Kind: captions
Language: en
during the covid lockdown this headline
went viral nearly half of men say they
do most of the homeschooling
three percent of women agree
i bring this up not to debate who's
right but because it's a great example
of something called egocentric bias most
people think they do most of the work
for example researchers have asked
authors of multi-author papers what
percentage of the work they personally
did and when they add up those
percentages the sum is on average 140
percent
when couples are asked to estimate how
much of the housework they do the
combined total is almost always over a
hundred percent
now you might think this is because
people want to appear more helpful than
they actually are but that's not it when
couples are asked what fraction of the
fights they start or how much of the
mess is theirs the total is again over a
hundred people think they do more of the
work but they also think they cause more
of the problems so why is this
i think it's simply because you
experience and remember vividly all of
what you do but not all of what everyone
else does so naturally you overestimate
your own contributions and underestimate
others
and i think this bias leads us to
underestimate the influence of other
things on our lives like the role luck
plays in our success
take hockey players for example if you
ask a professional hockey player how
they managed to reach the nhl they might
mention their hard work determination
great coaches their parents willingness
to get up at 5am and so on but they
probably won't acknowledge how lucky
they were to be born in january and yet
in many years 40 of hockey players
selected into top tier leagues are born
in the first quarter of the year
compared to just 10 percent in the
fourth quarter an early birthday can
make you up to four times as likely to
be a pro hockey player and the reason
for this disparity is presumably because
the cutoff date for kids hockey leagues
is january 1st those born in the first
part of the year are a little older and
so on average bigger and faster than
kids in their league born late in the
year
now as they grow up this difference
should eventually shrink to nothing but
it doesn't because the young kids who
share the most promise are given more
time on the ice and enter more
tournaments where they receive better
coaching and improve their skills and
these advantages compound year after
year so by the time you get to the pros
birthdays are heavily skewed towards the
start of the year but does any
professional hockey player feel thankful
for their birthday probably not and we
are all like that largely oblivious to
the fortunate events that support our
success probably the most significant
bit of luck many of us enjoy is being
born into a prosperous country
around half the variance in income
received by people around the world is
explained by their country of residence
and that country's income distribution
if you were born in burundi for example
which has the world's lowest gross
national income per capita of just 730 a
year it doesn't matter how smart or
hard-working you are you're unlikely to
earn much as an adult
now many people get offended if you
point out how big a role chance plays in
their success and i get it if we are
just a product of our circumstances then
our hard work and our talent seem to
count for nothing people think it has to
be either skill or luck that explains
success but the truth is you need both
take these eight track and field world
records all the athletes who achieve
these records are obviously world class
extremely dedicated and talented and yet
when they achieved their world records
seven out of eight had a tailwind now
these athletes all had the ability to
win a gold medal but to set the world
record required a bit of luck as well
the importance of luck increases the
greater the number of applicants
applying for just a few spaces
consider the most recent class of nasa
astronauts from over 18
300 applicants in 2017
only 11 were selected and went on to
graduate from the astronaut training
program now we can make a toy model of
the selection process
let's assume that astronauts are
selected mostly based on skill
experience and hard work but also say
five percent as a result of luck
fortunate circumstances
for each applicant i randomly generated
a skill score out of a hundred and i
also randomly generated a luck score out
of a hundred then i added those numbers
together weighted in the 95 to 5 ratio
to get an overall score
this score represents the selector's
judgments meaning the top 11 by this
metric would become astronauts and i
repeated this simulation a thousand
times representing a thousand different
astronaut selections and what i found
was the astronauts who were picked were
very lucky they had an average lux score
of 94.7
so how many of the selected astronauts
would have been in the top 11 based on
skill alone
the answer was on average only 1.6
that means even with luck accounting for
just 5 of the outcome 9 or maybe 10 of
the 11 applicants selected would have
been different if luck played no role at
all
when competition is fierce being
talented and hardworking is important
but it's not enough to guarantee success
you also need to catch a break
largely i think we're unaware of our
good luck because by definition it's not
something we did like the housework done
by your significant other it goes
unappreciated and here's the crazy thing
downplaying the importance of chance
events may actually improve your
probability of success because if you
perceive an outcome to be uncertain
you're less likely to invest effort in
it which further decreases your chances
of success
so it's a useful delusion to believe you
are in full control of your destiny i
mean if i had known how bad i was when i
started youtube or how much work it
would take i might have given up right
then welcome to veritasium
an online science video blog now there
may be another benefit to overlooking
your lucky breaks which is it makes it
easier to justify your place in society
if you have a lot of wealth or power you
can just chalk it up to your own
intelligence effort and perseverance it
makes it easier to accept inequality in
one experiment participants were put in
groups of three in small rooms to
discuss a complex moral problem and one
person in each group was randomly
designated the team leader
