Maybe we should examine as an industry why so many mediocre men get elevated to positions of incredible power and run great businesses into the ground.

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atmosx 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Luck (primarily) and connections. We feel psychologically safe believing there is some determinism _in the world_. But there's none. Studies show that you can have 140 IQ and still end up homeless if circumstances are poor.

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gbacon 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Luck (primarily)

This is an extraordinary claim. What is your extraordinary evidence?

Why didn’t it rain today? Good luck! Why was Michael Jordan so skillful at basketball? Just good luck. Why is Linux better than Windows? Good luck! Why did VMS fall off? Bad luck. Why does 2 + 2 = 4? I guess just good luck.

These are all laughably incurious, superstitious answers. Other factors must be at play. Yes, identifying them may require hard thinking and concentration.

Otherwise, what is democracy other than selecting the luckiest? We already had strange women lying in ponds distributing swords for that — and much cheaper and quicker to boot.

> Studies show that you can have 140 IQ and still end up homeless if circumstances are poor.

We’ve likely all known people who were book smart but didn’t have good walking-around sense. Everyone knows others who make poor or destructive choices. The interpersonal skills, soft skills, and emotional intelligence being dismissed in this thread as mere “luck and connections” may be severely lacking. The person may have poor mental health or addiction.

Are you using determinism in the automata theory sense or some other?

	▲	thwarted 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Luck here isn't referring to some invisible dice roll whose randomness can not be explained or is just a correlation (like no rain on your wedding day would be), it's refers to variables that the person can not influence. Being born into a rich family is lucky for that baby, and the baby can't have done anything about it.
	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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Borg3 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Connections... It was always like this..

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lkjdsklf 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The same way mediocre men have been elevated for thousands of years.

A combination of being in the right place at the right time and connections to people with money

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nsjdjdekkddk 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

surely you can make a couple billion from mothing given you are so smart

	▲	Flatterer3544 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Who said you need to be great in an area to tell the difference between competent and incompetent? While it helps, it doesn't take a genius to tell the difference. Picking the great from the great apart, that'd be another story all together.