"For Gladwell's argument is that success is not a matter of individual will triumphing over adversity, but a combination of luck, opportunity, culture, initial advantages, hard work, and enough talent and intelligence - enough, note: not necessarily vast amounts of either - to profit from the advantages and opportunities at issue … whether or not you agree with Gladwell, you will never again think as you did before about what he has to say."
I have not read the book yet but from what I have heard & read about it, it does not seem to say anything startling, though the evidence he has amassed is interesting
But if even someone like Grayling has had his thinking changed, then I have been missing something
Maybe it is just that I have always thought like this, & did not understand my peculiarity?
Statistical training must help, though I remember that when I tried out my argument about Binomial families & greater educational opportunities for girls on a fellow statistician he accused me of being deterministic
Which reminds me of another idea: Women without a brother are disproportionately likely to rise to a position at or near the top of organisations in business, the civil service etc, etc. I should be really intrigued to see if there is evidence to support this
My reasoning is that such girls are in some sense (most definitely not a Well of Loneliness sense) their father’s son. From childhood they will have more ‘manly’ discussions with their father & perhaps be more likely than other girls to help daddy as well as mummy, more confident in just being with, as well as arguing with, men as equals
Or perhaps it really is all just down to The verb TO BE
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