95%-ile isn't that good (2020)

> You're probably 99%-ile, but someone with no talent who's put in the time to practice the basics is going to have a serve that you can't return

I have a soft spot for this kind of insight because it is supposed to be inspiring and I know I should take it in that spirit, but one thing that's always bothered me is the contradictory assertions that on the one hand, almost no one deliberately practices, but on the other hand, this makes it "easier". How can both assertions be true? Any sensible definition of difficulty has to consider how many people succeed at it. If very few people succeed at a task in practice, it is a difficult task no matter how "easy" it looks in theory.

I've come to see passion & motivation as indistinguishable from "talent". Having the passion & motivation to put in the effort is part of one's "talent" and realistically is not that easy to change. Everyone knows that to write well, you need to practice writing a lot. Scott Alexander notes in his Parable of the Talents [1] that he never needed to really muster up the energy to practice writing a lot:

> I know people who want to get good at writing, and make a mighty resolution to write two hundred words a day every day, and then after the first week they find it’s too annoying and give up. These people think I’m amazing, and why shouldn’t they? I’ve written a few hundred to a few thousand words pretty much every day for the past ten years. But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower.

I've found this to be true in a lot of walks in life. While there are certainly people with genius intellect/ability, most of the "talented" people I meet aren't of that kind, they are just effortlessly more motivated or passionate about something than I am. For example, they often started programming when they were 10 or something and spent most of their childhood choosing to do little side projects instead of the normal variety of childhood time wasters.

I think this essay's (95%-ile is not that good) thesis is roughly this: to be good at something, you just need to care a little, because most people don't care at all. Just need to care a little, that doesn't sound so hard, right? All I want to say is yes, in my experience caring even a little is so, so hard. There's a reason why most people don't care at all and that reason is probably not "you're better and more special than most people as a reader of this essay".

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-tal...

I worked for a company where my team was fine, and individual people from other teams seemed perfectly smart and capable when talking to them, but looking at their team's output, they might as well have been idiots. I image for many of them, if they had worked at a more functional organization like Google, they would have done good work. (Even if not to the standards that Google has. But certainly better than at their then current employer.)

People state a goal, but that's not a goal - that's an aspiration. The person doing the above "time wasting" is just setting the actual goal of "relax" and "hedonism", which tbh, is completely fine. What they say their goals are is irrelevant.

Not very many people actually work towards the goal they say they want to achieve. Those who do are quite likely to achieve it.

I wouldn't say I was that good. My foundational skills were decent, but not amazing and I did poorly against cheese or in extreme late-game situations. My micro in large scale battles also sucked.

A lot of people in the community would say that Master is where the game starts, and in some ways that's very true.

This:

> Anyone in the top 5% is definitely that good, executing complex strategies with extreme precision

Is more like GM in SC2. In Master players can usually execute 90-95% perfectly if left alone, but that quickly falls apart if you have to multitask. Probably closer to 70-80% at best in real games, if that.

Also, almost everyone is copying strategies not doing anything particularly complicated. It's hard enough to just play the damn game with a simple strategy, no point in making it harder.