Group rationality diary, 1/9/13

cata

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of January 7th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit
Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to everyone who contributes! Happy New Year to folks; my resolution is to always post these on Monday evenings instead of letting them slip to Tuesday or Wednesday : >

Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of January 7th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit
Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
Tried doing any of the above and failed

Thanks to everyone who contributes! Happy New Year to folks; my resolution is to always post these on Monday evenings instead of letting them slip to Tuesday or Wednesday : >

Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.

I'd like you to drill down a bit on what you mean when you talk about these probabilities, because I think you may be glossing over the information that really answers your question.

It seems that there are at least three different reasons why people would say following a given career path leads to a low probability of a desired outcome.

The first is that the supplied probability information is giving an incomplete picture of the situation. If 0.001% of people attempting this path succeed and it just so happens that this 0.001% happen to be the only ones whose parents run multinational corporations, then the problem isn't that "the probability of success is low," the problem is that "the probability of success for you is zero." If this is the case, just lose hope already.

The second possibility is that success only happens to 0.001% of the participants because there are only a discrete number of pots of gold and way too many people chasing rainbows. This only implies that the probability of a randomly selected individual, with no prior information, would be 0.001%. This does not imply that the probability of you finding a pot of gold is 0.001%, if you happen to know that you have some advantage or disadvantage relative to your peers. If you know what types of things you could be doing to increase your odds of finding a pot of gold, then do those things and ignore the naysayers. However, it sounds like the problem is that your field of choice involves either a lot of inherent uncertainty about what qualities lead to success, or a total glut of maximally-qualified peers, so this may not help or may not apply

The third possibility is that there really is a dominant effectively-random aspect to the situation, something which you literally cannot usefully engage with. I am honestly having a hard time thinking of things in the real world other than actual lotteries where this is strictly the case.

My point, in sum, is that talking about the probability of success can be misleading. It is often intentionally used to mislead people when making career choices - sayin "Your probability of making over $100k/yr with this degree is 10%!" when in reality your probability of making over $100k/yr is actually 80% if you went to an Ivy League school and 2% if you didn't.

Hope this helped in some way.

Right, yes, those factors definitely do affect people's odds in my field. The facts that my parents aren't major players and that I didn't go to the right schools definitely hurts my chances. However, those aren't the only determining factors. Many people who did go to the "right" schools have not succeeded and many people who did not, have.

One major factor, however, is my age. Some say that it doesn't matter, that I'm still young, but the majority of people who succeed in this business get their first significant job in their 20s. Having just t... (read more)