I love dan luu's blog posts. Great examples of principled thinking. Much of their writing on (computer) performance has pushed my own thinking and expectations.
Incidentally, I was in the top 10% in my last half-marathon. My next goal is to be in the top 5% (~1h30m). I expect this to take decent amount of effort and more structured training.
The easiest way to improve your relative ranking is to find a less competitive event :)
I recently won my age class in a 10k (6th overall out of 147 men). In a very competitive race earlier this year, the exact same time barely put me in the upper half (242/498).
“95%ile in HN-driven engagement, even among those trying, isn’t actually that good—most don’t even bother to set up a submission cron-job against a list of historically-upvoted classic posts”
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.
Yeah I'm not interested in that part, that's obviously suspicious behavior that admins will ideally handle. The person I replied to said the content itself was spam and claimed to care about new ideas being shared.
Also, if you're on a website or platform long enough that a repost angers you, go outside. Read a book. Play a game. There is better shit to worry about than how many times a page is linked to on a forum.
Yep, they aren't progressively posting them, OP is spamming at this point. Quite sad considering their account is from 2010, they should understand HN more. Looks like they are trying to drive people to their sites judging from the long list of URLs on their profile.
For the last 24 hours, they've submitted 30 posts with zero other contributions such as comments.
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.
Agreed. There's something flawed about the voting model that totally messes with people socially. It ends up replacing actual discourse with gamesmanship.
I assume the green handle is because you're a mod. ~~Given that you seem to understand the design problems and limitations, do you feel like modding sites like these is more of a hassle than other platforms? Investigating antisocial shit seems more complex than just checking DMs and post history. Voting history is relevant, too.~~ Assumption wrong.
Looks like they are trying to drive people to their sites judging from the long list of URLs on their profile
I can't imagine that's very effective. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I rarely (i.e. < 1% of the time) look at a profile AND follow links found therein.
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.
I think what the commenter did was reasonable, since it also lets other HNers know that this is a behavior to be on the lookout for. I knew people spammed HN with links to their own websites, but I didn't realize people tried did the same with previously-successful submissions.
I agree with the commenter that this isn't appropriate, even if it sometimes leads to good discussions. I appreciate that he posted it here, even if he ultimately has to email HN to get this addressed.
Perhaps the best resolution is for a rule to be added to the HN guidelines. I don't mind people submitting a lot, but if you're just recycling old stuff that's not great IMO.
I'm curious to know which of those guidelines covers this somewhat-novel situation. @-ing the mods may not officially be a thing, but I have to say whenever there is a comment starting with that handle that rises up in the comments, it gets attention right quick.
> Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
The first guideline is about submissions, not commenting. The second and third are not quite on-point because the commenter is not saying that the post is inappropriate per se, but that it's part of a pattern of inappropriate behavior.
I, for one, and glad that the commenter added to the conversation in this way. I can see I'm not alone, as the post was subsequently flagged (to be clear, I didn't flag it).
They didn't add to the conversation. They inserted an off-topic digression about the submitter of the story, who has nothing to do with the story or with Dan Luu. Before other people downvoted and flagged it, it was sprawling out from the top comment on the thread. That's why we have these guidelines: to keep stuff like this from crudding up threads.
I'm also not sure what you mean by flagging; the story isn't flagged, and is on the front page right now.
If you view this through a micro-lens, then it leads you to focus on the 'crudding up' of the thread. But if you take a macro view, then you consider the bigger-picture impact that the submitter's behavior has on HN as a whole.
Could the commenter have just emailed HN? Sure. But by commenting, the commenter shared this information with the community, who were then able to upvote the comment (I did) and flag the post (I did not). This is a valuable service IMO. It provides the HN team with additional feedback and alerts other HNers to a way in which the community is being used, perhaps not for the best.
The view has been taken at sufficient zoom levels to have multiple specific guidelines and dozens of moderator comments. It's just not the case that nobody has thought about this much or discussed it on HN repeatedly.
As to 'valuable service', what the HN moderators ask in their own guidelines regarding feedback is very likely a better indication of value than 'IYO'.
As explained above, none of the guidelines actually addresses this type of comment. Also, it's obviously not just IMO, since as I mentioned other people have flagged the post, presumably after being educated by this comment.
It's fine. If you care, pay attention to how things like this go in the future, and I think it'll rapidly become clear to you what the norms are. If you really care, do what obsessives do, and follow Dan's comments, which are an informal mod-log for the site. We don't have to keep talking about this.
none of the guidelines actually addresses this type of comment
They do. A significant chunk of the site guidelines boils down to 'no meta' and even address the specific kind of meta in the comments - meta about appropriateness of submissions and meta about the alleged misbehaviour of others.
The fact that it's not just your opinion doesn't change the fact that the mods have said this kind of commentary does not, in fact, provide value to them which was your claim.
But like tptacek says, just read/follow dang's comments, almost everything gets recycled through there on a regular basis.
In addition to that 'akerl_ comment, Dan has explicitly said, a bunch of times, that they don't monitor "@dang". It's not a thing, but doing it creates the false impression to others that it should work.
> 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 people who participate.
My probably wrong opinion is that when people discuss “Dunning Kruger” the participants aren’t clearly considering what set of people they’re being measured against.
The original Dunnint Kruger study involved Ivy League students (Cornell). I would hope they have high confidence in their ability. They’re genuinely the cream of the crop!
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.
It depends. A 95%-ile salary in an average country will buy you a tiny flat in a good area. The equivalent salary in a very rich country will allow you to retire in your 40s.
for a while I've been counfounded by the connection between "they're really smart, they do great quality work" and the simple fact that maybe, they just spent way more time doing the work
The argument from Scott Adams is about generalists being better than specialists is in regarding becoming useful/resourceful enough to the point people will pay you for your skillset.
No one gets outstanding recognition for being in the 95%-ile.
I took it as suggesting 75% is aiming way too low for these kinds of even-people-doing-it-don’t-deliberately-practice activities, even if you’re aiming to be a generalist. Rather, that being 95%ile (among practitioners) or better in several valuable skills/areas-of-knowledge isn’t actually an unreasonable goal.
I remember a piece on Donald Glover where Glover described discovering a “superpower” that went on to define his life when, after getting his ass handed to him in a casual basketball match as a kid, he simply practiced shots for a few hours that evening, and the next match went very differently. He doesn’t come out and say precisely what the superpower was but I took it as “literally try at all, and put the tiniest amount of thought/focus into how you try”. The implicit observation is similar: going up tens of percentile in skill-level isn’t that hard, because most people don’t thoughtfully try or put in any practice time at all, even those engaging in the activity. Won’t make you elite, but start applying that goal-oriented-practice attitude to several of the kinds of fuzzy activities mentioned in this piece, and you might really get somewhere.
