Carl, you name a lot of factors as going into income and occupational status. What are your estimates for their respective effect sizes and correlations? I'm skeptical of the 'enormous amounts of noise' claim remaining the case after your list plus initial socio-economic endowment, health, specific skills and possibly a few other factors are accounted for. In fact, I'd expect the uncertainty due noise to be far less than the uncertainty in between person estimates of occupational status, a variable which different groups would measure quite differently from one-another.
Also, estimates of the causal relationships between the factors in success would be nice.
I'm skeptical of the 'enormous amounts of noise' claim
Trivially, look at the wealth of Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs. Most of Peter Thiel's wealth relative to other past tech CEOs comes from one great hit at Facebook. Even entrepreneurs who have succeeded at past VC-backed startups are only moderately more likely to succeed (acquisition, IPO, large size) than new ones. Financiers vary hugely in lifetime career success based on market conditions on Wall Street when they finished school, on which product groups have ups and downs when, and which risky bets ha...
LW doesn't seem to have a discussion of the article Epiphany Addiction, by Chris at succeedsocially. First paragraph:
I like that article because it describes a dangerous failure mode of smart people. One example was the self-help blog of Phillip Eby (pjeby), where each new post seemed to bring new amazing insights, and after a while you became jaded. An even better, though controversial, example could be Eliezer's Sequences, if you view them as a series of epiphanies about AI research that didn't lead to much tangible progress. (Please don't make that statement the sole focus of discussion!)
The underlying problem seems to be that people get a rush of power from neat-sounding realizations, and mistake that feeling for actual power. I don't know any good remedy for that, but being aware of the problem could help.