On lichess, the 95th percentile rating of active participants is 2125. I wonder if this author would agree such a rating "isn't that good"? I think it's pretty darn good.
Yep, I'm forever 'amazed' (read: not surprised) that this type of content continually makes it to the top of the front page of this website. With the way the author described Overwatch, it sounds like the equivalent to 95th percentile for chess would be more 50th percentile for chess, because in order to reach around that level, one would have to put in that type of work as described to purportedly reach the 95th per…
I also immediately thought "this can't be true for Chess..."
A video game and public speaking seem like really weird/unusual examples. A ton of people play video games, very few people do it professionally. A ton of people give talks, but it’s usually a small part of their jobs. Being even 50%-ile among professionals for either would certainly be extremely impressive. When I think about normal jobs, which are less competitive fields than professional gaming or speaking, being…
> Being even 50%-ile among professionals for either would certainly be extremely impressive. I think you'd be surprised at how low the bar is. And how people either 1) don't care about actively improving or 2) don't effectively learn from their mistakes. For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them. And for other people they never developed a growt…
If someone is primarily earning their living from speaking, they're probably pretty good (or have a particularly compelling story to tell)--or they wouldn't be earning their living from speaking. As the parent suggests, most people in, say, the tech industry give talks at conferences etc. now and then as a sideline. Some more than others, some better than others. But mostly, they're not having coaching, watching video, rehearsing extensively etc.--i.e. the things a professional athlete does all the time. They're just going out and doing it at least well enough that they get invited back.
In every competitive game I've ever played (Overwatch, CSGO, LoL, TFT, Rocket League), the top 5% definitely wasn't "that good". In my mind, the top 20% are people who actually play. If you are stuck anywhere below that, you aren't even trying to improve. If a leaderboard says you haven't even cracked top 50%, then that leaderboard is definitely cutting players that don't play much from the bottom of that list. In mo…
Have you played an RTS game? Look at Age of Empires 2 or 4. The ELO system has a nice normal distribution. My brother, myself, and a few friends have been playing for 20 years. I'm top 30%. My brother's top 60%. Everyone watches streamers, micros, max-performs their civs, uses strong unit comps, does all the economic tricks like luring boars, knows the counters etc. Starcraft 2 was similar, although ELO was tougher t…
A video game and public speaking seem like really weird/unusual examples. A ton of people play video games, very few people do it professionally. A ton of people give talks, but it’s usually a small part of their jobs. Being even 50%-ile among professionals for either would certainly be extremely impressive. When I think about normal jobs, which are less competitive fields than professional gaming or speaking, being…
> A video game and public speaking seem like really weird/unusual examples. I thought they were great examples because most people are familiar with both. Dan's not wrong: most people don't improve because they don't invest in getting better, and often getting better is easy to do. Incidentally, I watched one of my kids do this with Overwatch. She started watching the replays and seeing what she did wrong, and then t…
I agree. That probably do require spending a fair bit of time to build confidence and skills. But they also benefit from some deliberate practice/skills building as opposed to just repeating some of the same mistakes over and over again.
A video game and public speaking seem like really weird/unusual examples. A ton of people play video games, very few people do it professionally. A ton of people give talks, but it’s usually a small part of their jobs. Being even 50%-ile among professionals for either would certainly be extremely impressive. When I think about normal jobs, which are less competitive fields than professional gaming or speaking, being…
> Being even 50%-ile among professionals for either would certainly be extremely impressive. I think you'd be surprised at how low the bar is. And how people either 1) don't care about actively improving or 2) don't effectively learn from their mistakes. For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them. And for other people they never developed a growt…
> For a lot of people their career is just a way to get paid. As long as they don't get fired that's enough for them.
When that’s the target for hiring and the majority of people in professional practice any attempts to aggressively improve are frequently met with friction and do more to put your job at risk than just coasting. That’s why so many developers have side projects where they can be as ambitious as they wish completely disconnected from the boring professional work designed for 25%-ile.
