Re:Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are tal...
by philwelch on Monday August 08, 2022 @12:57PM
(#32388022)
> Being smart and working hard will do absolutely nothing to make most people richer, unless they work hard in the specific and limited ways that maximise wealth.
If you’re smart enough, you can figure that out.
> If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy.
That becomes more and more true as your society approaches the state of nature that your namesake discussed, but it’s less and less true in free societies, and as a consequence, those free societies become richer societies.
Re:Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are tal...
by mv4 on Thursday August 11, 2022 @10:59AM
(#32426750)
Re: If you’re smart enough, you can figure that out.
- being able to spot situations that can be exploited has little do do with intelligence. Many smart people never figure that out.
Many of those ways happen to be morally questionable at best, and criminal at worst.
An artistic genius is very likely to lose out financially to an averagely intelligent slum landlord no matter how hard they work. Because the opportunities to make money from artistic genius are heavily skewed towards failure, while for slum landlords they're heavily skewed towards success.
The handful of exceptions in the arts are survivor bias. No one hears about the many more failures, by definition.
There is no sense in which wealth is a level playing field. If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy.
The successful ultra-rich are notorious for greed, selfishness, and lack of empathy. Go to any social event for the ultra-rich and you'll find a disproportionate number of criminals, narcissists, and other kinds of damaged people.
Those are the qualities that make someone a "success". IQ certainly helps, but if you lack the pathological motivation to exploit others it's not going to get you far on its own.