Here’s everything I wish I could write, but never got to, or never figured out how to express properly.

Why don’t I just save the drafts and write these later? I could, but I would rather start fresh with a clean slate.

That also means that these are raw notes, and below my regular bar for quality. Read at your own risk:

• The Use of Patent Data in Meta-Science
• Notes on Penguin Highway
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Starting Over
• Learned Autism
• The Cost of Criticism

Patent Data

A bunch of papers in the meta-science/economics of research/theory of innovation space cite patent data as a metric for good research.

As far as I can tell, the US patent office is just total garbage. Patent trolls run amok, anyone can get a patent for anything if they have a lawyer and some money, patents are constantly awarded on the basis of totally ridiculous things. Patents serve more as a excuse to sue other people than as an actual working mechanism for publicizing research and getting paid royalties when it’s monetized.

I realize that the patent data is just a proxy, but do we have any reason to think it’s a good one? Or even remotely acceptable? Is everyone already aware of this but choosing to ignore it?

Related.

Review of Penguin Highway

Penguin Highway is the best movie about independent research. It is also possibly the best portrayal of autism.

The protagonist often says “I did the math yesterday, and there are still 3,888 days before I turn twenty.” This is a silly autistic savant stereotype but then he continues “By then, I’ll be 3,888 days better than I am now. I can barely imagine how great that will make me.”

This was once true for all of us, but it doesn’t feel like I’m 3,888 days better. It doesn’t even feel like I’m 365 days better than I was at the beginning of the year. What happened? How did we all become such shitty adults?

In one scene, his sister comes into his room crying that their mom is going to die. He gets up, shocked and eager to help, but she shakes her head. Their mom isn’t in any immediate danger. What his sister has realized is that mortality exists at all. That their mom will die, far off in the future, but inevitably. This was pretty much exactly my own experience at the same age. On a related note, the film also features a somewhat Parfitian view of identity.

My only complaint is that the protagonist gets sick after a single day of fasting, which is your typical 3-meal-a-day propaganda. But at least he runs the self-experiment.

Because we live in an era of incredible abundance, this movie is just $3 to rent on Youtube.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Starting Over

US GDP growth is around 2% a year, with total GDP at 20 trillion in 2018. We’ve made immense progress.

What follows is a mathematical tautology, but it’s still worth saying out loud.

Let’s say you were able to restart a new country, build institutions from scratch, learn from our mistakes and do better the next time around. Let’s say you start with just 1% of current US GDP, but were able to increase the growth rate to 3%.

Under these conditions, your new country will overtake the US in just 163 years.

What if you’re able to double growth to 4%? 120 years. 8%? 60.

Is it really that hard to believe that we could grow at 8% if we were willing to abandon 99% of the economy? I’m not suggesting there’s any specific way to do this, but there are some obvious inefficiencies, and plenty of local maxima.

Take this blog for example. I started anonymously, which meant abandoning whatever status and credibility I previously had. It was painful to give that up, and a difficult decision at the time. But now subscribers are approximately doubling everything month, for 409600% annualized growth.

Obviously this is unsustainable, but I have no doubts I’ll quickly overtake what I could have had with a higher starting point (real life status) but lower growth rate (unwillingness to write on contentious topics).

What local maxima are you trapped in? Do you hate your career, but feel like you’re in too deep? You’ll advance faster if you actually care about what you’re doing. Do feel unfulfilled by your social group but worry if you move you won’t make new friends? You’ll form much deeper connections if you actually care about the people you hang out with.

In general humans have a horrible intuition for exponential growth. You are likely underestimating the value of making the leap and starting over.

Learned Autistic Deficiencies

Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal A Vindication of the Rights of Woman broadly argues that women appear inferior only because they are raised this way. I’m sure this was subversive at the time, but (hopefully) seems obvious now. If you don’t let women go to the best schools, you’ll find that very few of them end up well educated.

I wonder how much of autism is like this. In her interview with Tyler, Michelle Dawson says:

Well, there’s a huge literature in autism about how autistics judge facial expressions of emotion in other people. And what you have in the autism literature is, you haven’t only just turned autistic people into stereotypes and cartoons, you’ve done that to the typical population.

This is really at odds with the nonautism literature on facial expressions, which is much more complicated. In the autism literature, it’s assumed that you can just read people’s inner emotions and mental states. Mental states are not necessarily well defined, that it’s a simple matter, that it is sort of written all over somebody’s face, or even you can read it just from looking at a photo of their eyes.