More interesting is that reaching the 99.99th percentile is very difficult, and yet completely unremarkable. I love David Foster Wallace’s essay on this subject: “ Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness.” He follows a top 200 and is impressed by how absolutely amazing he is at tennis, but ultimatel…
It's important to choose the right thing to be in the top 0.01 percent of. Being the 200th best bobsledder probably sucks. Being in the top 200 lawyers is probably pretty awesome.
>Being in the top 200 lawyers is probably pretty awesome.
And assuming that money is the relevant metric (which it may or may not be), working at a big city law firm. You can be a top 200 lawyer (whatever that means exactly) but if you're practicing family law in a small town, you're probably not making a lot.
Have you played an RTS game? Look at Age of Empires 2 or 4. The ELO system has a nice normal distribution. My brother, myself, and a few friends have been playing for 20 years. I'm top 30%. My brother's top 60%. Everyone watches streamers, micros, max-performs their civs, uses strong unit comps, does all the economic tricks like luring boars, knows the counters etc. Starcraft 2 was similar, although ELO was tougher t…
It's important to choose the right thing to be in the top 0.01 percent of. Being the 200th best bobsledder probably sucks. Being in the top 200 lawyers is probably pretty awesome.
And if you’re in the top, say 1/3, of engineers you’ll make a good living. If you’re in the top 1% of say, chess players, you probably won’t even get tournament invites.
Tournament jobs is even a term. Look for any field that has unpaid or very lowly paid internships (or would-be actors waiting tables) because so many people will work for nothing to get a foot in the door hoping for a big break.
Trivial to be top 5 percent of the general population at programming Possible to be top 5 percent of the programmers Very difficult to be in the top 5 percent of FANG programmers Nearly impossible to be in the top 5 percent of Google Principal engineers
One way that I've always found ways to skew this is to not restrict yourself strictly to 'programming' however you define it. Always treat the problem as a one-off where everything is 'in bounds' for the solution space. This approach lets me solve problems where the top 5% have not found a solution because they were looking at certain pure problems and not the practical ones at hand.
Two other superpowers: (1) don't try to impress yourself or anyone else with the sophistication of your solutions, in fact do the opposite finding simple mechanisms that fit the problem. When you do this well, the solution looks simple, and makes the original problem seem much less hard. People don't do this because there's little credit to be had in a simple solution to a non-hard problem. Just keep in your own mind that it was a hard problem and finding that simple solution wasn't easy. With repeated practice, this means you can solve more difficult problems than others because you operate at a lower ratio of solution-complexity:problem-complexity. This is how you deal with intrinsic complexity rather than incidental. (2) Do not think procedurally (like a machine) in time steps. Think in invariants, decompose into independent logical partitions, ensure that logic is composable. When we say make code easy to 'reason about' we want to be able to, at each level, understand only what the subparts are doing, not how, and that those parts do not interfere with each other. If you repeat this at every level, you need to keep far less in your 'working memory' compared to problems that have deep implementations to keep in mind to understand and use properly. Related to this, relate the implementation structure to a conceptual model, and don't be compelled to make the conceptual model into concrete form, that tends to only add incidental complexity. People tend to do this because the conceptual model is cool and beautiful and would like to be able to show it, see it. Whenever you see a deep implementation stack that seems excessive and unnecessary there was probably a simpler implementation where each concept didn't have to be an explicit piece of architecture. Again this is very much less code, and less impressive to the unenlightened, but don't concern yourself with that, lose the ego (or rather feed it yourself instead of externally), only focus on solving hard problems with simple, underappreciated solutions.
the 95%-ile is irrelevant - it's more the sector that matters. a 5%-ile doctor is still going to be able to do the work of a doctor. The reason photography or art/music require a 99%-ile is because these sectors require popularity, and the quality is subjective. Only the most popular pieces make any money - the rest are passion projects by its creators. Engineering sectors don't need it - there's an objective standar…
Maybe. Though compare also https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/
I'm not sure the two are in opposition although I do think the MD example in the article in questionable. (I get the point he's making but, while you're either an MD or not an MD to a significant degree--it's a rather different situation from pro football player vs. not pro football player.) Tournament jobs is another term I've seen used which are characterized by an excess of supply at the entry level.