Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

That’s not how IQ tests are made as can be found by reading how they’re actually made via Google scholar. And it would be spectacularly hard to do what you describe.

How they’re actually made is a batch of questions thought to take some form of reasoning are curated, then ALL of those questions are used in the test. It is an empirical fact the percentages of decent sized groups of people will score a bell curve, in exactly the same way humans do on hard calc exams, on hard writing items, on chess problems, and across a bewildering amount of mental tasks, none of which are preselected and fidgeted with to fake a Gaussian.

A simple example: see how many simple arithmetic problems people can do in fixed time. What do you find? Gaussian. No need to fiddle with removing pesky problem. Do reading. Do repeat this sequence for length. Just about any single class of questions has the same bell curve output in human mental ability. The curve may bend based on some inherent difficulty, say addition versus calculus, but there will be a bell curve.

Now take plenty of types of questions to address various wobbles in people’s knowledge, upbringing, culture, etc, giving a host of bell curves per category (and those also correlated by individual). Then the sum of gaussians is gausdian. All IQ tests do is shift the mean score to be called 100 (normalized) and the std dev to match a preset amount of people so such tests can be compared over time.

And the empirical evidence is these curves do strongly correlate over time, so scaling a test to align with this underlying g factor is well founded.

This latter fact, that score on one form of intelligence seems to transfer well to others, forms the basis of modern intelligence research on the g factor. IQ tests correlate well with this g factor. And across all sorts of things the results are bell curves.

For anyone wanting to hear all this and a ton more, Lex Fridman has an excellent interview with a state of the art intelligence researcher at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hppbxV9C63g. The researcher goes into great depth on what researchers do know, how they know it, what they don’t know, and what has been proven wrong. This is all there.

> Hey, wait – is employee performance Gaussian distributed?

Well, the Gaussian distribution gives positive probability to any interval of the real line, including the whole real line (probability 1), so, strictly speaking, no.

But maybe the issue is a distribution with a bell curve or even with just a unique maximum and falling off monotonically from that maximum.

Well, then, in my college teaching, still no: Instead, commonly, roughly, there were three kinds of students: (1) understood the material at least reasonably well, (2) understood some of the material a little, and (3) should have just dropped the course but from me got by with a gentleman C. So, the distribution had a peak for each of (1) -- (3), three peaks, no Gaussian!

Approximate Gaussian is guaranteed, under meager assumptions, from the central limit theorem (CLT) of averaging random variables, the easiest case, independent, identically distributed (IID), and, more depending on how advanced the CLT proof is. A proof due to Lindeberg-Feller long was, maybe still is, regarded as the most powerful CLT.

Apparently ~100 years ago, especially in education, the CLT was commonly regarded as standard, true, without question, maybe some law of nature. Maybe some of the people measuring IQ, SAT scores, etc. also thought this about the Gaussian.

For me, I, in mathematical and applied probability, care first about finite expectation, conditional independence, independence, several convergence results (e.g., the martingale convergence theorem), then IID, and hardly at all, Gaussian.

> People don’t have to be passionate about their job to do really good work.

Even in your core logic here you're proving my point. It's not about being passionate about your job, it's about being passionate about your work, which for me and most of the people I've enjoyed working with the most only has a rough overlap with our jobs. It's a true privileged to work in an area with high paying jobs, but if tech completely crumbled I would remain working in the field so long as the work was relevant to what interests me, regardless of how little it paid.

Doing really good work, in the sense I'm talking about, has little to do with how good you are at your job. In fact, as your job pays more it increasingly requires a distracting loyalty to your employer and the "work" you do tends to increasingly become less interesting. There are very clear exceptions to this, but for the most part I've found it to be the case.

High TC speaks solely to an individuals ability to meet the needs of a high paying employer. I prefer to work with people who are working on something much larger than their job, so tend to work at weirder companies that pay less.

I guess it all comes down to what you define as "talent" (as that was the original point), personally I'm not interested in working with people whose primary talent is being a good employee.

Talking about a "toxic person" is starting on an ontological track that is deprived of any possible way to make everyone satisfied. Instead it’s possible to think about toxic behavior. Now, maybe a behavior is so deeply enshrined in a person that abrogating it is out of reach for the social organization that is considering this person behavior as a source of nuisance. But this is not necessarily the case and maybe there are option to help the person change and become part of a more harmonious social structure.

Using a "isolate poor performers" and "excellent beings" has well known backfire consequences that history largely document.

This is indeed a crazy idea (your words, not mine). Why should a foreign worker who can do a job in the US that pays 2,3,4x what they make at home be forced to languish underpaid because of where they were born? And why should the US economy be denied their talent to protect inherited privilege of an American worker who can't compete?