I like the spirit of this, but I have to play devil’s advocate on two counts:
Being in the top K percent at a thing among the population is only meaningful if the thing is globally useful. If there are 100 people who have tried COBOL programming in a professional society of 1000 programmers, and only ten people have jobs that involve COBOL, then being in the top 10 percent doesn’t bring me any benefits.
(As a counterexample, being in the top 10 percent for deadlift PR, even if only 10 percent of the population works out, is still enormously beneficial, because physical fitness has wide, generally-applicable benefits)
It’s possible to be so inherently bad at something that even doing it regularly won’t move you up past the people who don’t practice it at all. I’m like this with art—I like it, but I’ve always been well below the people who don’t draw even when I did so on a regular basis.
I like the spirit of this, but I have to play devil’s advocate on two counts:
Being in the top K percent at a thing among the population is only meaningful if the thing is globally useful. If there are 100 people who have tried COBOL programming in a professional society of 1000 programmers, and only ten people have jobs that involve COBOL, then being in the top 10 percent doesn’t bring me any benefits.
(As a counterexample, being in the top 10 percent for deadlift PR, even if only 10 percent of the population works out, is still enormously beneficial, because physical fitness has wide, generally-applicable benefits)
It’s possible to be so inherently bad at something that even doing it regularly won’t move you up past the people who don’t practice it at all. I’m like this with art—I like it, but I’ve always been well below the people who don’t draw even when I did so on a regular basis.
I agree that being in the top 10% isn’t always useful. I think you’re overestimating the average person’s art skills though.