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 :)
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 :)