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TALENT VERSUS LUCK: THE ROLE OF RANDOMNESS IN SUCCESS AND FAILURE
Advances in Complex Systems ( IF 0.4 ) Pub Date : 2018-08-07 , DOI: 10.1142/s0219525918500145
ALESSANDRO PLUCHINO 1, 2 , ALESSIO EMANUELE BIONDO 3 , ANDREA RAPISARDA 1, 2, 4
Affiliation  

The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is mainly due, 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 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, talent and personal qualities) exhibits a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth — often considered as a proxy of success — follows typically a power law (Pareto law), with a large majority of poor people and a very small number of billionaires. Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale (the average talent or intelligence), and the scale-invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, our simple agent-based model shows 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 averagely talented but sensibly luckier individuals. As far as we know, 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. We also compare several policy hypotheses to show the most efficient strategies for public funding of research, aiming to improve meritocracy, diversity of ideas and innovation.

中文翻译:

天赋与运气:随机性在成功和失败中的作用

在高度竞争的西方文化中,很大程度上占主导地位的精英主义范式植根于这样一种信念,即成功主要(如果不完全是)归因于个人素质,例如才能、智慧、技能、聪明、努力、任性、努力工作或冒险。有时,我们愿意承认,一定程度的运气也可以在取得重大成功方面发挥作用。但是,事实上,低估外部力量在个人成功故事中的重要性是相当普遍的。众所周知,智力(或更一般地说,人才和个人素质)在人群中呈现高斯分布,而财富的分布——通常被认为是成功的代表——通常遵循幂律(帕累托定律) , 绝大多数穷人和极少数亿万富翁。具有典型规模(平均才能或智力)的输入正态分布与输出的规模不变分布之间的这种差异表明,一些隐藏的因素在幕后起作用。在本文中,我们建议这种成分只是随机性。特别是,我们基于代理的简单模型表明,如果确实需要某种程度的才能才能在生活中取得成功,那么最有才华的人几乎永远不会达到成功的最高峰,被平均才华但更幸运的人超越个人。据我们所知,这种违反直觉的结果——尽管在大量文献中的字里行间隐含暗示——在这里首次被量化。它揭示了根据所达到的成功水平来评估功绩的有效性,并强调了将过多的荣誉或资源分配给最终可能比其他人更幸运的人的风险。我们还比较了几个政策假设,以展示公共资助研究的最有效策略,旨在提高精英管理、思想多样性和创新。
更新日期:2018-08-07
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