on jk rowling's success

7/27/2019 On JK Rowling's success

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J.K. Rowling and the Chamber of Literary FameBy Duncan J. Watts Jul 19, 2013 10:15 AM CTLast weekends revelation that J.K. Rowling is the author of the critically acclaimed and -- until now -- commercially unsuccessful crime novel The Cuckoos Calling has electrified the book world and solidified Rowlings reputation as a genuine writing talent: After all, if she can impress the critics without the benefit of her towering reputation, then surely her success is deserved.And yet what this episode actually reveals is the opposite: that Rowlings spectacular career is likely more a fluke of history than a consequence of her unique genius.Whenever someone is phenomenally successful, whether its Rowling as an author, Bob Dylan as a musician or Steve Jobs as an innovator, we cant help but conclude that there is something uniquely qualifying about them, something akin to genius, that makes their successes all but inevitable.Even when we learn about their early setbacks -- Rowlings original manuscript forHarry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone was rejected by no fewer than 12 publishers;Columbia Records Inc. initially refused to release Dylans Like a Rolling Stone; Jobs was booted from Apple Inc. in the mid-1980s -- we interpret them as embarrassing oversights that were subsequently corrected rather than evidence that their success may have somehow been a product of luck or happenstance.The ExperimentSeveral years ago, my colleagues Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds at Columbia University and I challenged this conventional wisdom with an unusual experiment. W

e set out to prove that market success is driven less by intrinsic talent than by cumulative advantage, a rich-get-richer process in which early, possibly even random events are amplified by social feedback and produce large differences in future outcomes.To test our cumulative-advantage hypothesis, we recruited almost 30,000 participants to listen, rate and download songs by bands they had never heard of. Unbeknownst to the participants, they were randomly assigned to one of two groups: an independent group, which saw only the names of the bands and the songs, and a social influence group, whose participants could see how many times songs had been downloaded by others in the group. In addition, those in the social-influence groupwere assigned to one of eight different worlds that were created concurrently, allowing us to effectively run history many times.If quality determined success, the same songs should have won every time by a ma

rgin that was independent of what people knew about the choices of others. By contrast, if success was driven disproportionately by a few early downloads, subsequently amplified by social influence, the outcomes would be largely random andwould also become more unequal as the social feedback became stronger.What we found was highly consistent with the cumulative-advantage hypothesis. First, when people could see what other people liked, the inequality of success increased, meaning that popular songs became more popular and unpopular songs become less so. Second and more surprisingly, each songs popularity was incredibly unpredictable: One song, for example, came in first out of 48 we sampled in one world, but it came in 40th in another.In the real world, of course, its impossible to travel back in time and start over, so its much harder to argue that someone who is incredibly successful may owetheir success to a combination of luck and cumulative advantage rather than supe

rior talent. But by writing under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, an otherwise anonymous name, Rowling came pretty close to recreating our experiment, starting over again as an unknown author and publishing a book that would have to succeed or fail on its own merits, just as Harry Potter had to 16 years ago -- before anyone knew who Rowling was.False ResultsRowling made a bold move and, no doubt, is feeling vindicated by the critical acclaim the book has received. But theres a catch: Until the news leaked about theauthors real identity, this critically acclaimed book had sold somewhere between500 and 1,500 copies, depending on which report you read. As they say in the U.K