And things are far more complicated than that in the literature, in the nonautism literature. For example, MIT — their affective computing group, Rosalind Picard did these fantastic studies showing that people smile in frustration, and those are real honest-to-goodness Ekman-type smiles. You have the whole facial action coding thing going on. Those are real, genuine smiles that people smile in frustration when they are genuinely frustrated. They don’t do it when they’re acting out frustration. And there are many other examples like that.

People smile for many different reasons, and that is acknowledged to some degree in the literature in the typical population, not in the autism literature, where things are completely simple. They’re just very caricatured and cartoonish. Now, what you find is that the typical population can decipher their way through this. They know what these facial expressions are supposed to represent, even if they don’t look like that in real life.

Autistics are — maybe because their experiences are quite complex with how people respond to them starting early in life, and I’m just wildly speculating here — but autistics are going to notice that things are more complex and uncertain than that. Again, it’s the considering more possibilities, and that will very much hamper their task performance if what you are looking for is this automatic certainty that these acted expressions are all there is, which is not accurate.

And that leads to many problems because we’re actually training autistic people to ignore the complex, real, important information in favor of the caricatured, stereotyped, simplified, probably wrong information, and we should really think about that. But that gives you an idea of looking at social deficits, thinking about how autistics process information, and also actually looking at the literature itself. [emphasis mine]

Dawson caveats this theory by noting that it’s speculative, but it certainly feels true to my experience. As I recall, early childhood education revolved entirely around a set of social rules that turned out to be totally counter productive. For example:

• From ages 2-6, the importance of sharing and fairness was seemingly constantly impressed upon me
• Then at some point, adults started saying things like “life is unfair”
• Subsequently, I spent the rest of my life very confused about norms around fairness

Similarly:

• I used to be very bad at making eye contact
• I was specifically taught the importance of making eye contact
• I was later often accused of staring
• Subsequently, I spent the rest of my life very confused about norms around eye contact

Which seriously, is just an unbelievably difficult thing if you don’t have an existing intuition. Let’s say you’re at dinner with 4 people, you’re telling a story that isn’t directed at any one of them in particular. Who do you look at? Do you go around and make sure you’re making eye contact with each of them at least once? Do you pick one person and stare at them the whole time? Do you glance around as if making sure that everyone is still paying attention?

I think I’m somewhat good at this, but it’s also a very conscious process. I sometimes think that if I was never taught to do it, I would have picked it up intuitively, and eventually learned how to do it “naturally” without thinking. But now that I have been taught, and now that I am thinking, it is pretty much impossible to ignore that and just subconsciously do the right thing.

And to be totally clear, I’m not totally against obeying arbitrary social rules. If you told me “starting tomorrow, we’ve all decided to wear hats, and if you aren’t wearing a hat, it’s like being naked in public”, I would be totally fine! I mean seems dumb, but it imposes pretty much zero cost to me, and I’m happy to comply.

But if you said “some hats are cool, but others are like being naked in public, and we won’t tell you which is which”, I’m just never going to wear a hat ever again for fear of picking the wrong one.

The Costs of Criticism

Writing criticism just makes me really really unhappy. If you’re right, the world is a worse place than you thought, and it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able to change anything. Matthew Walker still has a job, most papers identified as fraudulent by Elizabeth Bik don’t get retracted.

Meanwhile, you spend your entire time terrified that you’re wrong, and going to make a fool of yourself. Or even worse, that you’re wrong but people will think you’re right, and you’ll have harmed innocent people.

Then there’s the possibility that you’re right, but your truth isn’t worth telling. Maybe Lambda school is dishonest, but if the cost of pointing that out is that fewer students get a good education and we all have to keep going to 4 year colleges and accruing student debt… it’s unclear what good I’ve actually done.

In the meantime, you’re eviscerating your own credibility because you so clearly have an axe to grind. Either you have a conflict of interest, and are thus motivated to exaggerate, or you don’t and it’s even worse. If there’s nothing really in it for you in terms of upside, you’re not even a deceptive mercenary, just a crazy person with an irrational vendetta.