The Red Quest had a similar point on the dating scene - ie. guys just aren’t trying very hard and it seems like strange behaviour but if you commit you can get excellent results.
I personally don’t. Pick-Up has shifted over the years not many people do it the old school way. If you Google up Red Quest, he moved to Substack you can probably find the article. “Most guys just don’t care” or something like that.
And it’s true. People would rather get baited into online nonsensical outrage and neuter themselves by playing video games.
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.
I always demolished my friends as Ness (to the point where they renamed PK Fire to PK Cancer) but Ness is one of the least competitive characters in tournaments and I'd get absolutely demolished because he's so easy to counter if you know what you're doing (hint: intentionally absorb his PK thunder when he's trying to get back on stage).
Same with myself and Link. I've been devoted to him the entire series, with side characters for fun, and without fail, he falls to characters with more movement options that can escape the zone and outspeed him up close. Ultimate made him much better with the remote bombs for the mindgames, but yeah I feel it. Solidly mid-tier this time around but still next to nobody playing him at the top, so I haven't seen much pushing of his game. Izaw was big in the Smash4 era and I think T, Tea? A Japanese player still plays him in Ultimate.
I keep telling myself if I ever get good at bomb-jumping to recover, my game will explode in potential.
Nice to find another Ness player in the wild; one of my IRL friends is a Ness and Lucas main. He was the first I ever played against that could do more than PK Fire and yo-yo. Those matches get rough with PK Fire's angles and how quickly the stick can come out and return that arrow...
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.
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.
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 & participant in many activities: I have no interest in being more knowledgable in cars / driving, I don't want to get better at cooking, I enjoy chess but I currently have no desire past futzing around with the Chess.com app in the few moments I have.
By virtue of seeking out information outside of that context, you are trying to dive deeper into the activity even if you aren't performing at that level.
Most software engineers aren't listening to podcasts about software engineering. If you are religiously listening to and learning from podcasts, that makes you more suspectible to being a higher percentile performer in software engineering.
Absolutely. The article hints at this problem by saying 95th percentile is easy but the grind from 95th to 99th is more difficult, requiring explicit effort and reflection on your process.
To use a gaming metaphor that hopefully lands, the XP grind from level 1 to 92 in Runscape is the same XP amount as the XP needed to go from 92 to 99 [0].
It is also illustrated with the Pareto Principle and the 90/10 rule where the final portion takes the most resources. Someone can easily become top 10% basketball player given the right training. 27M people played basketball recreationally in the US in 2021 [1], you only need to be in the top 2,700,000 players to be a top 10% player. There's only about 500 people in the NBA in a given year [2] so they represent approximately the top 0.0018% of organized basketball players.
If you include people who play rarely or in pick-up games, the odds of a top 10% 5'9 player jump drastically. 5'9 isn't that short either, it's roughly the median height of an American man.
> To use a gaming metaphor that hopefully lands, the XP grind from level 1 to 92 in Runscape is the same XP amount as the XP needed to go from 92 to 99 [0].
Do you get more XP on average when you're a higher level?
It really depends skill to skill, but generally yes. However, and keeping in mind this again varies a lot skill to skill, the increases are not even the same order of magnitude as the scaling for the xp required.
You're thinking about the _NBA_ when you think of basketball players. You can _easily_ be in the top 5% of _people that play basketball_ just by playing at the gym once or twice a month, even if you're short.
> Most software engineers aren't listening to podcasts about software engineering. If you are religiously listening to and learning from podcasts, that makes you more suspectible to being a higher percentile performer in software engineering.
Does it though?
I don't feel like listening to podcasts is a particularly good way to build software engineering skill.
The same way listening to a podcast about art doesn't make you a better painter nor listening to a podcast about football will make you a better athlete.
If I listen to a podcast on let's say, algorithms.
They discuss an algorithm I'm currently working on and some research papers on said algorithms.
If I didn't know about those research papers I now have more knowledge than I had before and can improve more than someone who didn't have said knowledge.
Replace algorithm with framework, design pattern, type of software etc...
It alone doesn't make you better just like reading a boom wouldn't make you a better software developer. Actually absorbing the information and using it to improve would.
The same can be said for every single one of the fields you mentioned.
Sharing knowledge using spoken word is no different from sharing knowledge using any other media.
I agree, I think building things is the main thing that makes someone better. So building side projects and experimenting with different tech besides your work.
Podcasts I think are quite superficial. They can only be beneficial if you are critical about what they are saying, but to be critical you need to have already made something yourself. Otherwise you are blindly learning facts like you said.
> A streamer (...) says that if you are (...) watching streams of the game, that makes you a top 10% player automatically.
Sounds like pandering to the audience. Performing better then 90% of people makes you a top 10% player.
Self soothing about how what you like to do in your spare time makes you better then others is not making you any favors.
It doesn't matter how much effort you put into being effective. In fact I'd say living and breathing software engineering will make you a less effective software engineer than someone who also understands management, psychology, economics, etc.
I knew I should've been an asterisk / joke about that! :)
Yeah, I could certainly see that but I disagree with your assessment that it is just pandering or self-soothing.
Seeking out any external information in your off-time / outside from that activity gives you the edge against people who just show up and only engage and think about the activity while doing it.
If you are watching basketball play-by-plays or even better, recordings of your own games (read: consuming transformative versions of games just outside your skill vs passively consuming a professional game) outside of basketball practice, there is a good chance you will pick up or develop ideas of how to apply that to your own game.
Yes, passively watching someone play WoW has a low chance of making a world-first raider but watching a world-first raider do raiding with the intention of picking new ideas up will expose you to ideas and methods you won't otherwise be exposed to through normal gameplay.
By listening to other engineers speak, you are being exposed to problems and solutions you would have had to encounter and solve yourself (or possibly never have so you will never cross pollinate ideas)
See there's the mentality I'm calling self soothing. Your mental model of what makes someone excel seems to build off of what you like to do. One thing is to pursue extra information, another is to believe the sole way to excel is by doing the things you do.
I think it depends on how you measure top 10% in a video game (especially the MMORPGs Asmongold plays), being a top 10% player by stats is a function of play time and 'grind'.
People actively looking at top 10% players can have more game knowledge and build efficiency than people who just grind bigger numbers.
Being an "effective" software engineer also depends on your definition of effective. Mark Zuckerberg was clearly an effective software engineer, but was he in the top 5% of engineers?
