“Too Lazy”: Episode 2 with Roberta Sinatra

Today is Roberta Sinatra day on #TooLazyPod!! Roberta is a physicist, an expert on science of succes, and all-round fantastic person. In the podcast, we talks about her recent paper “Success and luck in creative careers”.

In the conversation, talk about a range of things and get deep into the process of creating science, the “backstage” part of things. If you want an overview of topics, the podcast now has time-stamps.

• [0:00:00] Sune shamelessly fishing for compliments about the podcast trailer.
• [0:02:19] We talk about Roberta’s past work, ending up in Boston and working on success.
• [0:10:29] Why Roberta is a scientist, the experience of working in BarabasiLab.
• [0:20:20] How did the question of *Luck* enter into Roberta’s research?
• [0:32:08] The difficulty of finding the right question. Being in “the cloud”.
• [0:37:00] A solution begins to present itself. The Q-model.
• [0:44:53] Decomposing success into skill and luck.
• [0:48:47] Data sources, proxies (+ power-laws vs log-normals). [0:55:45] Sune’s mind is blown learning about multiplicative luck (3).
• [1:03:30] Getting to the results of the paper!
• [1:14:07] How is talent inherited?
• [1:19:54] Wrapping up!