February Meetup

Note that this venue has very limited food, but they don't mind if you order food from elsewhere and bring it inside.

Discussion Topic: Marginal Individual Impacts

A recurring theme in our recent discussions has been the marginal impact that single individuals have on the world. If you're a historian, this is just another version of the Great Man vs Social Forces debate. Let's generalize this a bit and discuss more broadly how to accurately think about the marginal impact of individuals. For instance,

Are successful companies successful due to a small number of individuals in the long tail of the pareto distribution, or due to scalable processes that don't have a single point of failure?

In any domain, what is the proportion of outcomes that is explained by competence, talent, or otherwise the virtues of individuals, and what is the proportion of outcomes that is explained by chance or other unpredictable factors?

If stock market returns are normally distributed and all investors only ever invested at random, how likely is it that we would reproduce Warren Buffet's success?

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the claim that success in hockey is largely determined by your birth month, with athletes born in January having an enormous advantage. When we learn things like this - assuming this is correct - how should we adjust our priors with respect to how agency individuals have over their futures?