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Skills don't follow a bell curve or normal distribution. They follow a power law distribution with most people being terrible and a very small number of people
by chrisdbanks 4y ago
Skills don't follow a bell curve or normal distribution. They follow a power law distribution with most people being terrible and a very small number of people being exceptional.
- lioeters 4y agoToday I learned: > A few notable examples of power laws are Pareto's law of income distribution, structural self-similarity of fractals, and scaling laws in biological systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#Power-law_functions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#Power-law_functions An opinionated comparison of the bell-curve and Pareto distribution: > (1) The power law is often an empirical fact (the way things are) but not necessarily the platonic idea (the way things ought to be); and > (2) We can tame or mitigate at least some of the negative aspects of the power law by encouraging eclectic and diverse strategies. Tyranny of the Power Law - http://econophysics.blogspot.com/2006/07/tyranny-of-power-law-and-why-we-should.html http://econophysics.blogspot.com/2006/07/tyranny-of-power-la...
- nlittlepoole 4y agoThanks for sharing, I enjoyed the "Tyranny of the Power Law".
- ulnarkressty 4y agoIs it really a power law or just that the right half of the bell curve could pass the interview?
- kridsdale2 4y agoI've never thought about it this way. Cut off the left side of the bell, rotate the graph by 90 degrees, and you can see that the high-sigma members of the distribution take all the reward and recognition in a limited attention economy.