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Comment by antimagic | Hacker News Reader

Huh?

"His points are usually correct (though obvious to many); in this case his point is that adversity often breeds success in ambitious people."

No. Just no. Did you not read the article? The study demonstrating this "point" was a low-powered study. A more highly powered study failed to reproduce the result. Now, at best you could say that the result only applies to "ambitious people", but that remains to be proved - after the Canadian result, the null hypothesis has to be that making the task superficially more difficult has no impact on people's ability to complete the task. In other words, Gladwell's hypothesis is unproven and unjustified.

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Actually, you (and the jealous author of the critical article) are comparing apples to oranges. It is a safe assumption that a group of random students at a public Canadian university are not nearly as ambitious as a group of students at an impossibly competitive university such as Princeton. The study does in fact show that adversity often breeds success in ambitious people.

So, the results were as expected. The ambitious group was inspired by the challenge. A group of average public college students were neither inspired nor deterred by it. And I would bet that my house that a group of homeless people would be significantly deterred by it. It is an apples to oranges comparison that in no way disproves Gladwell's hypothesis.

"It is a safe assumption that a group of random students at a public Canadian university are not nearly as ambitious as a group of students at an impossibly competitive university such as Princeton."

No, it is not a safe assumption. It remains to be proven, and that's assuming you can even come up with a decent objective definition of "ambition". Your post-hoc reasoning is exactly the type of reasoning that is taken to task in the article -

Gladwell: Making a task harder makes people perform better.

Academia: No, actually, when tested with a higher-powered study, this effect disappeared.

You: (with no evidence, and only after the release of the Canadian study refuting Gladwell) Oh, but the result only applies to ambitious people.

That argument is weak - it's fitting the facts to the hypothesis, and not the other way round. With the available data, the only thing you can really say is that perhaps a study needs to be done to better understand the why the Princeton study and the Canadian study gave different results (statistical fluke? different ambition? cultural bias?)

So you're saying, then, that there are no differences between those that choose to attend a public college and those that attend an elite university? That those two groups of people wouldn't perform differently in studies focused on performance? That is nonsense.

He isn't saying that at all. I think his main point is you are talking crap (though he articulated it much better than I have).

And Princeton (in undergrad) isn't "intellectually" elite, it is financially elite. I don't think you can derive anything about student "ambitiousness" just from how wealthy they are, and wealth is pretty much the only thing that separates Princeton undergrad student from a public college student.

Caveat: I'm assuming the study was done on undergrads, postgrad princeton is different beast.

He is saying that. Further, it doesn't appear that we're talking about the same Princeton. From http://abt.cm/GOXrfh :

"Princeton University is one of the most selective colleges in the country.....Most students who got into Princeton had GPAs close to a 4.0, SAT scores (CR+M+W) above 2100, and ACT composite scores above 30......many students with a 4.0 GPA and extremely high standardized test scores get rejected from Princeton. For this reason, even strong students should consider Princeton a reach school."

The results of the two studies at issue here can be swayed dramatically by the type of students participating, and each study in fact looked at two dramatically different groups of students - one matching the criteria above and one being a public college in Canada. Yet both of you have taken the position that the results of one cancels out the results of the other. You are, quite simply, wrong.

I think you need to learn more about the correlation between educational outcomes and socio-economic status (Hint: There is an extremely strong one).

Also, GPAs, SATs, and ACT composites don't measure ambition. So... I'm trying to work out what your point was...

40 people isn't a 'study' it's an anecdote.

What I am saying, is there is not enough information to draw a meaningful conclusion, which I believe the GP is also saying... You can say we are 'wrong' as much as possible, but that's just rhetoric.

No, antimagic is saying that there isn't enough evidence to conclusively demonstrate that they actually did perform better, rather than it being due to some other factor--such as random noise from the small sample size. Post hoc justification doesn't prove anything.

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