Note that this is all really different from friendly disagreements. Debate is important. I sent drafts of my posts to friends, and they consistently eviscerate me, prompting arduous rewrites before I can finally publish. This kind of exchange makes all parties better in a way that my rant against Lambda School does not.

To be clear, none of this is to say that criticism is bad. The job of criticism is to better the world, not the criticized. Even in the absence of direct positive impact, it’s role is to elevate epistemic standards.

Some people read Guzey’s Why We Sleep and felt sad that some popular science was fraudulent. Instead, I felt hopeful that we still had a functioning culture of criticism, and felt more confident believing other work that had not received the same treatment.

In this sense, criticism is a prerequisite for truth. Without the ability to be cynical, our belief is incoherent.

So someone has to take on this mantle, but it won’t be me.

The last three posts were a series of investigations into the Golden Handcuffs phenomenon. First, a review of existing arguments and dismissal. Then, a series of ground-up empirical estimates. And finally, crowdsourced comments from readers. [1]

In the end, I conclude that it’s largely visa issues and selection effects.

Now we ask, is the distinction actually important?

If Golden Handcuffs are not about Google [2] bribing its employees with kombucha, but still prevent engineers from leaving corporate jobs to pursue their dreams, why should we care what the specific mechanism is?

For years, I have listened to people lament the “brain drain” out of socially important fields into tech. Supposedly, if Google didn’t pay such high wages and offer such good perks, the geniuses who work there would instead be doing renewable energy research.

But if it’s all selection effects and visa issues, this isn’t true at all! If Google engineers are just people who were not going to do interesting things to begin with, then it doesn’t matter at all to the rest of society. Their alternative was not solar panels, it was finance and consulting.

Note that this is only true for that particular purpose. If you’re dating around and looking for someone with a stable income, a Google engineer is still a great choice. It doesn’t matter one lick if they’re stuck at Google because they’re addicted to kombucha or because they’re an intrinsically risk-averse person. Either way they’re not leaving.

So the language we use does have this kind of fuzzy “by what definition” feature to it, but that doesn’t mean it’s arbitrary.

Postmodernism was about the context-dependence of facts [3]. Who’s asking matters as much as the question itself. If you’re trying to study The Eastern World it matters very much if you’re an insider. Some judgements will be wrong, others merely fantastic anachronisms that are simply irrelevant to how someone sees themselves.

In contrast, meta-rationality is about purpose-dependence. Rather than fixate on who is posing the question, meta-rationality asks why they want to know, and then provides an answer that is actually useful.

Is that too fanciful? Let me put it this way: if you’re asking purely out of intellectual curiosity, any number of things can be true. Is minimum wage bad? Good? It depends on what you want. Are you minimizing short term unemployment? Maximizing long term economic growth? Are you a policy maker, or a voter? If so, then you should be asking about minimum wage in a very particular context, not the phenomenon in general. If not, then why does any of this matter, and what kind of answer would even be satisfying?

To be clear, this isn’t about “skin in the game” in the sense of investing as a dojo for rationality. Betting on your beliefs is a fine exercise for proving that you can think clearly, but it also means you only get to think about bettable claims. At first that seems like a pretty large universe, but by design, it systematically excludes any domain where you might have an actual impact. Do you have a strong belief about UBI as an economic stimulus? It doesn’t matter because you won’t get to test it. And if you do make it your life’s mission to implement UBI, you’re now insider trading.

Purpose-dependence is about clarifying why you’re asking in the first place, figuring out which facts matter for that purpose, and using language in a way that’s useful for discovering those facts.

Accordingly, if you’re a reader skimming blogs out of pure intellectual curiosity, it is very much worth asking why.

---

[1] These map onto three popular ways of approaching questions. You can either consider common knowledge, reason from first principles, or ask broadly.

[2] If you read the previous posts closely, you might ask “how can there be Golden Handcuffs at Google when the average tenure is just 3 years?” The answer is that I’m using “Google” as shorthand for “big tech companies”.

[3] Words can mean different things in different contexts, which means first, you shouldn’t trust anything too much and second, it’s critical to ensure that language is used in a beneficial manner. And so you get theorists applying the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis to everything, and trying to rename everything (minority to minoritized, homeless to experiencing homelessness, etc). This feels absurd from the outside, but once you give up on language as a fixed thing, it makes sense to leverage it in a way that suits your goals.

Previously: The Golden Handcuffs Were Insite of You the Whole Time and Empirical Estimates of Golden Handcuffs.

