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I've always wondered about what it is that kicks someone up from great to "how is that even possible?". For example Mozart being asked to remove a ring because

I've always wondered about what it is that kicks someone up from great to "how is that even possible?". For example Mozart being asked to remove a ring because his playing was so good an audience thought the ring was a talisman. It's one thing to be so good people think you cheat. It's another level when people think you are magic. Clearly opportunity, talent, and work play their parts, but there have been many people that have all three and don't turn out a Gauss, or a Newton, or a Pele.

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
If you look into that wave of great central european composers most of them were third generation successful musicians/composers from big families. Natural selection in action. I'm sure genes played into it.
te_platt 12y ago
Actually, thinking about it a bit more I think there is a natural explanation. If measured ability follows a normal distribution then the farther out you go the more spread out (on average) individuals become. For example, draw a billion samples from the right half of a normal distribution with mean 0 and stddev 1. There will be more drawn between 4 and 5 than between 5 and 6. The extreme outliers will be in some sense more lonely. Edit: here are the most extreme values from a run of a billion draw with the distance to the next smallest value. 5.967211966 0.056293894 5.910918072 0.043174783 5.867743289 0.081026984 5.786716305 0.043416671 5.743299634 0.094533593 5.648766041 0.000088773 5.648737164 0.005932669 5.642804495 0.011669773 5.631134722 0.003206244 5.627928478 0.004643796 5.623284683 0.013723654 5.609561028 0.014653298 5.59490773 0.018714748 5.576192982 0.001690759 5.574502223 0.031026791 5.543475432 0.002331827 5.541143605 0.022237834 5.51890577 0.004242771 5.514662999 0.009347961 5.505315038 0.004298492 5.501016547 0.02271157
- philwelch 12y ago
  "Ability" isn't a single variable either. There's a combination between natural talent and hard, determined work. For instance, many people thought Ricardo Quaresma and Cristiano Ronaldo had similar amounts of natural talent as young players, but Quaresma wasn't as determined as Ronaldo to become the greatest player in the world. Conversely, Michael Jordan's contemporary Charles Barkley didn't really have Jordan's natural talent, but made up for it by working exceptionally hard. So you have at least two (and possibly more) variables, all of which have to reach extreme outliers together, to produce an athlete like Messi, Jordan, or Gretzky.
phreeza 12y ago
One thing that might play into it is that actual talent distributions are leptokurtic, ie they have a fat tail, while our internal model is more of a normal distribution, or maybe even some kind of truncated normal based on what we have previously seen. So these outliers that occur naturally in the leptokurtic have a much lower perceived likelihood. PS: the bit about talent distributions being leptokurtic is pure conjecture, no idea if it is true. Seems like something Nassim Taleb would say.
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  This is an amazing comment. The only way it could have been funnier is if you had made up the word "leptokurtic." You should get Malcolm Gladwell's people on the phone and set up an interview.

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago

If you look into that wave of great central european composers most of them were third generation successful musicians/composers from big families. Natural selection in action. I'm sure genes played into it.

te_platt 12y ago

Actually, thinking about it a bit more I think there is a natural explanation. If measured ability follows a normal distribution then the farther out you go the more spread out (on average) individuals become. For example, draw a billion samples from the right half of a normal distribution with mean 0 and stddev 1. There will be more drawn between 4 and 5 than between 5 and 6. The extreme outliers will be in some sense more lonely. Edit: here are the most extreme values from a run of a billion draw with the distance to the next smallest value. 5.967211966 0.056293894 5.910918072 0.043174783 5.867743289 0.081026984 5.786716305 0.043416671 5.743299634 0.094533593 5.648766041 0.000088773 5.648737164 0.005932669 5.642804495 0.011669773 5.631134722 0.003206244 5.627928478 0.004643796 5.623284683 0.013723654 5.609561028 0.014653298 5.59490773 0.018714748 5.576192982 0.001690759 5.574502223 0.031026791 5.543475432 0.002331827 5.541143605 0.022237834 5.51890577 0.004242771 5.514662999 0.009347961 5.505315038 0.004298492 5.501016547 0.02271157

philwelch 12y ago
"Ability" isn't a single variable either. There's a combination between natural talent and hard, determined work. For instance, many people thought Ricardo Quaresma and Cristiano Ronaldo had similar amounts of natural talent as young players, but Quaresma wasn't as determined as Ronaldo to become the greatest player in the world. Conversely, Michael Jordan's contemporary Charles Barkley didn't really have Jordan's natural talent, but made up for it by working exceptionally hard. So you have at least two (and possibly more) variables, all of which have to reach extreme outliers together, to produce an athlete like Messi, Jordan, or Gretzky.

phreeza 12y ago

One thing that might play into it is that actual talent distributions are leptokurtic, ie they have a fat tail, while our internal model is more of a normal distribution, or maybe even some kind of truncated normal based on what we have previously seen. So these outliers that occur naturally in the leptokurtic have a much lower perceived likelihood. PS: the bit about talent distributions being leptokurtic is pure conjecture, no idea if it is true. Seems like something Nassim Taleb would say.

JonnieCache 12y ago
This is an amazing comment. The only way it could have been funnier is if you had made up the word "leptokurtic." You should get Malcolm Gladwell's people on the phone and set up an interview.