maandag, december 24, 2018

The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material 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 talent exhibit a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth - considered a proxy of success - follows typically a power law (Pareto law). Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale, and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based model, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show 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 mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our knowledge, 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. With the help of this model, several policy hypotheses are also addressed and compared to show the most efficient strategies for public funding of research in order to improve meritocracy, diversity and innovation.

Submission history

From: Alessandro Pluchino [view email]
[v1] Tue, 20 Feb 2018 11:37:02 GMT (508kb,D)
[v2] Sun, 25 Feb 2018 11:22:38 GMT (524kb,D)
[v3] Mon, 9 Jul 2018 15:02:56 GMT (2040kb,D)

Groet,

Jan

dinsdag, juni 19, 2018

Het verkeerde gelijk van – De Groene Amsterdammer

Het verkeerde gelijk van Trump – De Groene Amsterdammer

https://www.groene.nl/artikel/het-verkeerde-gelijk-van-trump

donderdag, juni 14, 2018

Grondig in Catalaans - Nederlands-Catalaans Woordenboek

Deze vertaal-site heeft blijkbaar veel van onze publicaties vergeleken om tot vertalingen te komen.

Jammer voor ze dat we niet meer zo letterlijk een op een vertalen tegenwoordig 😂

https://nl.glosbe.com/nl/ca/grondig

dinsdag, juni 05, 2018

Scrambler S | Off Road Electric Bike | Vintage Electric

https://www.vintageelectricbikes.com/pages/scrambler-s

donderdag, maart 29, 2018

Ti: Note to self: Hoe notities maken je leven verrijkt

Op De Correspondent las ik een artikel van Ernst-Jan Pfauth dat ik graag met je wil delen:

Note to self: Hoe notities maken je leven verrijkt:
https://decorrespondent.nl/7397/note-to-self-hoe-notities-maken-je-leven-verrijkt/208543621-53f01bbd