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There are 10x people in every field. It’s not “everyone is average and there are 3 Einsteins”. It’s a bell curve and eventually you’ll meet someone on the fart

There are 10x people in every field. It’s not “everyone is average and there are 3 Einsteins”. It’s a bell curve and eventually you’ll meet someone on the farther ends of both sides. Chances are there’s always someone much better or much worse than you.

deeviant 3y ago
But it really only happens when you compare the top to the bottom and the comparison particularly useful. When you get the top, differences are more perception and other factors over skill/knowledge/intelligence. See: The Olympics, do you often see an Olympic competitor 10x a competitor?
- Semaphor 3y ago
  > See: The Olympics, do you often see an Olympic competitor 10x a competitor? Yes, the Olympics mostly consists of 10X athletes. It’s pretty much a competition made for them.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    Olympic athletes don't outperform average athletes by 10x. I'm sorry, but that's just complete bullshit. The world record for 100 meters sprint is 9.58 seconds. High school athletes routinely break 11 seconds. There are one-legged people, 90-year-olds, and other highly handicapped individuals who have come within a factor of 2 of the world record set by elite professional athletes. 10x my ass.
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      A concept can still be generally true even if there are exceptions. It's useless anticommunication to pretend to be unaware of that. Almost no statement ever made can be said to be true without exceptions, and it would be impossible to communicate at all if you actually tried to enumarete every possible qualification to every statement. Pedantry is if anything a worse crime than hyperbole.
      - p-e-w 3y ago
        The 10x concept isn't "generally true", it's generally false, and reeks of ignorance and hero worship. "10x" is a quantitative claim. If you really meant 1.15x, why not say so? Is it because that sounds rather unimpressive by comparison, and therefore is not conducive to your elitist rhetoric? The truth is that the gap between average and peak human performance is actually rather modest, and this is reflected by hard numbers wherever they are available. There is no need to invoke 10x ubermensch nonsense.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  If by "competitor" we mean "everyone who competes in the sport" and not just "everyone who competes well enough to qualify for the Olympics" then yes, Olympic athletes frequently perform 10x better than some of their competitors.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    Please name a single sport where the world record is 10x of what average hobby athletes perform at. To show how ridiculous that idea is, that would make "average" 100 meters sprint times more than 1.5 minutes, and "average" long jump distances less than 1 meter.
    - josephg 3y ago
      Fencing. I’m a “hobby athlete” at fencing (Sabre) and I’d play with about a 10x point multiplier if I wanted to compete with an Olympic level athlete. We had a couple people like that at our club.
      - p-e-w 3y ago
        That's comparative performance vs. absolute performance. Yes, there are people who can beat others 10x more often than those others can beat them. That doesn't mean they perform 10x as well. In fact, it can be enough for them to be just slightly better in order to achieve such comparative results. Where absolute performance is concerned (that is, performance measured against an external, objective standard), no elite athlete in any sport is anywhere close to 10x'ing their hobbyist peers. Even beating them by a factor of 2 is unthinkable in most sports.
p-e-w 3y ago
> There are 10x people in every field. I very, very strongly doubt that. That's just not how human performance works. There is a lot of variation for sure, but not by arbitrarily high amounts. Instead, there is a maximum humanly achievable performance, and the performance of individuals varies between zero and that value. As a trivial example, the world champion in weightlifting doesn't lift 10x as much as the average person – and they certainly don't lift 10x as much as other professional weightlifters. In most fields, the world's top performers are a few percentage points better than the average professional. I consider any software engineer who performs just twice as well as the average engineer to be part of the elite. And I consider claims of "10x" performance to be complete and utter bullshit concocted by people who have no idea what they are talking about.
- texuf 3y ago
  Oddly enough the world champion deadlift is exactly 10x the amount I feel comfortable deadlifting right now (I haven’t been doing it for long) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Deadlift_Championships https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Deadlift_Champions...
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    Those guys weigh 150+ kg though, since deadlifting is a rather informal competition without weight classes. Unless you weigh the same, comparing yourself to them doesn't make sense. I am not physically active at all, and the world record for weightlifters in my weight class is around 3 times what I am able to lift with zero training.
    - josephg 3y ago
      > Unless you weigh the same, comparing yourself to them doesn't make sense. Of course it does. The “10x developer” claim is that some people have 150+ kg equivalent brains when it comes to programming. In the right environment they’re lifting 10x more code. Just like with weightlifting, it might not be healthy or useful to compare your productivity to theirs because it hurts and it doesn’t really matter anyway. But just like with weightlifting, the comparison can still be made. Most of us work with other people in our “intellectual weight class” - so you might not meet many developers that much smarter than you. But they’re out there. The Jeff Deans of this world aren’t spending their time closing jira tickets for simple web apps.

deeviant 3y ago

But it really only happens when you compare the top to the bottom and the comparison particularly useful. When you get the top, differences are more perception and other factors over skill/knowledge/intelligence. See: The Olympics, do you often see an Olympic competitor 10x a competitor?