People judging their abilities by adjacent (and loosely correlated) metrics is a road to unhappiness.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure"
I got to top 10% of Trackmania players (extremely competitive) just by watching Wirtual’s streams. Couple of advices (and learning to implement them) were worth more than hours of (bad) grinding.
And he is „only” in like 99,9th percentile in time trials, not even competing in top tournaments.
Same: when Path of Exile was less popular and had races I was often able to finish top 10% (or even much better) by just copying techniques from streamers who were good.
The concentration of knowledge that was available in a (successful player's) stream was far more useful than what I could gain from personal experience playing alone.
If you define "player" in this context as "person who bought the game and opened it at least once" then becoming top 90% in any given game really doesn't take much. If Steam achievements are accurate just playing the game for an hour will make you above average. Most people quit before that and thus have no time to learn the game.
I still agree with your last paragraph. In gaming as in professional life, a T-shaped skillset is really useful. Having broad knowledge and experience, even if it's mostly shallow, is incredibly useful.
I've brought this up before and got down voted, but I agree. Competition starts at the 90th percentile. Everything before that is casual play and fundamentals.
> Most software engineers aren't listening to podcasts about software engineering. If you are religiously listening to and learning from podcasts, that makes you more suspectible to being a higher percentile performer in software engineering.
It's generally true that seeking more information can lead to increased knowledge, yes.
But I've also met a lot of people in my career who can confidently recite factoids from hundreds of podcasts, books, and blog posts they've read but then struggle when they have to tackle real-world problems. Podcasts don't substitute for experience and someone with real-world experience is going to run circles around someone who merely listened to a lot of podcasts or read a lot of books.
Podcasts have also become a trap for inexperienced engineers in recent years. It's easy to listen to a lot of podcasts with guests who are trying to flex their knowledge or look extra smart by claiming their subject is the only way to do something. Then you end up with juniors trying to make complex microservice architectures with over-engineered single page app frontends for trivial tasks because that's what they've been learning about from podcasts. Podcasts try to capture the most exciting topics, whereas many engineering problems are better solved by boring old technology. Without experience to know the difference, podcasts can really lead people astray.
> 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.
Influencers telling their followers that following them will provide a leg up on the competition is the oldest marketing trick in the book. :) I'm sure some amount of stream watching can provide some learning, but for fast-twitch games I'll put my money on the player who has more hours of practice over the player who watches a lot of streams of other people playing.
In StarCraft the reverse it true. There are many who get information outside the game by watching, but don't actually play that much (1v1 in particular). Just by playing it puts you in a high percentile of SC2 players (that used to play or only play co-op and other forms).
I'm a pretty consistent top 10 amateur cyclist in Colorado. Some really get wrapped up in it and let it get to their head. The reality though is most people don't ride or race, of those who even race many are there just to participate, now of those who are there to race my percentile has dropped. On the flip side, the truly great riders are overseas and even of them there are just a handful of riders anyone will ever know by name and who are making any money.
Even within bike racing, defining 99% is tricky. The sport generally punishes all-arounders. In road racing, most winners either have great sprints with just enough aerobic capacity to hang on til the finish or have massive aerobic capacity and anemic sprints. I no longer follow the sport, but riders like Peter Sagan and Julian Alaphilippe were more impressive to me than, say, Chris Froome.
Tadej has entered the chat. That guy might be the best all-rounder in several generations. Tour wins and strong in the Classics? That doesn't happen any more.
> 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 :)
How about I just want to win but I don’t want it enough to grind hard because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze in many competitive things with no rewards for winning except a small rush
The first example makes me think if the 95th percentile players still can't figure out how to trigger the mission completed objective, the problem is probably more with the mission design being inappropriate for the game's user base than an indication of some broader truth about how add the 95th percentile person is at everything
This is the kind of claim that needs actual evidence, otherwise it's just a dumb feel-good sentiment about how you _could_ be 2000 ELO on lichess if you cared.
I tend to agree that with enough time and _appropriate_ training anyone can become quite competent at anything, but this is a significantly different claim than thinking you can be in the 95th percentile of persons who are engaged in the activity. It becomes even worse when you realize that technical activities (such as programming) where there are cash incentives are a lot different than recreational activities where the only incentive is to have fun. There is an incentive to _not_ improve at a recreational activity and outpace your friends.
> I tend to agree that with enough time and _appropriate_ training anyone can become quite competent at anything
It's something I don't believe. There's no evidence for it, but that would also be really hard to obtain. You'll get better with training, practice, exercise, but quite competent is a level very many people won't be able to manage.
Physical competence is an obvious case. Roughly half the population is too young or too old to become e.g. a "quite competent" marathon runner, has ailments, handicaps, etc. An even larger part simply is not tall enough to reach beyond than absolute amateur level in certain sports (basketball, volleyball). And the differences don't magically stop at the blood-brain barrier.
I agree that more than 5% of the population could achieve the level currently held by the top 5%, but it's not a lot more.
I don't think I agree with this at all. I can see how you would have this impression with something like a video game or I guess public speaking where maybe a lot of people do it un-seriously and you can be better than most with some intentional effort. It's weird to choose a super mass market game like Overwatch to make that point though, if you were in the 95th percentile of Starcraft players, that would truly be something, since the skill ceiling is MILES high.
For anything with a physical component I think this whole thing falls apart completely. For something like weightlifting the 95% percentile for men is around 160kg or ~352lbs. Going from sedentary to that lift could take years of effort. Musical performance is similarly something where the effort to do anything at all is quite large.
It probably depends on your objective. 352 lb is about the cutoff before you become a competitive weight lifter. Most people probably don't want to do that. Same thing happens in gaming, 95th percentile is probably about where you get to the point of "learned how to play the game up to the competitive level".
The majority of my hobbies are non-competitive. If I get to one day be a 95th percentile hiker, I will be ecstatically happy. However I'd be willing to bet that for my (narrow) niche of software - I am well into the three 9s by virtue that while most backend engineers will have touched what I work on, they haven't done it for 10 years in a demanding environment.
I see what you're saying, but my point is that even for non-competitive pursuits in the physical world many can involve deep levels of skill that take years to develop. Cooking is another great example, almost anyone can make dinner for themselves but making a really delightful meal for guests requires a lot of skills that take a lot of time to develop. You can go quite deep there, and while hard to measure become better than 95% of home cooks would be impressive.
I'm not sure what the 352 is supposed to be. strengthlevel.com claims a 352 lb bench is ~95th percentile for a 180 lb male, but I've never seen anyone in a gym that can bench anywhere near that. IME even a 225 lb squat feels like 95th percentile. I don't think I've ever seen someone else do a 100 lb shoulder press (~20th percentile on SL). Usually I see something like 75 lb (doing fixed barbells), and once I saw 95 lbs.
