<story><title>Why brilliant people lose their touch</title><url>http://timharford.com/2019/06/why-brilliant-people-lose-their-touch/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mntmoss</author><text>This is related to the general &amp;quot;is it luck or is it skill&amp;quot; question: At the broadest scales, luck increasingly explains every factor of experience. But in the everyday situation you can always point to factors of skill, until you get down to the most raw performance indicators of speed, strength, reflexes, etc.: then it becomes luck, unless you have a way of training those things, improving them with nutrition, pharmaceuticals etc. And then it becomes skill again, until you are limited by stuff inherent to a human body, and then it could be luck that you have long swimmer arms or bodybuilder genetics. You can then switch to considering mechanical assistance and developing original inventions, and now you are considering mental performance. It goes on and on like that.&lt;p&gt;The most practical thing I&amp;#x27;ve found to do, in light of this problem, is to focus on developing better feedback: success and failure signals for each problem that you can use to summarize how you are doing. Then the skill&amp;#x2F;luck question becomes less reliant on external comparison and more on inner growth - hence more in control, more skill-driven.&lt;p&gt;But as a society our measures are mostly external. If someone succeeds, that&amp;#x27;s all we see.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>godelski</author><text>As to luck there&amp;#x27;s an old saying that I really like: the harder I work the luckier I get.&lt;p&gt;How I interpret this it that working hard increases your skills. If you are more skillful you are more able to take advantage of lucky situations you have. We all have lucky situations, some more than others (we can even say privilege plays a large role here). But here&amp;#x27;s the thing, if you don&amp;#x27;t have the skills to take advantage of these situations then they are useless.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s make up an egregious example. Let&amp;#x27;s say you are working on battery powered rockets that use AI. If you one day meet Elon Musk at your local grocery store and somehow strike up a conversation then he&amp;#x27;s probably going to be very interested in you and your background. He&amp;#x27;ll probably try to keep in contact with you and maybe offer you a job. Now let&amp;#x27;s consider without the skill. Well you met Elon Musk which is pretty cool, but you&amp;#x27;re probably not going to get a job.&lt;p&gt;It isn&amp;#x27;t so much luck vs skill, but the combination of the two. I would be willing to bet that there is not a single millionaire (yes, that low) that can&amp;#x27;t chalk up a significant portion of their wealth to something that others would consider luck. Such as family&amp;#x2F;friend&amp;#x27;s connections, stumbling into a situation, taking jobs that lead to other jobs in the right way, etc (this is why the specific wording of the previous sentence. Because most don&amp;#x27;t notice these kinds of things and when looking from the inside we notice the skill part and not the luck. Because we did in fact work hard, and you know... Human psychology)</text></comment>
<story><title>Why brilliant people lose their touch</title><url>http://timharford.com/2019/06/why-brilliant-people-lose-their-touch/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mntmoss</author><text>This is related to the general &amp;quot;is it luck or is it skill&amp;quot; question: At the broadest scales, luck increasingly explains every factor of experience. But in the everyday situation you can always point to factors of skill, until you get down to the most raw performance indicators of speed, strength, reflexes, etc.: then it becomes luck, unless you have a way of training those things, improving them with nutrition, pharmaceuticals etc. And then it becomes skill again, until you are limited by stuff inherent to a human body, and then it could be luck that you have long swimmer arms or bodybuilder genetics. You can then switch to considering mechanical assistance and developing original inventions, and now you are considering mental performance. It goes on and on like that.&lt;p&gt;The most practical thing I&amp;#x27;ve found to do, in light of this problem, is to focus on developing better feedback: success and failure signals for each problem that you can use to summarize how you are doing. Then the skill&amp;#x2F;luck question becomes less reliant on external comparison and more on inner growth - hence more in control, more skill-driven.&lt;p&gt;But as a society our measures are mostly external. If someone succeeds, that&amp;#x27;s all we see.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alexpetralia</author><text>My theory: the tighter the causal feedback loop, the more agency you have (or perceive to have). For example if you want to knock over a cup, you can do that.&lt;p&gt;But if you want to knock over a cup across the world, or become rich overnight, this is a very complex feedback loop, so you exercise less agency (therefore more luck).</text></comment>