I'm sure the authors will not use this paper in their grant proposals or on their resumes: "Oh, no, don't count that paper, we were just lucky on that one." Mo

I'm sure the authors will not use this paper in their grant proposals or on their resumes: "Oh, no, don't count that paper, we were just lucky on that one." More seriously: without reading the work more in depth, this seems to show that luck is sufficient to have the current distribution, not that it's necessary. Anecdotally, there sure seem to be people out there that are 10x or 100x as productive, not by doing the same tasks faster but by identifying a different set of tasks that accomplish the same thing, or by imagining new possibilities that others couldn't. Clearly, some luck is involved in that, but so is some skill, and this paper seems to exclude that as a possibility.