Leopold Aschenbrenner

My intuitive answer: stability? That sort of dependable income and status you can rely on to start and support a family. Second intuition: people are bad at saving—or by the time they have enough saved, they have dependents.

The dependents thing is a good point, but San Francisco also has some of the oldest parents. Related statistic from Twitter. This data is city wide, and I would guess that tech workers skew older than average.

Based on the math I did last time, you can quit a corporate tech job after a year with considerable savings, or after 5 years with around $713,000.

If you graduate at 22, work for 5 years, and have kids at 32, you still have another 5 years to do whatever you want.

Andy Matuschak

I worked at Apple for five years and met many people who felt stricken by golden handcuffs. The most common “trap” that people seemed to fall into was the classic one: jogging ever faster and faster on the hedonic treadmill.

Common vices included multiple vintage sports cars, buying wine at auction, multi-year construction and renovation projects, airplanes, etc. More mundane vices were also common: marrying and having several children, which often leads to a $3M+ home and a wife who no longer works. It’s easy in that situation to find oneself expenses to the tune of $300k/year if one’s not actively trying to reign things in.

The vices sound silly typed out like this, but as a 21 year old entering this scene, it was quite an intense thing having all my role models and more senior peers engaging in this kind of thing. In some sense, it was necessary to spend time with them: if I wanted to socialize (perhaps necessary for advancement), I’d need to go to dinner at fancy restaurants, share the wine, etc. Now, perhaps fancy meals and drinks amount to “only” $2k/mo, but it’s easy to develop a taste for such things, and then to notice the merits of your older colleagues’ interior decor…

It was easier for me to leave (I went to a non-profit) because what lifestyle changes I’d adopted were flexible: I could simply choose to stop going to fancy meals. Others have somewhat more disruptive stakes: selling the cars, moving to a different home, etc. I notice that when I talk to them about leaving, there’s a kind of distant wistfulness: “ah, if only…”—as if they’re imagining another life, another person, impossible for them to be. It’s a kind of complacency, I guess. [emphasis mine]

Engineers might be particularly prone to this trap because their identity is wrapped up in their job. As Ben Kuhn writes in What happened to all the non-programmers?, it’s shockingly easy to find yourself only hanging out with other engineers who have similar interests.

Seth Green (excerpt)

…two general thoughts:

1. From a longer thread about how YC has lost its soul: “RPM at Facebook is the new IB @ goldman (and actually pays more)” (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23916314). If this is true, then we should expect people who take these roles to be excellent and risk-averse, which is what it takes to get into Yale or Stanford and then BCG, Goldman, YLS, HBS, Apple, etc. The funnel selects for lack of courage (also high IQ & ability to grind).

2. How many people do you know who are just stuck in ruts, period? Perhaps they make a lot of money, feel like they’ll never ever be fired, and when they go home, they get high and play videogames every day. I know a lot more people like this than I did ten years ago (Erik Hurst attributes some of the declining work share among young men to video games’ getting better over time). Perhaps people are just much less (consciously) bored at home anymore, which leaves less time for ruminating on things they want to maximize.

So perhaps it’s less of a handcuffs situation, golden or otherwise, and more of a selection for people who have optimized and been optimized for staying the current course, and look, now, rather than go down this other dark road, you can watch Tiger King or play Red Dead Redemption 2, doesn’t that sound more fun?

As I wrote in the other post, selection effects are indeed a substantial part of this. But I am confused why there aren’t more opportunistic idealists who work in tech for a few years and then self-fund a career in the arts or independent research.

Even among people who regularly play video games, the US average is just 7.6 hours a week, which doesn’t seem incredibly disruptive to ambition. In contrast, Wikipedia has Americans watching TV 4 hours a day, equivalent to 28 hours a week. So maybe the problem is TV, video games, social media and every other distraction combined?

Even then, it’s not like we’re talking about dysfunctionally unemployed people. Google engineers are (presumably) doing some work, I’m asking why they don’t spend that time on work they care about instead.

Anonymous

gr8nola is really good…

…why should i apply such aggressive temporal discounting to following my dreams right now? isn’t it almost surely the case that working my day job, collecting my paycheck is the pathway to both 1) a more successful shot at $the_dream in the future AND an even longer runway perhaps one that lasts until I die?

why should i be so naive to think that at ~25yo i have a finely tuned nose for great opportunities and the skillset to execute on them?

why can’t i directly apply the secretary problem solution and work 1/e of my 40 working years (14.7y), evaluating but passing up on potential opportunities during that time, then, after that window, take a stab at the next good one i see?