The idea is most people who participate are probably closer to what you see at the YMCA or Planet Fitness, not a powerlifting gym. They could do a lot more with basic advice like "add weight".
I can squat 315, DL 425, bench about 230. Done 100-115 strict overhead press. I train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Plenty of guys stronger than me that I train with. I also go to a gym once in a while. I am solidly middle of the pack, especially considering I weigh 200 lbs. maybe if you are at planet fitness or something. Otherwise these numbers only take a bit of dedicated work to achieve. You would not look at me and think much based in my build and appearance.
> Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not 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 people who participate.
Someone who even calls it "training" and has specifically put in effort to be better is probably in the 95th percentile of people who do the activity.
> Otherwise these numbers only take a bit of dedicated work to achieve
I think you may be underselling that a bit. I got to something like 370-80lb DL while weighing 185 some years ago, and it took nearly 3 years of dedicated work, eating tons of boring chicken, and a lot of lifestyle changes. It was pretty hard work and a of hours in total. I still lift weights, but don't have the focus and dedication to maintain that kind of lifting routine. Even at my max I was probably only edging into the "advanced" category.
My numbers were similar to yours, but I agree with OP that it wasn’t really “difficult”. Sure, you have to turn up to the gym regularly and put in the hours, but there’s no real skill or practice involved. It’s not like tennis/judo/your_sport where you actually have to focus to get good.
I guess saying a “bit” is dismissive. I had periods of regular training. Periods of no lifting. Running was a big part of my life. I have never been a very dedicated lifter. Did some 12 week cycles here and there. Probably took me a decade to hit those numbers. Someone with more focus could get there quickly. It was hard work here and there but nothing anyone would look at and say wow, I can’t do that. My T is a avg too, I have had it tested many times. Just solidly middle of the pack.
That's kind of the point: people online will say that's the 95 %ile level[0], and either they're taking the piss or they're self-selecting into a group that actually tries, so it's the 95 %ile of the 95%ile, or the 99.75 %ile. Meanwhile your average gymgoer that sometimes wanders into the free weight room thinks putting the big plates on the bar (i.e. 135) is a lot. There's obviously no way 1 in 20 dudes at the gym have a ~350 bench.
And not to distract from the point (which you made well), but weight lifting in general is tricky to compare since you generally want to take body weight into account. Benching 225 lbs is a different prospect for a 125 lbs individual vs. a 250 lbs individual.
A 352 pound bench at 180 pounds is bordering on being an elite lift. I would wager that it's unattainable for most guys, even if they worked at it and did everything right (in terms of training, nutrition, etc). Success in athletics/strength-based activities is, in large part, determined by genetics.
I'm sure there are domains where being in the 95th percentile just takes "some work." If we're using video games to make this point though, then I'm at a loss for words.
It doesn’t matter how high the skill ceiling is, just how much effort the average player puts into the game. In Starcraft 2 to be top 4% player essentially means to be the worst player in masters league. But the gap in skill between a bad masters player and a grandmaster player (or even larger, a pro player) is enormous. I know that when I played I was able to climb to near the top of diamond without even using map hot keys, and still being (compared to high masters players) really quite mediocre at macro. It doesn’t really matter how high the skill ceiling is when you can approach the 95th percentile while not even utilizing all the functionality the game gives you.
That doesn't mean it isn't very difficult or in some ways impressive, just that to get into the top few percentage points is even more impressive. It's not like you're going to watch a few hours of game play and suddenly be able to jump to that level.
> if you were in the 95th percentile of Starcraft players, that would truly be something, since the skill ceiling is MILES high.
If you made it near the top of diamond in Starcraft 2, that's probably top 5%, and that's still _miles_ away from where the pro players are. I made it near the top of diamond at some point after it came out and I was terrible at SC2.
I feel like implicit in this framing is the idea that one's sense of value is linked to where one measures up in some arbitrary task. Should I feel worse about myself if I'm only in the 95th percentile for some activity I enjoy rather than the 99th? Most things worth doing are more enjoyable the more skilled you are at them, but of course our lives are finite and we have to make choices that might limit our development of any skill. But the more I am worried about where I measure up, the less I am enjoying the thing for what it is. As the saying goes, comparison is the thief of joy.
The framing is a lot narrower, and pretty clear if you’ve ever played overwatch. In that context a lot of people claim they want to get better, but don’t even grab for the lowest hanging fruit.
> but of course our lives are finite and we have to make choices that might limit our development of any skill.
This is a key point in Four Thousand Weeks (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54785515). For our hobbies, it'd be totally fine (and even preferable) to not worry about percentiles at all.
* The caveat of course being that you dedicate all your available waking hours (not occupied with life-sustaining activities) to training and deliberately practicing a single particular skill/game and also trying to do your best every single time, which is incredibly mentally taxing. It's even more mentally taxing as you get older, since your fluid intelligence diminishes.
Also, another author's mistake is diminishing the role of talent. While we know that with deliberate practice most people can achieve a 95%-ile, the real advantage of talent is how fast you can get there. Because if it takes you half as long to get there, you are able to start reaping the rewards earlier, and getting first-mover advantage.
I think the author's point is really that you can outperform a huge slice of people with just a little bit of careful self-reflection and asking for help, instead of putting even more effort into grinding and hoping you'll improve.
Or, even: by throwing some deliberateness in to things we're doing, we can avoid a lot of frustration.
As someone who used to be an avid gamer and reasonably competitive, "a little bit of careful self-reflection" is definitely not enough to get you in the top 5%. Top 20%, sure, because the bottom 50% doesn't even try, and the next 30% tries just enough to learn the basic mechanics.
You need a certain time commitment and the ability to learn reasonably complex abstract mental models. Learning curves for many games are in the 1000s of hours. It's just not easy to fit into a busy work schedule.
I think the way this is phrased is weird. It should probably be rephrased as "becoming 95% percentile at a thing is not that hard". Which I might agree with. Becoming good at a lot of tasks and skills really just comes down to finding the right approach to training and then doing that training. The last 5% is much harder because that's generally filled with truly talented people that also know how to train and are diligent with it.
I've been top 1% and slightly below 1% at peak in video games that have milions of gamers and I wouldnt say that top 5% is filled with "truly talented people"
Top 5% is just decent people, but they are very, very, very far from top 0.1, 0.5%, etc.