Semaphor 3y ago
> See: The Olympics, do you often see an Olympic competitor 10x a competitor? Yes, the Olympics mostly consists of 10X athletes. It’s pretty much a competition made for them.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  Olympic athletes don't outperform average athletes by 10x. I'm sorry, but that's just complete bullshit. The world record for 100 meters sprint is 9.58 seconds. High school athletes routinely break 11 seconds. There are one-legged people, 90-year-olds, and other highly handicapped individuals who have come within a factor of 2 of the world record set by elite professional athletes. 10x my ass.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    A concept can still be generally true even if there are exceptions. It's useless anticommunication to pretend to be unaware of that. Almost no statement ever made can be said to be true without exceptions, and it would be impossible to communicate at all if you actually tried to enumarete every possible qualification to every statement. Pedantry is if anything a worse crime than hyperbole.
    - p-e-w 3y ago
      The 10x concept isn't "generally true", it's generally false, and reeks of ignorance and hero worship. "10x" is a quantitative claim. If you really meant 1.15x, why not say so? Is it because that sounds rather unimpressive by comparison, and therefore is not conducive to your elitist rhetoric? The truth is that the gap between average and peak human performance is actually rather modest, and this is reflected by hard numbers wherever they are available. There is no need to invoke 10x ubermensch nonsense.
arrowsmith 3y ago
If by "competitor" we mean "everyone who competes in the sport" and not just "everyone who competes well enough to qualify for the Olympics" then yes, Olympic athletes frequently perform 10x better than some of their competitors.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  Please name a single sport where the world record is 10x of what average hobby athletes perform at. To show how ridiculous that idea is, that would make "average" 100 meters sprint times more than 1.5 minutes, and "average" long jump distances less than 1 meter.
  - josephg 3y ago
    Fencing. I’m a “hobby athlete” at fencing (Sabre) and I’d play with about a 10x point multiplier if I wanted to compete with an Olympic level athlete. We had a couple people like that at our club.
    - p-e-w 3y ago
      That's comparative performance vs. absolute performance. Yes, there are people who can beat others 10x more often than those others can beat them. That doesn't mean they perform 10x as well. In fact, it can be enough for them to be just slightly better in order to achieve such comparative results. Where absolute performance is concerned (that is, performance measured against an external, objective standard), no elite athlete in any sport is anywhere close to 10x'ing their hobbyist peers. Even beating them by a factor of 2 is unthinkable in most sports.

p-e-w 3y ago

> There are 10x people in every field. I very, very strongly doubt that. That's just not how human performance works. There is a lot of variation for sure, but not by arbitrarily high amounts. Instead, there is a maximum humanly achievable performance, and the performance of individuals varies between zero and that value. As a trivial example, the world champion in weightlifting doesn't lift 10x as much as the average person – and they certainly don't lift 10x as much as other professional weightlifters. In most fields, the world's top performers are a few percentage points better than the average professional. I consider any software engineer who performs just twice as well as the average engineer to be part of the elite. And I consider claims of "10x" performance to be complete and utter bullshit concocted by people who have no idea what they are talking about.

texuf 3y ago
Oddly enough the world champion deadlift is exactly 10x the amount I feel comfortable deadlifting right now (I haven’t been doing it for long) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Deadlift_Championships https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Deadlift_Champions...
- p-e-w 3y ago
  Those guys weigh 150+ kg though, since deadlifting is a rather informal competition without weight classes. Unless you weigh the same, comparing yourself to them doesn't make sense. I am not physically active at all, and the world record for weightlifters in my weight class is around 3 times what I am able to lift with zero training.
  - josephg 3y ago
    > Unless you weigh the same, comparing yourself to them doesn't make sense. Of course it does. The “10x developer” claim is that some people have 150+ kg equivalent brains when it comes to programming. In the right environment they’re lifting 10x more code. Just like with weightlifting, it might not be healthy or useful to compare your productivity to theirs because it hurts and it doesn’t really matter anyway. But just like with weightlifting, the comparison can still be made. Most of us work with other people in our “intellectual weight class” - so you might not meet many developers that much smarter than you. But they’re out there. The Jeff Deans of this world aren’t spending their time closing jira tickets for simple web apps.