天赋与运气：随机性在成功与失败中的作用
Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure
摘要：
在高度竞争的西方文化中，占主导地位的精英管理模式植根于这样一种信念：成功主要（如果不是唯一的话）归功于个人素质，如天赋、智慧、技能、努力或冒险。有时候，我们愿意承认某种程度的运气也可以在取得重大物质成功方面发挥作用。但是，事实上，低估外力在个人成功故事中的重要性是相当普遍的。众所周知，智力或天赋在人口中呈现出高斯分布，而财富的分布--被认为是成功的代表--通常遵循幂律（帕累托定律）。具有典型尺度的输入正态分布与输出的尺度不变分布之间的这种差异表明，某些隐藏的成分在幕后起作用。在本文中，一个非常简单的基于代理的模型的帮助下，我们认为，这样的成分只是随机性。特别是，我们表明，如果一定程度的天赋是必要的，在生活中取得成功，几乎从来没有最有才华的人达到成功的最高峰，被平庸但明智的幸运的人超越。据我们所知，这一违反直觉的结果--尽管在大量文献的字里行间隐含着暗示--在这里是第一次被量化。它揭示了根据达到的成功水平来评估优点的有效性，并强调了将过多的荣誉或资源分配给那些最终可能比其他人更幸运的人的风险。在这个模型的帮助下，几个政策假设也得到了解决，并进行了比较，以显示最有效的策略，为研究的公共资金，以提高精英，多样性和创新。
英文摘要：
The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence or talent exhibit a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth - considered a proxy of success - follows typically a power law (Pareto law). Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale, and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based model, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness. In particular, we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals. As to our knowledge, this counterintuitive result - although implicitly suggested between the lines in a vast literature - is quantified here for the first time. It sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others. With the help of this model, several policy hypotheses are also addressed and compared to show the most efficient strategies for public funding of research in order to improve meritocracy, diversity and innovation.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