I'm in the top 15 bf4 tankers in the US. I run a very unique loadout that's very specific to my PTFO playstyle and the most common threats I deal with. It has glaring weaknesses that few ever exploit, but if you knew the game and actually tried to counter me, you absolutely could.
Sometimes, the .001% have simply found their particular niche in the ecosystem
Ah, there's probably still 500 players still playing on PSN. Probably the same on XBL and maybe 2x that on PC I'd guess. The only problem I see is a 'dead sea' effect, where a lot of the folks still playing are very good, and the games can be lopsided and not fun for the average player. I hate to see them stomp on average dudes. I always hold back capturing the last objective, and I never shoot into deployment even if I'm taking fire. The game should be fun and fair for everyone.
As I said, I'm a tanker. I run smoke screen, thermal camo, and LMG. It's an insanely fun play style because everyone relies on their minimap and thermal optics and I'm basically a 70 ton ghost on the battlefield. It's crazy how easy it is to sneak up behind enemy armor or juke incoming shells because everyone is looking for a white blob or a red marker on their map.
Also, given I'm almost unspotable, aircraft tend to leave me alone unless i'm dealing with a pro jet pilot that's looking for me. Sometimes I will piss off the enemy team and by the 3rd strafing run I'm like 'wow bud, you really got nothing better to do with your day, huh?'
The world of video games can't be compared with anything else — except sports — in terms of competitiveness. If you're in the top 32 you're in the A-list of celebrities in that niche, and if you're top 64 you're a second-tier celebrity. Anything after that and it's hard to get paid.
Imagine a country where only the top 64 surgeons get paid.
Yes, and becoming a professional in a domain is a heuristic for tiering skill. The reason why OP is so dismissive to the top 1% is because they're not good to break into the industry.
This is a function of the market for a particular skill, not the skill distribution within that market.
The skill distribution for surgeons is ~the same as the skill distribution for baseball. The reason surgeons get paid to work as professionals is because there is demand for people who can perform surgery.
I'm no good anymore, but in the VERY early days of SC2, I was good enough to occasionally get matched up by the ranking system with players like WhiteRa and Idra.
Shocking how much better they were than me. Technically in the same league, but in terms of skill it wasn't even close. The top .1% really are something special in these types of cases. Pretty neat stuff.
I just looked and the top 4% of the SC2 ladder is Master+, which I consider to be quite an accomplishment. At the same time, there's so much range of skill within the master's leagues as well as even in the Grandmaster (top 200 players in each region). Even the difference between the top 5 pros and next 10 are visible in matches.
This reminds me of the range of skills in Go (board game), from absolute beginner 30-20k (kyu) beginners, 19k-10k casual, 9k-1k amateur (me), then 1-7d advanced amateur (dan), then 1-9p (pro dan). Each few 'stones' of difference can typically squash or run circles around the other. So many orders of magnitude.
It's kinda fascinating, isn't it? Small adjustments make such a massive difference. I had a similar experience in League of Legends. I'm no good at that game, but a streamer who was a backup for cloud9 (a support player; I forget who, but his name was kinda edgy iirc??) played with his viewers sometimes. I was a support main at the time, and I just remember feeling like he was more dangerous than his ADC in terms of pure damage. How? It's not possible. It's so confusing. I never figured out how he was so successful with his extreme aggression in lane, but I was utterly fascinated.
Likewise -- I played in CAL-M in Counter-Strike back in the day. This statement dates me, I realize, but for those who aren't aware, CAL was the top online Counter-Strike league, and CAL-M was the second tier. IIRC, there were ~10 teams in CAL-I, the top tier, and about 40 teams in CAL-M, separated into multiple regions. (Lower tiers were CAL-IM, i.e., intermediate, and CAL-O, i.e., open - anyone could join CAL-O, but getting past that required promotion.)
Anyway, point is, I was probably in the top ~1000 Counter-Strike players in North America in the early to mid aughts. But the gap between CAL-M and CAL-I was just ridiculous -- we're talking about the gap between a college sports team and a pro team. The average CAL-M team wouldn't win a single match in a CAL-I season.
So, yeah - the gap is increasingly large the closer you get to the top of a given pursuit.
I think it was Adam Savage who put it this way (talking about the importance of talent): Getting 90% of the way to mastery of a thing is just a matter of practice. Talent is what gets you that last 10%.
I'm 70%-ile online chess player. That is average relative to players active on lichess in a given month.
I'm better than most people (maybe top 10% even) that "play a little." I'm (I assume) well below average for adult tournament player. The pool matters. I think if I took lessons and dedicated a serious 100-200 hrs over some period, I might reach 85th in my online pool.
95%-ile is currently ELO 2075... just under where junior masters (CMs) seem to be on lichess. I suspect that extra 150 elo would be a difficult jump... but maybe doable for me and other average players.
Chess is probably structured similar to athletics and other such pursuits. You can probably expect a similar distribution for weight lifting, for example. The average person can probably reach the level where everyone (including most over average people) is "actually trying" simply by being systematic. Where that point is varies, but weight lifting and chess have similar ranges of participation levels... like many hobbies.
In any case... I think unlike chess, it's worth focusing on either strategy or technique... not tactics.
Strategically defining the thing (chess is defined, but "software engineering" is malleable). Meaningfully selecting the pool. Actually deciding the value. Getting to top 10% rec chess player sounds fun. Getting to CM sounds arduous and pointless. There's not much value in being an entry level chess master... or power lifter.
Techniques, like the habit of planning a training plan, creating a strategic plan with goals, timelines and such... that's a valuable asset... very transferable. The tactics... not so much. Meanwhile, you don't need great tactics to get results, and tactical advice is the easiest advice to get.
Software engineering, much as some people don't like to hear it, is also a team sport unlike weightlifting or chess. Give me a 99th percentile team over a mythical 10x dev every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Chess has a funny distribution because there are different populations to consider. I'd guess a chess.com 1200 is better than 95% of all people who know the rules and have played a game.
Yet to reach the 95% of any tournament rating pool is far more difficult. It took me nearly three years just to get to 1450 USCF, which is about 83% nationally. In that time I've done more than 50,000 tactics, played more than 15,000 total games (mostly online blitz and rapid) and at least 300 rated tournament games at a slow time control (this includes online games played at 45+45, only half that number are OTB). I've analyzed those tournament games, most of them with a coach. I've played through annotated game collections. I attend lectures at the club from an FM, and watch dozens of Youtube videos every week from streamers and instructors. I drill openings and endgames etc etc.
I have a lifetime goal just to reach 1800, which is about 95% I believe. Its reasonable to expect that to take at least 5 years, and also reasonable to think I will never achieve it. This is what chess improvement looks like when you start in your 40s. Any kid who takes the game seriously can get to 1800, a lot of them will do it in just a couple of years.
