made the case that promotions are awarded at worse-than-random https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07068.pdf

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — HN submission

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 14:58:44 GMT

Talent vs. Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure

3 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by lioeters

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 21:18:29 GMT

> ECONOMICS PRIZE [ITALY] > Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda, for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest. > REFERENCE: “Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure,” Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda, Advances in Complex Systems, vol. 21, nos. 3 and 4, 2018. <https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068> > This is the second Ig Nobel Prize awarded to Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Rapisarda. The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize for Management was awarded…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — HN submission

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 12:03:49 GMT

Ig Nobel 2022 in Economics: Talent vs. Luck

1 point; 4 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — HN submission

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 07:04:30 GMT

Talent vs. Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by bko

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 23:52:00 GMT

My main issue with this narrative that work hard != success is that it looks at the upper tier of a profession. You don't have to be a CEO or a professional hockey player to be successful. It's trendy to say this for some reason, but the people saying it don't believe it. The author of the post literally has 3 degrees (undergrad, masters and MBA). He works as VP and head of M&A of a $5.2bn company. He doesn't believe this crap. He's worked hard and probably prides himself on being successful. But he peddles this crap on LI for some reason to discourage others from having any hopes or…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by elcritch

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 15:30:55 GMT

> I personally like Michael Pettis's argument that continued economic growth depends on increasing economic demand through redistributing wealth from capital (or more generally the wealthy) to labor [3], so I am skeptical of reforms that stop taxing capital. This is an important point, and is misunderstood in (US) politics and deabtes, IMHO. Supporting capitalism and taxation aren't mutually exclusive positions. Well thought out taxation is crucial to balance the inherent network effects of large corporations. There's huge network effects, especially in tech [1], that leads to less ability…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by pwinnski

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 16:50:36 GMT

Academic studies have repeatedly found that one of the single biggest determinants in success of just about any kind is luck. It is a very common misconception that hard work results in success, or that talent results in success, but that's looking at the successful from the wrong end. It is rare to find someone very lazy or completely talentless among the most successful, so it must be hard work and talent, right? No, because it's easy to find very hard-working and talented people who are not successful. In fact, according to research[0], the most successful are usually not the most…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by SonOfLilit

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 13:31:46 GMT

Whenever I see a NetLogo based paper, my suspicion is immediately raised. It's not that multiagent simulations are never good models of reality, it's that they are so hard to get right and so easy to shoot yourself in the foot with and not notice. Nonlinear dynamics are hard. Usually you write a simple model, it does something pathological like diverging to one extreme, you maybe tune the parameters a bit until it does something that fits better with your expectations, then you publish. But the behavior you observed is still pathological, dependent on fine tuning of the model parameters, and…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by GcVmvNhBsU

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 19:09:35 GMT

One of the books that I read last year, I can’t remember which [1], said that the greatest contributor to wealth over the long run is education. My unfounded assumption that explains the reasoning of why you did not experience American families reacting the same way that yours did is: the American belief in rugged individualism. I think that most Americans would say that “hard work” is the biggest contributor to wealth [2]. Being an immigrant, I guess that your family, and probably society they are from, adhered to the former belief, and that is why they took your education so seriously? [1]…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — HN submission

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 18:16:50 GMT

Talent vs. Luck:the role of randomness in success and failure

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by fullstackchris

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 01:55:20 GMT

There is an excellent paper on this, it is a combination of both luck and skill: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — HN submission

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 18:04:47 GMT

Talent vs. Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by buboard

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 17:03:29 GMT

But what did the reviewers say about the paper? (http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068) They used a normal distribution for "Talent", but that's false. There is plenty of evidence that , like everything in life , it's power-law distributed https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-myth-... http://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2018/11/16/power-laws-reve... And the assumtions of the model are rather childish: each random event either doubles or halves your capital (In real life, the multiplier can be much much higher or lower). In fact that's the most flawed point of their tiny "model": by…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by DecayingOrganic

Tue, 02 Oct 2018 09:36:21 GMT

"The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, smartness, efforts, willfulness, hard work or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence (or, more in general…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — HN submission

Tue, 10 Jul 2018 18:49:41 GMT

Talent vs. Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure

38 points; 27 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by laughingman2

Sat, 12 May 2018 06:07:00 GMT

There is this interesting paper that evaluates role of luck and talent in outcome. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 " The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by asbc

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 16:01:04 GMT

Actually, randomly could be a good funding model. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07068.pdf

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by nopinsight

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 17:00:08 GMT

A key purpose of the original paper is to inform policy to improve public funding of research [1]. Thus, to a first-order approximation, it should reflect realities. However, ... The number of lucky and unlucky events in the paper (figure 5, page 8) are each around 5-7 events per agent on average, where 'lucky' is defined as doubling the capital (or success) accumulated so far and 'unlucky' as halving it. In the real world, how many regular people/scientists have that many career-defining events? Most are quite risk-averse, especially later in their careers. Some entrepreneurs could be…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — mentioned by giardini

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 15:06:56 GMT

Instead of wasting time on a (rather biased) critique, read the original paper: "Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure" by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, A. Rapisarda https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 Are the rich wealthy because they somehow earned it? Examination reveals that this is not true and that the most extreme cases of wealth accumulation (which show a surprisingly consistent pattern across cultures) are attributable more to luck than to skill. Mark Buchanan examines this in his excellent book "The Social Atom" (pp.172-174)…

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Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — HN submission

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 17:42:44 GMT

Talent vs. Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure

100 points; 57 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — HN submission

Sun, 04 Mar 2018 20:11:13 GMT

Talent vs. Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — HN submission

Sat, 03 Mar 2018 10:28:17 GMT

Talent vs. Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — HN submission

Fri, 02 Mar 2018 13:36:36 GMT

Talent vs. Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure — HN submission

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 21:47:56 GMT

Talent vs. Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure

5 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.