I agree that some jobs provide capital that is useful to future work.

The secretary problem is a useful framing, but has several key disanalogies. Unlike real life, the problem assumes:

1. Decisions are totally irrevocable (you can never pursue an opportunity you turned down earlier in life)
2. You’re maximizing the probability of selecting the single best opportunity, rather than expected value
3. The judgement and decision happens instantaneously, with no cost of “wasted years” on evaluation
4. You have no sense of absolute rankings, and can only compare opportunities relative to each other. In other words, if a mind blowing good opportunity presents itself tomorrow, the most you could say is “this is the best I’ve seen so far”. In real life, you at least have some useful priors over how good an opportunity is in absolute terms.

I’m not sure how this changes the optimal stopping point, but that might be a good topic for another post.

Anonymous (excerpt)

I’m a FAANG engineer, although since I work in a European office I probably make 50% less than your typical SV FAANG-adjacent engineer.

I’ve been doing this for a little over half a decade. So why don’t I, or most of the other folks around me, quit and follow our passions like you suggest?

Well some of us do quit to follow our passions. I know a handful of people who quit to join startups. I’ve heard anecdotes of a few other people moving back to their hometowns and taking on lower paid, less stressful remote work. While I don’t have startup ambitions as of now, I do plan to take a year off, explore the world the bit, learn scuba diving, etc.

But 90% of people end up staying at their jobs, year after year. I suspect there are a couple of factors making them do this:

1. Lifestyle inflation. I think you touch on this in your post, but consider things like expensive cars, expensive houses (most tech offices are in high cost of living areas), sending kids to prep schools, etc.

2. Social validation. People get attached to the social environment at work and see themselves defined by it. It’s scary to move onto something else. There’s also some social status associated with being a FAANG employee. You’re also competing with the Joneses now; your colleagues at work and other FAANG types around you.

I think 2 is probably a big factor for a lot of folks, probably a little for me as well, although I’m naive enough to think that I’m above such things :) I suspect it’s the same reason traders keep trading even after they’ve made millions.

Let’s see how the sabbatical goes. If I’m lucky I’ll be brave enough to cast off the golden handcuffs, at least for a year.

Competing with the Joneses is compelling to me. If you start working at Google out of college, you’re on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder. It’s easy to say “I’ll quit once I get promoted and really prove myself, if I quit now it’ll just look like I couldn’t cut it.” But of course, once you get promoted your reference class shifts, and it’s now other senior engineers or engineering managers you have to prove yourself against.

Anonymous (excerpt)

I’m convinced that the only thing that really motivates 80% of people to change is pain. If you’re working at Google, between the perks and the salary, you have no pain financially speaking. It’s pretty rare IMO for someone to make the jump from being motivated by pain to being self motivated by their goals. Google gives you a little bit of prestige, a lot of money, probably good coworkers, a path for advancement, and a minor feeling of achievement. It’s like being stuck at a local maximum and not noticing it’s not the global maximum.

Another reason may be that people are averse to open ended tasks. I would guess that the proportion of people is much less than 80%, although a sizable minority. For them Google would be the global maximum.

Anonymous (excerpt)

Most of the senior (above L6) FAANG employee comp (at least according to levels.fyi) consists of vested RSUs, with cash pay pretty much fixed. Not only do stocks appreciate over time but the amount gained per unit time increases with seniority, thus it appears as though sunk cost — finally — begins to repay itself.

74% of tech/math workers in Silicon Valley are foreign-born¹. Let’s discount that by some who got their Green Cards or became naturalized. Then some two thirds of them are probably on H1B and are legally obligated to leave the country if they lose a job.

…FAANG employees do a lot of open-source, many are literally paid to do it. When there’s a steady stream of income and no pressure to productize your creations, albeit useful to you, they’re simply left as half-baked margin notes on their GitHub. Thus product-gap-fullfillment urge is complete and you even got paid! Unlike randomly sampled YC applicant…

¹ https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/37-percent-of-silicon-valley-foreign-born
[emphasis mine]

The immigration thing is super compelling to me. Even if it’s only 66% of workers, that could be enough to set the culture. If you don’t need a visa, but most of your coworkers do, maybe you just adopt that mindset and stay put.

