3 ms·

Isn't the surprising part that it's fat-tailed rather than normal?

• eloff 4y ago
  Why would it be? All careers with leverage seem to follow a Pareto distribution. It would surprise me if any sport, art, or creative endeavor was normally distributed.
  • jonahx 4y ago
    You're right. I was thinking the "initial talent" might be normal in the way IQ scores are, but the parent was talking about actual performance, where history, training, etc all come into play. And empirically, you have Gretzky in hockey, Jordan in basketball....
    • OscarCunningham 4y ago
      IQ is normally distributed because it's graded on a curve to make that true by definition. I'm not sure how it's distributed on any sort of 'natural' scale.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        What would such a natural scale look like?
        • derefr 4y ago
          Maybe a cross-species IQ score would be interesting. Chimpanzees and corvids both can solve many IQ-test problems, but also are not experiencing the Flynn effect as far as we know. So we could measure IQ in multiples of a chimp's IQ, just like we measure cars in multiple's of a workhorse's sustainable pulling output. (Which is actually a less objective measure, when you think about it; we were breeding workhorses to increase that very target at the time the concept of "horsepower" was invented!)
          • jacquesm 4y ago
            That would be a great start. And it would also force us to acknowledge that a lot of the things that we are doing with these animals are utterly un-ethical.
        • OscarCunningham 4y ago
          I'm reminded of the paper 'Measuring universal intelligence: Towards an anytime intelligence test' https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370210001554 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000437021....
          • jacquesm 4y ago
            Thank you for the pointer.
      • derbOac 4y ago
        No, it's scaled but linearly and not redistributed. There's still studies of relatively raw distributions and it still looks normal. The biggest deviations from normality are due to an excess mass in the lower range due to disease, and a tendency for scores to spike a tiny bit at certain numbers, probably due to people administering the test fudging a bit sometimes for various reasons.
    • eloff 4y ago
      I don’t even think initial talent is normally distributed. Take Usain Bolt, for example, he’d be a far outlier in a Pareto distribution for sprinters just on the basis of his natural heritage.
      • hgsgm 4y ago
  • derefr 4y ago
    I suppose the distribution of aptitude would be a normal distribution in a world where careers were assigned randomly at birth and advancing in your career was on a strict seniority basis. So, for example, you'd see it in career paths that are mostly followed as generational family businesses.
• 082349872349872 4y ago
  keep in mind that even if football ability were (untrainable and) normally distributed, the distribution of ability among international players would be taken from one of the tails of that bell.
  • jonahx 4y ago
    Also a good point. Do you know what the exact distribution would be when sampling randomly and rejecting all values below some threshold? You can tell it would at least be Pereto-ish in general shape.
    • 082349872349872 4y ago
      I can't do much with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncated_normal_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncated_normal_distribution but maybe you can?