"How big can this “talent differential” be and still stay statistically consistent with the power law wealth distribution we see in the real world? It turns ou

"How big can this “talent differential” be and still stay statistically consistent with the power law wealth distribution we see in the real world? It turns out that it can’t be more than about 1 percent.2 A larger talent differential would produce a wealth distribution that is even more extreme than the real one, and that would not follow a power law." I thought this article looked like it was going to be very obvious, but that passage got my attention. I'm all for experiments of this nature: one day AI will be doing it as a matter of course, on a massive scale. Lines up with my observation, too: talent makes a difference, and it's about 1% over time. Kind of like compound interest. You can win out if you're very persistent and very determined and you fail a lot, because you're shooting for that 'luck' moment. There's no telling where it will strike, because it's luck! You have to stay in there and not go broke because it's luck, there's very little correlation between merit and success. I suspect if you went by tenacity rather than 'talent', the number might be a lot more than 1%. But bozos can be tenacious too, which is a daunting thing to consider.