For what it’s worth, I consider this among the US’s greatest policy disasters. We’re ostensibly involved in some kind of Sputnik-style scientific competition with China, but instead of trying to recruit the best scientists, we’re actively turning away people who want to immigrate here.

It seems like if you’re going to offer someone a place in your best universities, you should be excited to then benefit from that person’s labor. But instead we have this insane system where we’re happy to educate the smartest people from any country, but unwilling to let them work for us.

I understand that O-1 visas exist, but unless you have a great lawyer or are actually a genius, this is still a huge and completely unnecessary hurdle.

Anonymous (excerpt)

I think both of these claims (“Presumably, you have some values” and “Everyone knows this”) are pretty strong and perhaps not entirely justifiable. One might be a hedonist in a practical sense, but still not have an explicit goal of “maximizing enjoyment” - or an altruist lacking imagination (it would be nice if people were better off… without the thought continuing further). I think some fraction of people (I’ll make up a number, 20%) just don’t set these sort of explicit values / goals for themselves, but instead sort of run on autopilot (I used to do this, which is how I know it’s possible, and still do when I’m not careful). My basic point is these people just don’t apply as much thought to the question of “what should you be doing” as you do, and so their continued employment at google is not a mystery.

Let me call them “reactively-minded” people, for lack of a better phrase. If you’re reactively minded and working at google, and you don’t hate it, you regard things as going pretty well. You have friends who you see everyday - that makes you genuinely happy - and the work is sufficiently interesting. You don’t have monetary troubles, so your mind has a chance to unspool and think about things other than competition / work. This is a totally pleasant state of affairs, and if you’re not explicitly contrasting it with a vision of a different and more interesting occupation, as a reactively minded person it doesn’t occur to you to ask “how could I be doing things better?” Your thoughts do not extend for years into the future, your joy is associative, readily available, and presents itself without delay.

In particular, joy is not produced by optimization of some well-defined reward function, or the completion of explicitly-defined tasks.

If you accept the existence of a reactive mind, I think you needn’t question why it doesn’t quit and do its own thing. The necessary dissatisfaction, ambition, and imagination are not present. And without holding explicit values, at least not ones viewed as relevant to daily life, there’s no conflict.

This is a good point, but doesn’t answer how people become reactively-minded in the first place. I don’t have the answer either, but here’s a speculative guess.

As a child, your life is heavily constrained exogenously. If you can’t do something, it’s probably because your parent or teacher isn’t letting you.

In college, you have a brief period of incredible freedom paid with low disenchantment. For many people, this is where incredible work happens. Of course, there are new distractions as well. Unless you’re really good at avoiding social pressure, it’s easy to spend all 4 years either drunk or cramming for tests, depending on your inclination. Either way, you’re probably not doing the thing you love the most.

And if you don’t hit that tiny window, you’re now in the workforce,

Once you work at Google, you look around, see thousands of genuinely brilliant programmers who aren’t successful, and you get totally trapped. All of a sudden, you go from “I’m incredibly gifted and would do great things if only society wasn’t holding me back” to “there are literally 100 people within eyesight more gifted than me, and they’ve all settled for mediocre jobs, so I guess that’s the most I can hope for”.

You can think of this as weaponzied Imposter Syndrome. If you already feel like you don’t deserve your job, you’ll be too grateful for the oppportunity to quit.

Earlier, I wrote that founding a startup is not necessarily irrational, it just depends on your reference group. Since the odds are really bad for a randomly sampled founder, the trick is in convincing yourself that you aren’t randomly sampled.

This is easy in high school, since if you spend any time programming for fun, you’re probably the best engineer around. It gets a bit harder in college, but the real nerds are mostly heads down and easy to ignore, so you can still convince yourself you’re among the best if you just squint a little.

But once you’re in Silicon Valley and surrounded by brilliant people with mediocre careers, they becomes your relevant sample population. Working at a prestigious company should convince you that you’re special, but instead it exposes you to an arbitrary number of counter examples.

Conclusion
If the effect exists at all (which I’m not 100% convinced of), it is largely explained by visa issues and sampling bias. There are many other psychological explanations, but I’m not sure they’re necessary.