Entertainment is illustrative. There have been controlled studies (e.g., https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....) showing that there are sort of chaotic social dynamics influencing popularity, in that what others are paying attention to influence what someone is paying attention to, which leads to these kinds of random paths of success. Clearly there's some ability at play as well, but beyond some level, it starts to have a lot of chaotic path dependency.
I suspect a lot of fields are like this also, like academics (nowadays at least) and some other things. Maybe a lot of life is like it.
The discussions often seem to me to become oversimplified, like comparing some poor genius with access to books who overcomes it all by sheer ability, to some hypothetical other person with comparatively great education that's taken for granted. But what if that hypothetical other person is being ridiculed for liking math? Or reading books? Or what if there is no college math books around, they get bored, and go off on the wrong path? What if their interests are for something more complex in its ability determinants than math, or that someone doesn't encounter until later in life usually?
Sometimes I feel like people aren't necessarily exposed to what they are best suited for, for all sorts of reasons. This is a classic "finding a career" problem, with advice to try things until you stumble on it — the converse situation being one where you think you like a vocation and then find out later you hate it. It's not like what you're best suited to is just on a shelf for you to look at and have an immediate grasp of; it comes from having experience with it, which not everyone might have. Maybe there's an excellent potential rugby player out there who never had the opportunity to play rugby or even knows what it is.
Life is just so complex, people get in each others' way for all sorts of reasons, and corruption complicates things more.
I suspect a lot of fields are like this also, like academics (nowadays at least) and some other things. Maybe a lot of life is like it.
The discussions often seem to me to become oversimplified, like comparing some poor genius with access to books who overcomes it all by sheer ability, to some hypothetical other person with comparatively great education that's taken for granted. But what if that hypothetical other person is being ridiculed for liking math? Or reading books? Or what if there is no college math books around, they get bored, and go off on the wrong path? What if their interests are for something more complex in its ability determinants than math, or that someone doesn't encounter until later in life usually?
Sometimes I feel like people aren't necessarily exposed to what they are best suited for, for all sorts of reasons. This is a classic "finding a career" problem, with advice to try things until you stumble on it — the converse situation being one where you think you like a vocation and then find out later you hate it. It's not like what you're best suited to is just on a shelf for you to look at and have an immediate grasp of; it comes from having experience with it, which not everyone might have. Maybe there's an excellent potential rugby player out there who never had the opportunity to play rugby or even knows what it is.
Life is just so complex, people get in each others' way for all sorts of reasons, and corruption complicates things more.