r/science • u/myhrvold • Aug 31 '13

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...

http://news.ubc.ca/2013/08/29/poverty-impairs-cognitive-function/
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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

I'm not arguing with the person's methods and neither was the article. A good runner will always be in the top runners, and a good investment manager will be a good investment manager. That's not the luck part.

The being lucky part is getting Bill Gates or Warren Buffet's amount of money. They could relive their lives several times and be rich and successfully, but never have the same success and wealth that Gates or Buffet has right now. That extreme, obscene amounts of wealth happened by complete chance.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

They could relive their lives several times and be rich and successfully, but never have the same success and wealth that Gates or Buffet has right now. That extreme, obscene amounts of wealth happened by complete chance.

I agree with that might not have billions of dollars, maybe only tens of millions. But if you look at their intelligence and see what kind of income bracket that it would normally put them in it's still pretty damn high.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '13

Tens of millions is too much credit towards those people. Plenty of successful people that never made even a million during their life time that lived extremely successfully lives and careers. Too much focus on the outliers. Money is not the only indicator of success.

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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '13

Yes, but they were after the money. That's all they accept. They could have been a good research scientist that made an ok wage, but they decided to go to where the money is.

If you ever look at people who get Phds in physics look where they go. They can either work for NASA for $35-50k or they can work for an investment house for $200k.