Imagine that Alice is able to sit in an ice bath for 6 minutes and Bob is only able to sit in the ice bath for 2 minutes. Is Alice tougher than Bob? Not necessarily. Maybe Alice takes lots of ice baths and the level of discomfort is only like a 4⁄10 for here whereas for Bob it’s like an 8⁄10. I think when talking about toughness you want to avoid comparing apples to oranges.
I strongly suspect “toughness” is a lot like “pain tolerance”—there is no known way to measure how much of an outcome is mental tenacity and how much is simply noticing the difficulty less intently. In fact, they may actually be the same thing.
For many cases, you don’t actually care which it is. If you want someone to sit in an ice bath (or similar cold endurance), choose Alice. It doesn’t matter if she’s super-tough or just less sensitive to cold. If you want her to be willing to push through other types of adversity (say, pursuing an important but very uncertain goal), it’s not obvious that the ice bath test gives you enough information—maybe Bob is way better at that kind of difficulty (either because he’s tough to that, or because he’s just more optimistic).
You want to avoid comparing apples to oranges, and the best way to do that is not to conflate different kinds of success-under-adversity.
Yeah I agree that we probably don’t have a way to tease apart the toughness from the pain tolerance.
And I guess I agree that for “many cases” you care about the outcome, not the process, so you just care that Alice is better at sitting in ice baths, not why she is better.
But I also have a feeling that toughness matters. If Alice is good at sitting in ice baths because she happens to be very insensitive to cold temperatures, that isn’t something that is predictive of life success. But if Alice is good at sitting in ice baths because she is tough in some sort of generalizable way, that seems important because that seems predictive of her being able to handle other difficult situations well.
It sounds like you agree with this but that you are skeptical that being able to tough your way through ice baths is predictive of being able to tough your way through other adversities? If so, I have a different intuition but I’m not sure how to make the reasons for my intuition legible.
I’m sympathetic to the model—in many cases it seems that there is a generalizable trait of “toughness” (a few decades ago they called it “grit” or “determination”, now it rhymes with “agentic”). It’s tempting to simplify things to that level.
But I’m also skeptical of my own desire to believe that, and I don’t actually think it’s true often enough to count on it. When I press myself on edge cases or most specific data->prediction proposals, it loses a lot of appeal.
There are clearly some people who fare better than others across many domains. Exactly which traits cause this, and how ingrained and unchanging those traits are, remains quite difficult to pin down. Personally, I think it’s 50% luck, 50% genes, 50% early environment, and 50% current environment. Yes, success is overdetermined :)
I strongly suspect “toughness” is a lot like “pain tolerance”—there is no known way to measure how much of an outcome is mental tenacity and how much is simply noticing the difficulty less intently. In fact, they may actually be the same thing.
For many cases, you don’t actually care which it is. If you want someone to sit in an ice bath (or similar cold endurance), choose Alice. It doesn’t matter if she’s super-tough or just less sensitive to cold. If you want her to be willing to push through other types of adversity (say, pursuing an important but very uncertain goal), it’s not obvious that the ice bath test gives you enough information—maybe Bob is way better at that kind of difficulty (either because he’s tough to that, or because he’s just more optimistic).
You want to avoid comparing apples to oranges, and the best way to do that is not to conflate different kinds of success-under-adversity.
Yeah I agree that we probably don’t have a way to tease apart the toughness from the pain tolerance.
And I guess I agree that for “many cases” you care about the outcome, not the process, so you just care that Alice is better at sitting in ice baths, not why she is better.
But I also have a feeling that toughness matters. If Alice is good at sitting in ice baths because she happens to be very insensitive to cold temperatures, that isn’t something that is predictive of life success. But if Alice is good at sitting in ice baths because she is tough in some sort of generalizable way, that seems important because that seems predictive of her being able to handle other difficult situations well.
It sounds like you agree with this but that you are skeptical that being able to tough your way through ice baths is predictive of being able to tough your way through other adversities? If so, I have a different intuition but I’m not sure how to make the reasons for my intuition legible.
I’m sympathetic to the model—in many cases it seems that there is a generalizable trait of “toughness” (a few decades ago they called it “grit” or “determination”, now it rhymes with “agentic”). It’s tempting to simplify things to that level.
But I’m also skeptical of my own desire to believe that, and I don’t actually think it’s true often enough to count on it. When I press myself on edge cases or most specific data->prediction proposals, it loses a lot of appeal.
There are clearly some people who fare better than others across many domains. Exactly which traits cause this, and how ingrained and unchanging those traits are, remains quite difficult to pin down. Personally, I think it’s 50% luck, 50% genes, 50% early environment, and 50% current environment. Yes, success is overdetermined :)