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95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

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Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#71

Post by olau »

mo1ok wrote: post #48
5cott0 wrote: post #45

There is something so depressingly robotic about the obsession with being the best at everything all the time. Career, income, diet, exercise, lifestyle, hobbies; can't even have fun anymore without spending days holed-up researching esoteric hyper-optimizations. Some of you need to relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything.

I think it's important to be passionate about your life's work. However, maintaining "good enough" across all dimensions of particular lifestyle or role is actually incredibly challenging. Even for a standard engineer, think how many you know can code well, be leaders, AND can write good documentation. For most things, it's always a "pick 2 out of 3" situation.

There's a difference between being passionate about your own work, and being passionate about being better than everyone else.

I fact, I don't think the two have anything in common?

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#72

Post by __s »

hearthstonebad wrote: post #32
empath75 wrote: post #5

Aside from all the other things he said, at least for games — 1 out of 20 people get there, and the vast majority of people who play a game play very casually. So if you put a reasonable amount of effort at all into getting good at a game, you’re likely to make the top 5% of players or close to it. I play hearthstone about, I dunno, an hour a day or so, while I’m on the train. I’ve never made it to the legend rank, b…

this is because improving your rank at hearthstone is a matter of playing as many viable games as possible. the outcome of most matches is mostly dependent on randomness as opposed to player error. The largest source of randomness being the order of card draw, which can turn around a highly favorable or unfavorable matchup between decks. the actions of players have very little impact in hearthstone. in a typical game…

1) naming yourself "hearthstonebad" isn't conducive to good discussion

2) the commenter stated his time budget: an hour a day. This doesn't seem excessive to make the argument "rank is merely a function of game time"

3) 2-7 choices is an under estimate. Past MtG pros have observed that attack ordering has more tree breadth than MtG attack phases. Saying the choices are straight forward is misguided when top players will consistently make the better choice that weaker top players miss

4) a high amount of randomness doesn't necessarily negate skill. See Poker

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#73

Post by disease »

For me, learning art has broken all of the rules I thought I knew about how to correctly go about getting better. I've made several serious efforts to get better at it with VERY limited results. Either my brain is not wired for it somehow, or my approach to learning it has been incorrect in some way.

And just FYI my attempts included slowly going through all of 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain'.

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#74

Post by jammygit »

Speaking of gaming, I passed the 95th percentile in 2 games. It takes a lot of work. You don’t feel that good when you do it because you have learned about all the weaknesses in your own play. However, put yourself in a team with some 60th percentile players and you can carry pretty hard.

It felt like the 80-85th group (diamond) is where people actually start knowing how to play properly. Lots of mechanics to practice before then though - you only get to that point by automating the lower level skills

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#75

Post by renjimen »

krick wrote: post #57

Yeah, no, that's just about lousy definitions. The premise suggests that it's easy to become 95%-ile in anything, say, deadlifting among men who deadlift and not just entire population of the planet Earth. Before I can suggest author to try, he hastily corrects himself, that it doesn't mean "95%-ile among people who practice regularly", so "men who deadlift" is invalid domain after all. Rather, it should be... "peopl…

"Waste" is a bit harsh for a hobby that trains for high levels of coordination, reaction times, communication, teamwork and tactics. In fact, the benefits of competitive video games are wide ranging and often surprising.

See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201502...

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#76

Post by eshyong »

SkyBelow wrote: post #59
cdoxsey wrote: post #12

On the flip side. Sometimes you're just not that good at stuff despite your best efforts. In college I really struggled with math. Which was a challenge because computer science has you take a lot of math classes. In my calculus class I studied so hard for the final. Did every problem in the book. And I still just got a B in the class. At the same time my programming classes were really easy. I didn't study at all an…

>Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy. This means you aren't high in the 'programming interview' skill set. While related, I consider it distinctly different than the 'programming' skill set. I think it…

Agreed with your points, although I wouldn't use the word "lie". "Marketing yourself" would be a better way to put it. It's not about falsely representing your experience; it's about knowing and emphasizing your strengths, and aligning that with the needs of the team.

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#77

Post by cdoxsey »

lordleft wrote: post #35
cdoxsey wrote: post #12

On the flip side. Sometimes you're just not that good at stuff despite your best efforts. In college I really struggled with math. Which was a challenge because computer science has you take a lot of math classes. In my calculus class I studied so hard for the final. Did every problem in the book. And I still just got a B in the class. At the same time my programming classes were really easy. I didn't study at all an…

> Based on my interviewing history I'm not in the 95th percentile of programmers - I'm routinely outright rejected and don't even land the on-site interview. And this is basically my best skill for which I've invested an enormous amount of time and energy. You mentioned faring well in programming classes. Interview performance aside, do you feel that you're a good and perhaps exceptional programmer?

I can be very quick and can work diligently (grit my way through a problem) but I struggle with design and some high level concepts.

Interviews ask abstract and theoretical computer sciency type questions and in real life I would usually google my way to a solution on those types of questions, so I do very poorly on the spot. (forget everything or say something dumb)

But in practice I can usually deliver quicker than my teammates on real world problems.

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#79

Post by zubspace »

It's funny, because I started to play Spelunky again after a long absence, which is arguably one of the hardest games to master on your own. I'm not particularly good, played for about 28 hours and have not yet finished the game. (I rarely reach the ice caves...)

The thing with this game is: It needs a lot of awareness, patience and you need to know all different kinds of game mechanics. It's not terribly complicated, but uncovering everything by yourself is madness. I was so frustrated that I started to watch videos and was enlightened by some of the tactics (yeah, around the shopkeeper...)

So the blog post has some correct points: To improve, you need to inform yourself and maybe try to get feedback. But is it fun? Is it fun to read everything about the game, potentially spoiling it, simply to own? I'm not sure. I believe you can have a lot of fun without being the best for quite some time, but I have to admit that there's a point, where it starts to hurt your ego..

So then you start to read everything about it and then what? I think, there are personal and environmental limits, which learning cannot fix. You cannot simply fix the patience you need to play the same level again and again just to improve. In FPS games, you cannot get to the 95% without investing in your hardware. And you simply cannot compete with people having too much time on their hand, while you juggle your job, family and household.

The thing is, maybe going for the 95%-tile is futile? But who cares? Simply enjoy to be average. Support your teammates as good as you can. Have fun walking into that spike trap for the 100th time. Don't take everything too serious.

Re: 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach

#80

Post by scoutt »

injb wrote: post #22
k__ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing you to some geniuses in the field isn't gonna help. Sure Mozart was better that Salieri, but there is just one Mozart. Companies are always talking about how they just take the best, but in the end they have to settle with what the market gives them.

I don't know why this was downvoted, but you're right. Geniuses of that level are rare and extremely lucky. It's like lamenting that you'll never be financially independent because you didn't win the Megamillions lottery. Only a tiny minority of people have that kind of luck and no one has any control over it.

I agree there is a degree of luck in some people, but I'll be wary about the term genius.

Personally, when someone says Genius, in some contexts, I take it like an excuse to justify the existence of people that excel doing something, just because they are born-geniuses.

The fact that some of these geniuses dedicated their entire lives to improve themselves (being it by practicing on an instrument or doing math, for example) is left aside, and the justification for doing practically nothing to achieve excellence is because "that guy/girl is a genius and I am not".

PS: In the office that justification comes as being an expert: when someone doesn't know how about something, it's because some other person is an expert. When the boss asks the lab manager "how does that WiFi module work?" the answer is "let's call X because she is an expert", when the manager should already know how that works.

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