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International research team discovers career hot streaks occur in science, art and film:
A team of researchers [...] examined the works of nearly 30,000 scientists, artists and film directors to learn if high-impact works in those fields came in streaks.
According to Lu Liu, a doctoral student in the College of IST and member of the research team, they found a universal pattern.
"Around 90 percent of professionals in those industries have at least one hot hand, and some of them have two or even three," she said.
[...] Liu says that there are two previous schools of thought regarding hot streaks in individual careers. According to the "Matthew effect," the more famous you become, the more likely you'll have success later, which supports the existence of a hot streak. The other school of thought -- the random impact rule -- implies that the success of a career is primarily random and is primarily driven by levels of productivity.
"Our findings provide a different point of view regarding individual careers," said Liu. "We found a period when an individual performs better than his normal career, and that the timing of a hot streak is random."
The researchers also wanted to learn if individuals were more productive during their hot streak periods, which last an average of four to five years. Unexpectedly, they were not.
[...] "Individuals show no detectable change in productivity during hot streaks, despite the fact that their outputs in this period are significantly better than the median, suggesting that there is an endogenous shift in individual creativity when the hot streak occurs," wrote the team in their paper.
[...] As the research shows that hot streaks do in fact exist in creative careers, the researchers hope to apply the research methods to more domains, including musicians, inventors and entrepreneurs.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 11 2018, @08:30PM (12 children)
I'd counter this with: good luck is far more effective, and common, than properly applied intelligence. Properly applied intelligence can bootstrap you up from any reasonable starting point to a lower-middle class existence. Without incorporation of significant risk (and therefore elements of luck impacting your success), you're not going to break out much above the middle.
For better or worse, we're all pretty well thrown into the risk-taker category by today's economy: want more than 0.5%APR on your savings? Put it at risk in the market. Want a good paying secure job? Pick one, nobody gets both anymore, and security in employment is rapidly approaching extinction in the US economy, even people starting out in government work today aren't "guaranteed" secure employment for the next 4 decades. (Caveat: of course, if your net worth is in 8+ figures, you can name your terms when you take a job and therefore ensure that the time you spend in that job will be handsomely remunerated. That's not intelligence, that's financial power. When you have the net worth to do that, you're an anomaly - not comparable to those without financial power.)
Circling back to TFA: there are literally millions of people out there in any "creative" job, so when you identify a successful "serial entrepreneur" or similar, you likely have found someone who isn't so stupid that they screw up everything they touch, but as for whether they're any smarter or strategically superior to the next guy who failed 4 times in a row - that's not a conclusion you can really draw without taking a hard look at both of them and evaluating both of their moves in the context not of their final outcome, but of the probable risk/reward choices they made with the information available at the time. A 4 times successful player could well have consistently made quantifiably "worse" decisions that just happened to turn out for the good based on things beyond anybody's knowledge or control, while the 4 time loser could have been making excellent decisions with lower apparent risk and higher apparent potential gain, and still been kicked in the teeth with unforeseeable bad luck every time. But: Ain't nobody got time for that, it's a whole lot easier to just look at balance sheets, exit valuations, etc. and develop a metric that incorporates unknowable, uncontrollable luck into it, on the theory that everybody plays in the same field so it all works out in the end, but it really doesn't. If you divide the pool, those in the top half will be "smarter actors," on average than those in the bottom half, but there are plenty of actors in the bottom half of the pool who could have out performed the top players, if they had comparable good luck.
Then we get around to the wunderkind halo effect, where someone who has succeeded spectacularly in the past is expected to succeed again spectacularly in the future and is therefore granted more opportunity for the later success. My favorite recent movie illustration of this is "Gold".
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:44AM (11 children)
So solve that problem.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 12 2018, @10:48AM (10 children)
If that problem could be solved with intelligence alone, I'd like to think it would have been solved ages ago.
From my perspective, it appears that only superior financial power has any hope of solving that problem, and from the perspective of those with superior financial power, that is not a problem at all.
Sort of a perverse extension of the Icahn frat boy principle.
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(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 12 2018, @11:03AM (9 children)
I meant the commonness not the effectiveness. Teach people to actually engage their brains when making important life choices. Hell, spend all four years of highschool doing nothing but that and PE for all I care. There's very little that's terribly useful there to the vast majority of people anyway.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 12 2018, @11:49AM (8 children)
Where's my incentive to do that? If I teach everyone else all my tricks, then my tricks will no longer be an advantage (for me.)
The difference between application of intelligence and application of financial power is that intelligence can be freely and legally copied, whereas financial power is predicated on control of scarce/valuable resources.
Drilling a well to access "free" water underground is an "intelligent" thing to do (except when said water is laced with arsenic and other such problems...) However, when everybody knows the trick, not only does the water cease to be a scarce and therefore valuable resource, eventually this broad application of "intelligence" taps out the groundwater resource too. Meanwhile, the "intelligent" people with their ready access to water breed like rats. Short term: gain for intelligent people, long term: devastation of the ecosystem.
