The Advantage of Generational Knowledge (2022) | Hacker News Reader

The Advantage of Generational Knowledge (2022)

neuroleadership.com

33 pointssquircle14 comments

I do not see how this is remotely controversial - if you had trashy parents who spent their time partying and fighting the neighbors while living paycheck to paycheck, you probably have a harder path to success than if your parents had stable employment and taught you how to save and invest.

Does that mean that people can't come from nothing and achieve great success - not at all - and it's likely that you know someone who has. But as the article points out, "in general", if you grew up in a situation that normalized behaviors that are likely to result in better educational and work outcomes you will have an advantage.

Generational knowledge, and perhaps more importantly, generational treasuring of knowledge have made a huge difference in the outcomes in my family members that I have had access to across four generations.

The parents who did not pass that on raised children who fared far worse than those who did.

The article isn't describing anything related to knowledge unless they mean that as a euphemism for knowledge of the unwritten social signals for how to to advertise your class (which isn't even the main thing). This is talking about cultural capital. Like financial capital, families can accumulate it over several generations.

Particularly for CEO-style jobs which are relatively close to modern aristocrats - there isn't any special knowledge floating around generationally. CEO skills aren't even hereditary. Being recognised as being in the pool of people who are expected to be CEOs is though.

This walks the fine line between explaining how class differences work, and justifying the perpetuation of them. Clearly we don't have a meritocracy in the US, especially at the higher levels of income. I'm not traveled enough to comment on the rest of the world.

> This walks the fine line between explaining how class differences work, and justifying the perpetuation of them.

Had the same thought. And there’s also another question to consider I think: is it really beneficial for the company to further incentivize schmoozing? In my experience this focus on politics as the determinant of career progression can be very detrimental to the organization.

> ...and justifying the perpetuation of them.

Did you skim the second half of the article? Maybe I'm overlooking a "/s?, but it seems to be a call to action and plan (yes, vague) for making sure that those "generational knowledge" advantages are offered to 100% of a firm's employees.

We do in fact have a meritocracy here in the US for the most part. I don't know how you can say "clearly" we don't. Except for a handful of rich goofs, everyone is generally rewarded proportional to their skills, abilities, output, and impact. You can also work hard and get ahead, which is harder in places that are deeply corrupt. I do think executive-level pay is arbitrarily high but it needs to scale up with the level of responsibility you have. CEOs are rarely the most talented people ever, but to attract actually talented CEOs you have to pay significantly more than they could make doing something else (like starting another business or working as an individual contributor).

I see no evidence of a positive correlation between hard work and high pay. It seems to be a negative correlation.

> but it needs to scale up with the level of responsibility you have

I hear this phrase a lot.

Why do you think so?

I said it in that comment. But specifically, if more responsibility comes with the same or less reward than less responsibility, nobody rational will be motivated to do it. The degree of responsibility is somewhat subjective, but again you need to consider what else the qualified person might be doing that is more rewarding than working for you.

I said it in another reply but I should mention it here too. Not paying people well for their level of responsibility encourages corruption.

Not op but I guess the assumption here is that people would rather have less responsibility so need to be compensated to have more? I'm not sure this is true, but don't know if responsibility is its own reward. Maybe the status that responsibility conveys is?

People in general would rather have less responsibility if there is no value added by taking more. This is extra important when the person is highly qualified, because in theory they could do their own thing. So you have to pay more than that.

There aren't many people for whom status alone is enough. Why should anyone take on more problems to end up with less money than if they had assumed less problems?

There is another problem with not paying people. It encourages corruption. When people feel they aren't paid fairly, they will do all kinds of awful things.

I was a bit disappointed by this site. By the title, I expected it to be about the importance of apprenticeship and mentor-like relationships, and how to use them to improve our lives. Instead, it starts with the racial implications of cultural transmission (Significant, but not very novel), and from there proceeds to give fairly boring advice about how to improve mentorship and cultural transmission within an org. These are good tips, but also very common business advice. What's really going to set an org apart are the implementation details and the thought they put into these things... which is generally not well documented, or when it is documented comes in book form rather than article form.

Generational knowledge is no doubt important, but this article is more about schmoozing than about the power of such knowledge. Schmoozing is a bs skill that fake people do, and the world is worse off for it taking away from meritocracy.

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