Okay, so I quickly skimmed the paper in question, and I'm very skeptical of it. They are using talent as a variable in their model, but what do they mean by "t

Okay, so I quickly skimmed the paper in question, and I'm very skeptical of it. They are using talent as a variable in their model, but what do they mean by "talent"? "talent Ti (intelligence, skills, ability, etc.)" Throwing "intelligence, skills, ability, etc." together doesn't make much sense to me. Out of these three, only intelligence (assuming they meant IQ), is an established measure, at least from what I understand. What does "skills, ability, etc." even mean? It's not surprising to me that their conclusion doesn't seem to correspond with reality: "An important result of the simulations is that the most successful agents are almost never the most talented ones, but those around the average of the Gaussian talent distribution - another stylised fact often reported in the literature" (what literature??). I can't comment on this "talent" variable as a whole since it doesn't make much sense but in terms of IQ it's certainly not the 100 IQ individuals that tend to be the most successful ones. I also question the "luck" variable, because: "...does not change this fundamental features of the model, which exposes different individuals to different amount of lucky or unlucky events during their life, regardless of their own talent." I find it unlikely that "talent" and "luck" are completely independent from each other. For example, if I recall correctly, reaction time correlates with IQ, so wouldn't that make more intelligent people less prone to accidents? Finally, I'm dubious of their results that show that distributing funds equally among all scientists would lead to most scientific discoveries. From what I understand, people with a specific set of traits, aka geniuses, are over-represented in scientific discoveries. If that's the case, wouldn't deliberately seeking out geniuses and throwing money at them lead to more discoveries than distributing funds equally? Again, I only skimmed this paper, but it seems to me that the researchers didn't look at the data we already have, and instead made up their own models that don't appear to correspond with reality. Also, given that this is a Hacker News comment, not a scientific paper, I can't be bothered to cite anything :D