Lichess is an incredible project and a true gem of open source, but an accurate source of ELO rating it is not.
As we speak I am rated 2227. I am unspeakably horrendous at chess. Online chess is more like a video game; my competitive mindset and nerdy minimax tendencies are single-handedly carrying me.
It has a very accurate rating system, but "accuracy" does not mean "matches FIDE". Ratings can only be compared within the same pool of players, and Lichess is quite good at matching you with people of comparable skill, which is the only purpose of a rating system.
Are there any good platforms out there that people would recommend where you can have your code reviewed? Either paid for or for free.
As this article points out, feedback is an essential part of learning, and open source projects would be a great opportunity to get feedback on something you have sole agency over as opposed to many workplace projects where it's harder to receive feedback for your individual decisions.
Open source projects are flooded by low-quality PRs, they can't afford to give mentor-quality feedback to them. Better to join the project's chat server and have back-and-forth discussions.
Sadly with the limited context sizes on LLMs, you can't ingest a large project at all once to ask for feedback on the more abstract requirements of "good" software practices/design.
That is unless the context sizes have significantly changed in the past months.
190 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265197
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30411160
95%-ile isn't that good (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30411160 - Feb 2022 (156 comments)
95th percentile isn't that hard to reach - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265197 - Feb 2020 (286 comments)
I recently won my age class in a 10k (6th overall out of 147 men). In a very competitive race earlier this year, the exact same time barely put me in the upper half (242/498).
While I wouldn't go so far as to say 95% sucks, there can be a world of difference between that level and the true elites.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31199361
It just needs a [2020] tag.
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.
Also, if you're on a website or platform long enough that a repost angers you, go outside. Read a book. Play a game. There is better shit to worry about than how many times a page is linked to on a forum.
For the last 24 hours, they've submitted 30 posts with zero other contributions such as comments.
I assume the green handle is because you're a mod. ~~Given that you seem to understand the design problems and limitations, do you feel like modding sites like these is more of a hassle than other platforms? Investigating antisocial shit seems more complex than just checking DMs and post history. Voting history is relevant, too.~~ Assumption wrong.
I agree with the commenter that this isn't appropriate, even if it sometimes leads to good discussions. I appreciate that he posted it here, even if he ultimately has to email HN to get this addressed.
Perhaps the best resolution is for a rule to be added to the HN guidelines. I don't mind people submitting a lot, but if you're just recycling old stuff that's not great IMO.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I, for one, and glad that the commenter added to the conversation in this way. I can see I'm not alone, as the post was subsequently flagged (to be clear, I didn't flag it).
I'm also not sure what you mean by flagging; the story isn't flagged, and is on the front page right now.
Could the commenter have just emailed HN? Sure. But by commenting, the commenter shared this information with the community, who were then able to upvote the comment (I did) and flag the post (I did not). This is a valuable service IMO. It provides the HN team with additional feedback and alerts other HNers to a way in which the community is being used, perhaps not for the best.
As to 'valuable service', what the HN moderators ask in their own guidelines regarding feedback is very likely a better indication of value than 'IYO'.
They do. A significant chunk of the site guidelines boils down to 'no meta' and even address the specific kind of meta in the comments - meta about appropriateness of submissions and meta about the alleged misbehaviour of others.
The fact that it's not just your opinion doesn't change the fact that the mods have said this kind of commentary does not, in fact, provide value to them which was your claim.
But like tptacek says, just read/follow dang's comments, almost everything gets recycled through there on a regular basis.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26508945
My probably wrong opinion is that when people discuss “Dunning Kruger” the participants aren’t clearly considering what set of people they’re being measured against.
The original Dunnint Kruger study involved Ivy League students (Cornell). I would hope they have high confidence in their ability. They’re genuinely the cream of the crop!
More like the most connected and privileged, but okay.
Unless you are living alone in depressed city with low costs of living.
No one gets outstanding recognition for being in the 95%-ile.
I remember a piece on Donald Glover where Glover described discovering a “superpower” that went on to define his life when, after getting his ass handed to him in a casual basketball match as a kid, he simply practiced shots for a few hours that evening, and the next match went very differently. He doesn’t come out and say precisely what the superpower was but I took it as “literally try at all, and put the tiniest amount of thought/focus into how you try”. The implicit observation is similar: going up tens of percentile in skill-level isn’t that hard, because most people don’t thoughtfully try or put in any practice time at all, even those engaging in the activity. Won’t make you elite, but start applying that goal-oriented-practice attitude to several of the kinds of fuzzy activities mentioned in this piece, and you might really get somewhere.
And it’s true. People would rather get baited into online nonsensical outrage and neuter themselves by playing video games.
What does that mean?
Does trying hard at dating mean not playing video games...?
If I could stand the BO or the competitive atmosphere I'd consider it.
I keep telling myself if I ever get good at bomb-jumping to recover, my game will explode in potential.
Nice to find another Ness player in the wild; one of my IRL friends is a Ness and Lucas main. He was the first I ever played against that could do more than PK Fire and yo-yo. Those matches get rough with PK Fire's angles and how quickly the stick can come out and return that arrow...
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.
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 & participant in many activities: I have no interest in being more knowledgable in cars / driving, I don't want to get better at cooking, I enjoy chess but I currently have no desire past futzing around with the Chess.com app in the few moments I have.
By virtue of seeking out information outside of that context, you are trying to dive deeper into the activity even if you aren't performing at that level.
Most software engineers aren't listening to podcasts about software engineering. If you are religiously listening to and learning from podcasts, that makes you more suspectible to being a higher percentile performer in software engineering.
Try being in the top 1% of basketball players if you're under 5'9".
Easier said than done.
To use a gaming metaphor that hopefully lands, the XP grind from level 1 to 92 in Runscape is the same XP amount as the XP needed to go from 92 to 99 [0].
It is also illustrated with the Pareto Principle and the 90/10 rule where the final portion takes the most resources. Someone can easily become top 10% basketball player given the right training. 27M people played basketball recreationally in the US in 2021 [1], you only need to be in the top 2,700,000 players to be a top 10% player. There's only about 500 people in the NBA in a given year [2] so they represent approximately the top 0.0018% of organized basketball players.
If you include people who play rarely or in pick-up games, the odds of a top 10% 5'9 player jump drastically. 5'9 isn't that short either, it's roughly the median height of an American man.
[0]: https://runescape.fandom.com/wiki/Experience/Table [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191632/participants-in-b.... [2]: https://www.hoopsbeast.com/total-nba-players/
Do you get more XP on average when you're a higher level?
