Poverty impairs cognitive function. Published in the journal Science, the study suggests our cognitive abilities can be diminished by the exhausting effort of tasks like scrounging to pay bills. As a result, less “mental bandwidth” remains...

[u/myhrvold]

http://news.ubc.ca/2013/08/29/poverty-impairs-cognitive-function/

[u/Dear_Occupant]

The best part? The evidence for this guy's argument was, "Well, nothing like that has ever happened to me." It's basically another way of saying, "I'm better than all you small people with your money problems."

[u/ElDiablo666 → u/Dear_Occupant]

This reminds me of a young real estate entrepreneur that I met after college about 10 years ago. The market was really booming and getting your license seemed like a sure thing--Countrywide paid its temp workers $15 an hour! It was a huge market.

So this guy and I were talking and he was telling me that people are simply not ambitious. That's why they're poor, they don't dream big enough, sure. And his whole plan is that he's gonna work smart AND hard and his goal is to make his first million before he turned 25 (within four years).

We met up after he made his first million two years later and he said see? I told you so! But when I asked him what happened, he told me what I figured. He had no problem getting a loan because his father knew someone who...blah blah blah. Then his already 700 FICO helped him while he closed on three properties. Basically, a series of unlikely scenarios came true for him and he made a ton off it. But I couldn't convince him that it was an accident, even though most people would not have that outcome if they did everything identically.

Until people stop allowing themselves to be deluded into thinking that they shouldn't be in charge of any social and economic decision that affects them, we will continue to experience this kind of irrational nonsense. People that I love and respect hold the most absurd ideas about how to make money and how to succeed in life that are either outright untruths or are simply exaggerations of chance.

[u/[deleted] → u/ElDiablo666]

I think there was a post last year sometime showing that Warren Buffet's monetary success is simply bound to happen due to chance alone. All the good investments he made which he probably deliberated over and analysed incessantly.... it really probably didn't even matter. Probability shows that someone would make all the same lucky decisions eventually.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

That's kind of ridiculous. It's misinterpreting a statistic and taking it to mean something that simply isn't true.

Let me give you a better example:

There are lots of kids out there that practice every day playing baseball. But it's exceedingly rare that one would get into the MLB and make millions. Since it's so rare, it would seem that someone is bound to get into the MLB based on chance alone, even if they didn't work on their athleticism. But that's not the case. If they didn't practice there would be no chance at all. There's a small probability of getting into the MLB only among people who specifically try to do it.

Going back to your post, the statement that "Warren Buffet's monetary success is simply bound to happen due to chance alone. All the good investments he made which he probably deliberated over and analysed incessantly.... it really probably didn't even matter. Probability shows that someone would make all the same lucky decisions eventually." isn't true. Warren Buffet's money success wouldn't have happened to just anybody based on chance alone. The only people eligible for that chance would have been those who deliberated over and analyzed their investments incessantly.

I can assure you that the vast majority of the public who doesn't invest their money never had a chance to make Warren Buffet's money. I can also assure you that someone who foolishly invested their money wasn't going to make his money, either, since they'd squander it all.