half an hour later the experimenter came
by with four cookies for each team so
who got the extra cookie in each case it
went to the team leader even though they
had no special aptitude they didn't have
extra responsibilities and they'd gotten
their position through chance alone
once you have achieved a certain status
it seems natural to feel like you
deserve it and all the other good things
that come your way now this is just an
anecdote but whenever i've been upgraded
to fly a business class i've always
observed the worst behavior in my fellow
privileged passengers they just act so
entitled and uncourteous and research
has found evidence for this as well
in another experiment participants were
asked to think of a good thing that
happened to them recently and then one
group was asked to list their own
personal qualities or actions that made
that good thing happen another group was
asked to list external factors beyond
their control that led to the event and
a control group was simply asked to list
reasons why the good thing happened now
for completing this task participants
were told they would be paid a dollar
but at the end they were offered the
option to donate some or all of the
money to a charity results showed those
who listed their own personal attributes
contributed 25 less than those who
listed external factors beyond their
control
now think of what all this means for
people in our society specifically for
people in positions of power like
business leaders and politicians now
undoubtedly most of them are talented
and hardworking but they have also been
luckier than most and like most of us
they don't realize just how lucky they
are and this gives them a distorted view
of reality
they're kind of living in a form of
survivor bias all these leaders have
worked hard and ultimately succeeded so
to them the world appears fair in their
experience it rewards hard work but what
they don't have is the experience of all
the people who have worked hard and
failed
so what are they to make of people less
successful than themselves well the
natural conclusion is that they must
just be less talented or less
hard-working and this perspective makes
them less inclined to be generous to
give back and they are the ones who set
the rules for how society operates
and this is particularly unfortunate
since one of the main ways many of us
are lucky is in our country of residence
but what is a country except for the
things put there by people who came
before the roads and the schools public
transport emergency services clean air
and water everything like that
it seems a cruel trick of our psychology
that successful people without any
malice will credit their success largely
to their own hard work and ingenuity and
therefore contribute less to maintaining
the very circumstances that made that
success possible in the first place
the good news is that acknowledging our
fortunate circumstances not only brings
us more in line with reality it also
makes us more likeable in a study where
people had to read the transcript of a
fictional 60 minutes interview with a
biotech entrepreneur experimenters tried
changing just the last paragraph where
the interviewee is talking about the
reasons for their company's success
in one version the entrepreneur
personally takes credit for the success
they've had but in the other he says
luck played a significant role now
people who read the luck version of the
transcript judged the entrepreneur as
kinder and thought they'd be more likely
to be close friends with him than those
who read the other version of the
transcript
and raising our awareness of fortunate
events can also make us happier because
it allows us to feel gratitude
personally i am grateful to michael
stevens of vsauce who on october 7th
2012 posted the video how much does a
shadow weigh which shouts out my
slow-motion slinky drop video and within
three days my subscribers had increased
by a third and within a month they had
doubled leading me to quit my part-time
job and work exclusively on youtube
videos and i'm grateful to the writer of
the free newspaper they give out on the
trains in sydney who didn't quite
understand electricity leading me to
post this picture of their article to my
instagram with the caption what's wrong
with this picture and i'm lucky that the
first person to answer correctly was a
beautiful woman who became my future
wife
yep
that is how i met your mother
now initially i wanted to make this
video just to say our circumstances and
psychology conspire to make us oblivious
to our own luck this leads successful
people to view the world as fair and
those less successful than them as less
talented or less hardworking and this is
before you factor in any discrimination
or prejudice
but it also became apparent to me that i
should talk about what to do if you want
to be successful in such a world and i
think the best advice is paradoxical
first you must believe that you are in
complete control of your destiny and
that your success comes down only to
your own talent and hard work
but second you've got to know that's not
true for you or anyone else so you have
to remember if you do achieve success
that luck played a significant role and
given your good fortune you should do
what you can to increase the luck of
others
hey so i had an idea for what i could do
to increase the luck of others and that
is to give away a hundred snatims kits
to people who couldn't otherwise afford
them so if you didn't know snatums is a
product that i invented and kickstarted
five years ago it's a molecular modeling
kit where all the atoms snap together
magnetically
now i made it because i really wanted to
tackle the misconception that bonds
store energy they don't it takes energy
to break them and you can feel that with
snatums
recently i completely retooled snatums
so there are small holes where the
magnets are this allows them to touch
directly increasing the bonding strength
so you can form bigger more stable
molecules i call these snatums x
and yes they are backwards compatible
with original snatums so here's my idea
for the next month you can buy snatums
for 10 off using the code give luck and
for each one sold i will give a kit to
someone who can't afford one up to a
limit of a hundred so i'll put links and
more details in the description and i
really want to thank you for watching
and thank you for all my good luck