Sure, if you count everyone who's ever touched a basketball in their life - it might not be hard to be in the top 5%.
If you counting anyone who has played at least within the last 3 months - it's not going to be so easy.
Does it though?
I don't feel like listening to podcasts is a particularly good way to build software engineering skill.
The same way listening to a podcast about art doesn't make you a better painter nor listening to a podcast about football will make you a better athlete.
They discuss an algorithm I'm currently working on and some research papers on said algorithms.
If I didn't know about those research papers I now have more knowledge than I had before and can improve more than someone who didn't have said knowledge.
Replace algorithm with framework, design pattern, type of software etc...
It alone doesn't make you better just like reading a boom wouldn't make you a better software developer. Actually absorbing the information and using it to improve would.
The same can be said for every single one of the fields you mentioned.
Sharing knowledge using spoken word is no different from sharing knowledge using any other media.
Podcasts I think are quite superficial. They can only be beneficial if you are critical about what they are saying, but to be critical you need to have already made something yourself. Otherwise you are blindly learning facts like you said.
Sounds like pandering to the audience. Performing better then 90% of people makes you a top 10% player.
Self soothing about how what you like to do in your spare time makes you better then others is not making you any favors.
It doesn't matter how much effort you put into being effective. In fact I'd say living and breathing software engineering will make you a less effective software engineer than someone who also understands management, psychology, economics, etc.
Yeah, I could certainly see that but I disagree with your assessment that it is just pandering or self-soothing.
Seeking out any external information in your off-time / outside from that activity gives you the edge against people who just show up and only engage and think about the activity while doing it.
If you are watching basketball play-by-plays or even better, recordings of your own games (read: consuming transformative versions of games just outside your skill vs passively consuming a professional game) outside of basketball practice, there is a good chance you will pick up or develop ideas of how to apply that to your own game.
Yes, passively watching someone play WoW has a low chance of making a world-first raider but watching a world-first raider do raiding with the intention of picking new ideas up will expose you to ideas and methods you won't otherwise be exposed to through normal gameplay.
By listening to other engineers speak, you are being exposed to problems and solutions you would have had to encounter and solve yourself (or possibly never have so you will never cross pollinate ideas)
See there's the mentality I'm calling self soothing. Your mental model of what makes someone excel seems to build off of what you like to do. One thing is to pursue extra information, another is to believe the sole way to excel is by doing the things you do.
People actively looking at top 10% players can have more game knowledge and build efficiency than people who just grind bigger numbers.
Being an "effective" software engineer also depends on your definition of effective. Mark Zuckerberg was clearly an effective software engineer, but was he in the top 5% of engineers?
People judging their abilities by adjacent (and loosely correlated) metrics is a road to unhappiness.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure"
And he is „only” in like 99,9th percentile in time trials, not even competing in top tournaments.
The concentration of knowledge that was available in a (successful player's) stream was far more useful than what I could gain from personal experience playing alone.
I still agree with your last paragraph. In gaming as in professional life, a T-shaped skillset is really useful. Having broad knowledge and experience, even if it's mostly shallow, is incredibly useful.
It's generally true that seeking more information can lead to increased knowledge, yes.
But I've also met a lot of people in my career who can confidently recite factoids from hundreds of podcasts, books, and blog posts they've read but then struggle when they have to tackle real-world problems. Podcasts don't substitute for experience and someone with real-world experience is going to run circles around someone who merely listened to a lot of podcasts or read a lot of books.
Podcasts have also become a trap for inexperienced engineers in recent years. It's easy to listen to a lot of podcasts with guests who are trying to flex their knowledge or look extra smart by claiming their subject is the only way to do something. Then you end up with juniors trying to make complex microservice architectures with over-engineered single page app frontends for trivial tasks because that's what they've been learning about from podcasts. Podcasts try to capture the most exciting topics, whereas many engineering problems are better solved by boring old technology. Without experience to know the difference, podcasts can really lead people astray.
> 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.
Influencers telling their followers that following them will provide a leg up on the competition is the oldest marketing trick in the book. :) I'm sure some amount of stream watching can provide some learning, but for fast-twitch games I'll put my money on the player who has more hours of practice over the player who watches a lot of streams of other people playing.
Raises hand! I'm a competent, but very average, bicycle racer.
The whole notion of 95 percentile here is super weird. For a large enough pool of people, being 95% is nowhere near elite.
So, I guess I agree with the thesis, but it's not some profound insight into the world.
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 :)
I tend to agree that with enough time and _appropriate_ training anyone can become quite competent at anything, but this is a significantly different claim than thinking you can be in the 95th percentile of persons who are engaged in the activity. It becomes even worse when you realize that technical activities (such as programming) where there are cash incentives are a lot different than recreational activities where the only incentive is to have fun. There is an incentive to _not_ improve at a recreational activity and outpace your friends.
It's something I don't believe. There's no evidence for it, but that would also be really hard to obtain. You'll get better with training, practice, exercise, but quite competent is a level very many people won't be able to manage.
Physical competence is an obvious case. Roughly half the population is too young or too old to become e.g. a "quite competent" marathon runner, has ailments, handicaps, etc. An even larger part simply is not tall enough to reach beyond than absolute amateur level in certain sports (basketball, volleyball). And the differences don't magically stop at the blood-brain barrier.
I agree that more than 5% of the population could achieve the level currently held by the top 5%, but it's not a lot more.
I would argue that being top 2000 ELO is _way_ higher than top 5% of chess players. Most chess players have _never played a competitive game_
For anything with a physical component I think this whole thing falls apart completely. For something like weightlifting the 95% percentile for men is around 160kg or ~352lbs. Going from sedentary to that lift could take years of effort. Musical performance is similarly something where the effort to do anything at all is quite large.
The majority of my hobbies are non-competitive. If I get to one day be a 95th percentile hiker, I will be ecstatically happy. However I'd be willing to bet that for my (narrow) niche of software - I am well into the three 9s by virtue that while most backend engineers will have touched what I work on, they haven't done it for 10 years in a demanding environment.
The idea is most people who participate are probably closer to what you see at the YMCA or Planet Fitness, not a powerlifting gym. They could do a lot more with basic advice like "add weight".
> Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not 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 people who participate.
Someone who even calls it "training" and has specifically put in effort to be better is probably in the 95th percentile of people who do the activity.
I think you may be underselling that a bit. I got to something like 370-80lb DL while weighing 185 some years ago, and it took nearly 3 years of dedicated work, eating tons of boring chicken, and a lot of lifestyle changes. It was pretty hard work and a of hours in total. I still lift weights, but don't have the focus and dedication to maintain that kind of lifting routine. Even at my max I was probably only edging into the "advanced" category.
