Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by AmericanChopper 2895 days ago
>What kind of evidence? How do you define success?

Scientific evidence, and in every possibly way you could define success.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/

>This article investigates how personality and cognitive ability relate to measures of objective success (income and wealth) and subjective success (life satisfaction, positive affect, and lack of negative affect) in a representative sample of 9,646 American adults. In cross-sectional analyses controlling for demographic covariates, cognitive ability, and other Big Five traits, conscientiousness demonstrated beneficial associations of small-to-medium magnitude with all success outcomes.

This is only one example, these results are replicated in many, many other studies.

>Society and civilization are built around discipline and order, but it doesn't mean you require those qualities to have success.

Conforming to societies expectations really has nothing to do with this. No matter what it is you want to achieve in life, and no matter how passionate you might be about it, any worthwhile archievement in life requires discipline. Relationships, art, sports, philosophy, career... Achievement in any of those areas requires discipline.

Even if society was in a total state of disorder, you’d still need discipline to get what you want from life.

1 comments

I have a hard time with psychology as a science, it was showed many studies were not reproducible. I like psychology, but studying success and finding that discipline=success really seems like using some layman vocabulary to tell people the source of why they're unsuccessful in life, which reminds me of motivational speaking, which I despise with passion. Diagnosing people with lack of discipline is more a questions of morals, ideology of life and philosophy than science. It's not something you can do or do with results, and often it will just be about motivational speaking, which is often scamming.

Conscientious people also often are conformists, which to me is not a good thing.

"Big Five personality traits" and the HEXACO models seems like pseudo science to me, because I don't think you can precisely define those things with a study of behavior, and come with relevant and applicable notions of those metrics.

We are in an age of the study of AI, and psychology sounds like it's the alchemy of the study of the brain. It might work in some places, but I don't think we can rely on it. Worse, I hardly think you can use psychology in a thoughtful process of helping people without sounding like a madman.