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Comment by drawnwren | Hacker News Reader

Yes. To go along with this, the other misstep I see frequently is the inability to differentiate between statistical distributions and the individual. Your friend dropped out of college to become a carpenter and is now worth $100m? That's incredible. I'd take fairly bad odds that the P(Salary>$!00k|Dropped out of college to become a carpenter) is lower than P(Salary>$100k|Graduated with 4.0 gpa). It would be harder to statistically analyze, but I'd take even worse odds that the fellow who dropped out of college would not be too much worse off if he had stayed and graduated with a 4.0. IMO, the cost of a high gpa is fairly low.

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The GP explicitly reverses the conditional probability

> the most financially successful people I know had mediocre college grades

is saying something about p(mediocre grades|successful) i.e. among the people I know who are successful, a surprising number had bad grades.

where the interesting question, given the chronology of the two events is, as you point out, p(successful|mediocre grades)

Yeah, both the distribution of highly successful people and people with high academic performance are heavily skewed and the slightest decorrelation should result in the phenomenon of heuristically seeming independent.

In an ideally meritocratic world, we should see fewer Harvard grads and magnis cum laudibus occupying the top of the industries.

> the cost of a high gpa is fairly low

That's right. I started out nearly flunking out in college, and eventually graduated with honors. The difference was not busting my ass studying, but more effective time management. I had as much free time as before.

I learned that being able to sit down on your desk and focus on a topic or problem set and learn through trial and error with no distractions for hours is what will determine if you get good grades or not, and it's becoming extremely hard to do so. Most of my friends resort to drugs to focus but for me, that does not prefer drugs because it makes me feel artificial, it's been tough - it's like strengthening muscles in your brain in order to focus for long periods of time and those muscles for me are weak.

> Most of my friends resort to drugs to focus but for me, that does not prefer drugs because it makes me feel artificial, it's been tough - it's like strengthening muscles in your brain in order to focus for long periods of time and those muscles for me are weak.

This is desirable. People who use psychostimulants to focus are using it as a crutch.

You can train your mind to focus, it just requires a larger time investment than popping a stim.

Definitely! I should have started earlier in regard to training my mind to focus. Being in college, it seems I don't have the upper hand because so. It's all good though - I sort of argue that taking psycho-stimulants means you are entangled in that toxic cultural thinking of always going and being in the noise. I suppose then there's something sweet about failing a course without using psycho-stimulants.

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