I can understand the struggle at an older age, but age matters a lot here.
Surely you mean 353lb dead lift.
[0] https://strengthlevel.com/strength-standards/bench-press
A 352 pound bench at 180 pounds is bordering on being an elite lift. I would wager that it's unattainable for most guys, even if they worked at it and did everything right (in terms of training, nutrition, etc). Success in athletics/strength-based activities is, in large part, determined by genetics.
I'm sure there are domains where being in the 95th percentile just takes "some work." If we're using video games to make this point though, then I'm at a loss for words.
If you made it near the top of diamond in Starcraft 2, that's probably top 5%, and that's still _miles_ away from where the pro players are. I made it near the top of diamond at some point after it came out and I was terrible at SC2.
This is a key point in Four Thousand Weeks (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54785515). For our hobbies, it'd be totally fine (and even preferable) to not worry about percentiles at all.
* The caveat of course being that you dedicate all your available waking hours (not occupied with life-sustaining activities) to training and deliberately practicing a single particular skill/game and also trying to do your best every single time, which is incredibly mentally taxing. It's even more mentally taxing as you get older, since your fluid intelligence diminishes.
Also, another author's mistake is diminishing the role of talent. While we know that with deliberate practice most people can achieve a 95%-ile, the real advantage of talent is how fast you can get there. Because if it takes you half as long to get there, you are able to start reaping the rewards earlier, and getting first-mover advantage.
Or, even: by throwing some deliberateness in to things we're doing, we can avoid a lot of frustration.
You need a certain time commitment and the ability to learn reasonably complex abstract mental models. Learning curves for many games are in the 1000s of hours. It's just not easy to fit into a busy work schedule.
The author also describes the experience of people who are stuck, receive a small amount of quality coaching, and then massively increase in rating.
I've been top 1% and slightly below 1% at peak in video games that have milions of gamers and I wouldnt say that top 5% is filled with "truly talented people"
Top 5% is just decent people, but they are very, very, very far from top 0.1, 0.5%, etc.
At 1% I've been faaaaar from 0.5%, 0.1% people.
Sometimes, the .001% have simply found their particular niche in the ecosystem
What's the server population like these days?
What is your load out? I was a Jet main.
As I said, I'm a tanker. I run smoke screen, thermal camo, and LMG. It's an insanely fun play style because everyone relies on their minimap and thermal optics and I'm basically a 70 ton ghost on the battlefield. It's crazy how easy it is to sneak up behind enemy armor or juke incoming shells because everyone is looking for a white blob or a red marker on their map.
Also, given I'm almost unspotable, aircraft tend to leave me alone unless i'm dealing with a pro jet pilot that's looking for me. Sometimes I will piss off the enemy team and by the 3rd strafing run I'm like 'wow bud, you really got nothing better to do with your day, huh?'
Imagine a country where only the top 64 surgeons get paid.
The skill distribution for surgeons is ~the same as the skill distribution for baseball. The reason surgeons get paid to work as professionals is because there is demand for people who can perform surgery.
Shocking how much better they were than me. Technically in the same league, but in terms of skill it wasn't even close. The top .1% really are something special in these types of cases. Pretty neat stuff.
This reminds me of the range of skills in Go (board game), from absolute beginner 30-20k (kyu) beginners, 19k-10k casual, 9k-1k amateur (me), then 1-7d advanced amateur (dan), then 1-9p (pro dan). Each few 'stones' of difference can typically squash or run circles around the other. So many orders of magnitude.
Anyway, point is, I was probably in the top ~1000 Counter-Strike players in North America in the early to mid aughts. But the gap between CAL-M and CAL-I was just ridiculous -- we're talking about the gap between a college sports team and a pro team. The average CAL-M team wouldn't win a single match in a CAL-I season.
So, yeah - the gap is increasingly large the closer you get to the top of a given pursuit.
I'm better than most people (maybe top 10% even) that "play a little." I'm (I assume) well below average for adult tournament player. The pool matters. I think if I took lessons and dedicated a serious 100-200 hrs over some period, I might reach 85th in my online pool.
95%-ile is currently ELO 2075... just under where junior masters (CMs) seem to be on lichess. I suspect that extra 150 elo would be a difficult jump... but maybe doable for me and other average players.
Chess is probably structured similar to athletics and other such pursuits. You can probably expect a similar distribution for weight lifting, for example. The average person can probably reach the level where everyone (including most over average people) is "actually trying" simply by being systematic. Where that point is varies, but weight lifting and chess have similar ranges of participation levels... like many hobbies.
In any case... I think unlike chess, it's worth focusing on either strategy or technique... not tactics.
Strategically defining the thing (chess is defined, but "software engineering" is malleable). Meaningfully selecting the pool. Actually deciding the value. Getting to top 10% rec chess player sounds fun. Getting to CM sounds arduous and pointless. There's not much value in being an entry level chess master... or power lifter.
Techniques, like the habit of planning a training plan, creating a strategic plan with goals, timelines and such... that's a valuable asset... very transferable. The tactics... not so much. Meanwhile, you don't need great tactics to get results, and tactical advice is the easiest advice to get.
Yet to reach the 95% of any tournament rating pool is far more difficult. It took me nearly three years just to get to 1450 USCF, which is about 83% nationally. In that time I've done more than 50,000 tactics, played more than 15,000 total games (mostly online blitz and rapid) and at least 300 rated tournament games at a slow time control (this includes online games played at 45+45, only half that number are OTB). I've analyzed those tournament games, most of them with a coach. I've played through annotated game collections. I attend lectures at the club from an FM, and watch dozens of Youtube videos every week from streamers and instructors. I drill openings and endgames etc etc.
I have a lifetime goal just to reach 1800, which is about 95% I believe. Its reasonable to expect that to take at least 5 years, and also reasonable to think I will never achieve it. This is what chess improvement looks like when you start in your 40s. Any kid who takes the game seriously can get to 1800, a lot of them will do it in just a couple of years.
As we speak I am rated 2227. I am unspeakably horrendous at chess. Online chess is more like a video game; my competitive mindset and nerdy minimax tendencies are single-handedly carrying me.
Online is a different game, sure. But relative strength is not that variable between games.
As this article points out, feedback is an essential part of learning, and open source projects would be a great opportunity to get feedback on something you have sole agency over as opposed to many workplace projects where it's harder to receive feedback for your individual decisions.
That is unless the context sizes have significantly changed in the past months.