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

danluu.com

31–40 of 191 posts

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

#31
post #5

@dang — pretty annoying that this user is engagement farming by reposting classics. Not great behavior. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31199361

There's no such thing as "@dang". When you have concerns like this, mail hn@ycombinator.com, rather than crudding up the thread. Whatever this users is doing, Dan Luu's posts tend to be treasures, and we can have reasonable threads on them even as you try to clear up the submission behavior with Dan.

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

#32

This is my sad reality of local multiplayer games like Speedrunners, Duck Game, and Ultimate Chicken Horse. They're super fun, but I'm too good for my friends & family, and too bad for people who take it seriously online.

A group of friends and I would go into empty classrooms on our college campus and play Duck Game on their projectors. Made a great drinking game: You die, 1 sip. You die by falling object, another sip. If your death is memorialized (either by having your eyes closed, or turned into a tombstone), another sip. There were enough of us that we were constantly passing the controllers around. Absolute blast.

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

#33
post #28

This is my sad reality of local multiplayer games like Speedrunners, Duck Game, and Ultimate Chicken Horse. They're super fun, but I'm too good for my friends & family, and too bad for people who take it seriously online.

Classic “Kid who owns the only Sega in a friend group” problem. Nobody wants to play Mortal Kombat with them.

It's a big meme in the Smash Bros world, too. Tons of people who beat their friends but get bodied at tournaments.

If I could stand the BO or the competitive atmosphere I'd consider it.

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

#34

I would have to agree about 95th percentile being not that difficult. A streamer that I occasionally tune into (Asmongold) says that if you are seeking information outside of the game such as watching streams of the game, that makes you a top 10% player automatically. Most people are passive consumers and participants in their activities and that isn't exclusive to the individual. I am a passive consumer & participan…

It's easy to be in the top 99% in a competition nobody cares about.

Try being in the top 1% of basketball players if you're under 5'9".

Easier said than done.

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

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People post/repost the classics all the time, why are you tattling this aggressively, lol? It just needs a [2020] tag.

This is spam. I like to come here and want to contribute new ideas to the discourse here. I expect others to do the same.

So you don't think there's anything new to be said about this article, by anyone?

We're deluding ourselves if we think we're finding new ideas on what amounts to a faded techbro subreddit. Much of the discussion in tech happens in circles until we start talking about concrete code.

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

#36

This is my sad reality of local multiplayer games like Speedrunners, Duck Game, and Ultimate Chicken Horse. They're super fun, but I'm too good for my friends & family, and too bad for people who take it seriously online.

As one of the first people in my friend group to start playing Doom and Heretic using a mouse, I hear ya.

My friends could always tell when I was essentially just letting them kill me so that the fun could otherwise continue. Wound up playing way less PC games with them than N64/Genesis/Snes.

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

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People post/repost the classics all the time, why are you tattling this aggressively, lol? It just needs a [2020] tag.

This is spam. I like to come here and want to contribute new ideas to the discourse here. I expect others to do the same.

Bring us some fresh wine, the freshest you've got!

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

#38
> Some reasons we might expect this to happen are:

1. People don't want to win or don't care about winning

2. People understand their mistakes but haven't put in enough time to fix them

3. People are untalented

4. People don't understand how to spot their mistakes and fix them

——

There is another very common reason. It is often emotionally difficult to acknowledge that you’re making simple mistakes that could be fixed by a relatively small amount of dedicated practice.

Relatedly, most people have a fear of putting in the actual effort to get better and then still falling short of expectations (their own or others).

It’s emotionally easier to pretend that there are other reasons outside of your control and that dedicated practice wouldn’t make a difference anyways.

In my experience, the solution to this to work on accepting your emotions and developing inner security such that you don’t feel that your self-worth depends on the outcome of these events.

One might even discover that they don’t actually even care that much about achieving a high level of performance in activity X and that the “need” to be good at it is a manifestation of older behavioral patterns and conditioning that don’t necessarily benefit them today :)

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

#39

> Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not all people (for many activities, just doing it at all makes you 99%-ile or above across all people). I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among peo…

The author has a great post on the Dunning Kruger paper: https://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ It's interesting that the original paper does not actually justify the popular meme that the phrase became.

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been HN for years now. It’s a click farm with canned talking points.

It's kinda sad, this place feels kinda like Slashdot, and not in a good way. :(

As long as you can upvote/downvote/flag shit, you’ll get shit. The incentives aren’t aligned. That’s exactly why you’d have someone re-posting this stuff. People here aren’t old enough to remember when this happened on Digg, Nevermind Slashdot. Dang was in elementary school back then.
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