The only reason that a person who moderately applies intelligent decision making can rise to slightly above the middle today is because so many people do not apply even moderately intelligent decision making. If everybody started acting smart, smart would no longer be an advantage.
Fluff movie recommendation: The Duff. Social statement from the movie: geeks and nerds used to be worthless outcasts, now they basically rule the world (unspoken: through the application of intelligence.)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 12 2018, @12:11PM (7 children)
I'm not saying give away all your secret ninja movies, I'm saying teach them to at least engage their brain when making life choices that are going to greatly affect their position on the income scale. You know, like acquiring a marketable skill instead of working a McJob as a middle-aged person. Saving for retirement. Saving period. Buying real estate instead of going into debt to make your car look this fucking stupid [universalcarlifts.com].
There are very few legitimate reasons for a healthy person of even average intelligence to live in poverty. There are even less for an intelligent person to be below the median income. Once you get the people who are capable of elevating themselves to do so, you create greatly increased demand for the efforts of those who aren't capable of pulling themselves up off the bottom; you effectively raise the floor towards the median by reducing supply and increasing demand for those sitting on it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday September 12 2018, @01:39PM (6 children)
Where I grew up, acquiring a marketable skill like engineering, as opposed to screwing off or spending daddy's money on a fine arts degree in film-making or music production or even something esoteric like Physics, did seem like a Ninja move - not exactly secret, but less than the majority. The Physics major obviously had technical learning ability and, so, devout atheist that he was, ended up managing the computer systems of the Arch diocese. Others who could have benefited from actually learning something, or at least turning their multiple years' income worth of tuition into a valuable BS transcript, seemed mostly randomly distributed across whatever looked interesting at the time. As for saving/smart financial decisions: I've got an in-law who married at 18, immediately bought a living room set of furniture on credit as soon as they would give it to her, ended up paying >$20K over the next 15 years for the modest sofa chairs and end tables that were in fashion at the time, then found a religion (JW) that reassured her that it's the world's fault, not her own, and it will all work out when the rapture comes, any day now. But, consider all the people who make their living by extending and collecting credit on less-than-intelligent decision makers... what would they do for a living without that market opportunity?
But, if even 51% of people behave intelligently, at least some of them will be - by definition - below the median income.
What I've noticed as I age is that a lot of the formerly "kids' jobs" are now being taken by idiot boomers who let themselves get into a position of needing that kind of work. Not sayin' that the boomers' kids are any smarter, just that the boomers' parents apparently were.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 13 2018, @10:40AM (5 children)
By definition, no. By all probability, yes. We're talking median not mean, so it's technically possible for 98% of the population to be of median income. Realistically it would just raise the median significantly and give us back a strong middle class.
Boomers parents were epic badass fonts of wisdom and industriousness compared to anything that's come since.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:09PM (4 children)
I'll grant that the dictionary definition is misleading. The mechanics of calculating it [mathgoodies.com] make it clearer. In a set of 7 numbers, one is the median, three are equal to or above the median, three are equal to or below the median. Always, it's in the definition of how it's calculated. If you raise the set size to seven billion and 1, then there are 3.5 billion above or equal and 3.5 billion below or equal.
Sadly, I'd have to agree with you there. Something about living through the depression, the real one where people actually died from economic hardship, probably had a lot to do with that.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:16PM (3 children)
You're neglecting the possibility of multiple numbers being the same and the number of significant figures you're able to claim. For the purposes of this discussion, unless you're just in the mood to be pedantic which I totally sympathize with, the median is best defined as the precise median plus or minus five percent or so.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:33PM (2 children)
True enough, and I was just thinking about "binning" net worth in $1000 increments making it possible to truly have a significant number of people exactly hit the median bin, because calculating net worth to the penny is even sillier.
I suppose my far-horizon point is that: while the whole economy is not a zero-sum-game, a whole lot of it is, especially the parts that are influenced by intelligent decision making on the part of the individual consumer. When a consumer makes a better deal on a loan, they're essentially taking profit from the bank and its shareholders, which is a very good thing for the consumer, but not so great for that part of my 401(k) that's invested in financial products. Money "wasted" on bankruptcy and similar bad decisions is more circulated among the various hands that handle those situations than it is created or destroyed. I'd much rather have an economy where banking, insurance, collections, and lawyers shrink by 90% and we put them to work developing infrastructure, cleaning up the environment, right-sizing development, generating entertainment, whatever, but... this is the system we've got, and just having people make intelligent decisions isn't going to directly lift the whole economy up until those parasite industries shrink and retrain into things that actually do contribute - and I'd guess there's a generational lag between giving the parasites less opportunity and actually training more people into non-parasitic professions.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:46PM (1 child)
It's institutional not generational. The parents of the boomers were the last to teach these things to their children as a generation. The boomers were able but decided not to for moral reasons. If we ever want to unfuck ourselves it's going to have to be taught in schools. Breeding-aged people are simply incapable of teaching it because they don't understand it themselves.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 14 2018, @01:01AM
Good luck with that - my parents were teachers, one a PhD education professor - according to them the deck is stacked for failure and nobody cares.
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