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., thats rubbish! Whats more, had the author actually been Robert Galbraith, the book would almost certainly have continued to languish in obscurity, probably forever.The Cuckoos Calling will now have a happy ending, and its success will only perpetuate the myth that talent is ultimately rewarded with success. What Rowlings little experiment has actually demonstrated, however, is that quality and success areeven more unrelated than we found in our experiment. It might be hard for a book to become a runaway bestseller if its unreadably bad (although one might arguethat the Twilight series and Fifty Shades of Grey challenge this constraint), butit is also clear that being good, or even excellent, isnt enough. As one of the hapless editors who turned down the Galbraith manuscript put it, When the book came in, I thought it was perfectly good -- it was certainly well-written -- but itdidnt stand out.Ironically, thats probably how those 12 editors felt about the original Harry Potter manuscript. Now, of course, they look like idiots, but what both our experiment and Rowlings suggest is that they might have been right all along.Had things turned out only slightly different, the real Rowling might have met with the same success as the fake Robert Galbraith, not the other way around. Ashard as it is to imagine in the Harry Potter-obsessed world that we now inhabit,its entirely plausible that in this parallel universe, Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone would just be a perfectly good book that never sold more than a handful f copies; Rowling would still be a struggling single mother in Manchester, England; and the rest of us would be none the wiser.(Duncan J. Watts is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and author of Ev

erything Is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer): How Common Sense Fails Us.)To contact the editor responsible for this article: Alex Bruns at [email protected]

Response from Redditor /u/YodatsracistSince no one is defending Duncan Watts here, let me. This man is brilliant. Sociologists are still incredibly sad that he gave up his professorship at Columbiato go work for Microsoft (like, when I talk with people who study networks, it still comes up all the time).The key piece of evidence that no one is discussing is the music experiment thatWatts did with Matt Salganik and Peter Dodds while Salganik was a PhD student and Dodds was a post-doc (Salganik is at Princeton now and Dodds is at UVM). This

experiment is brilliant. Yes, it builds off work that has been done before, butthat

s how science works. Particularly what this is building off is "cumulativeadvantage", what the sociologist Robert Merton called "the Matthew Effect" in the 1960

s. This argues that advantages had at Tn lead to more advantages at Tn+1. To use an example from my own life so I

m not accused of soaking the rich or anything, I went to an excellent suburban public school, my parents paid for my SAT prep course, my two university professor parents checked my college application. This all in turn helped me get into a good college. My good college helped me get gain a professional network and a good first job. My good job and professional network helps me have more opportunities for a better second job, etc. Thisis not arguing I

m a talentless hack who got by on daddy

s money and name. I worked hard. Cumulative advantage is often summed up as "the rich get richer", andwhile that

s true, it

s not the whole story. It

s more like, even in a meritocr

atic system where merit is rewarded, non-meritocratic elements play a role. Thishas been known and studied by social scientists for decades.Watts

s (and Salganik and Dodds

s) brilliance was to test this idea empiricallyin regards to cultural consumption. Their study was a big deal. It ended up in Science (here

s the ungated article). Not much social science ends up in Science,especially not sociology. What it found was that, even when everything was perfectly equal at the beginning, small, random variation at the beginning (T1 ) hadhuge effects down the line. It

s not that hacks end up on top by dumb luck, butthat there

s a lot more chance that goes into who ends up on top even in meritocratic environments. And early fortune accumulates into what looks like pure mer


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it. Moreover, their work wasn

t about marketers and hype but just about lookingwhat people had already chosen (social influence). So it combines social influence with cumulative advantage in a neat way. And this is all with minimal socialinfluence, as they point out. No marketing, no hype, just an ordered list. And keep in mind, they

re counting ratings, not downloads.Of course, you redditors know this. The whole Quickmeme scandal was exactly about this, for example. People were gaming the system, using only a handful of voting bots, by making sure that a dozen or so early votes were in their favor. Buteven before that, you knew: you

d see great comments buried deep down in the thread and think "This deserves to be on top", but wasn

t because it was added toolate. Reddit has tried to limited both cumulative advantage and social influencein various ways, to try to get more meritocratic results (that is, that the comments that are the "best" wind up on top). The "best" algorithm instead of the "top" algorithm was one attempt at this (here

s Randall from XKCD explaining it).Contest mode is another. Those are both meant to deal with cumulative advantage, others tried to deal with social influence. Hiding the scores of submissions and comments, for instance, is a new way that Reddit has been trying to limit howmuch social influence affects voting, especially during the key early period.

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