As a rule of thumb, if you are in the top 1% of some non-lucrative thing (metacalc, Magic The Gathering, women’s softball, etc) then there are millions of people in the US and a billion people in the world that would be better than you at it, if they put in as much effort as you did.
If you are the absolute aknowledged best at the niche thing, there’s only thousands / millions who would have done better.
And many of those are devoting their effort towards something lucrative, like a stock market (or becoming CEO)
They might have been talking about the total amount of people with the potential to become better than you at the specific thing rather than the pure percentage of people who would be if everyone tried.
Meta: I would enjoy seeing growth in the number of users with everyday objects as names. I look forward to one day seeing the HDMI Cable, the USB-C Adapter and the Laptop Bag in conversation with each other.
Maybe but the US number lines up with 1% of the population lines up with the top 1% figure; if people outside the US are ~50x as likely to be top-1% at various hobbies that’s a bold statement that needs justification, not an obvious rule of thumb!
Or it could be across all time, which lines up with ~100 billion humans in history.
How much evidence is breaking into the top 50 on metaculus in ~6 months?
I stayed out of finance years ago because I thought I didn’t want to compete with Actually Smart People.
Then I jumped in when the prediction markets were clearly not dominated by the Actually Smart.
But I still don’t feel confident to try in the financial markets.
As a rule of thumb, if you are in the top 1% of some non-lucrative thing (metacalc, Magic The Gathering, women’s softball, etc) then there are millions of people in the US and a billion people in the world that would be better than you at it, if they put in as much effort as you did.
If you are the absolute aknowledged best at the niche thing, there’s only thousands / millions who would have done better.
And many of those are devoting their effort towards something lucrative, like a stock market (or becoming CEO)
I think “a billion people in the world” is wrong here—it should only be about 75 million by pure multiplication.
They might have been talking about the total amount of people with the potential to become better than you at the specific thing rather than the pure percentage of people who would be if everyone tried.
Meta: I would enjoy seeing growth in the number of users with everyday objects as names. I look forward to one day seeing the HDMI Cable, the USB-C Adapter and the Laptop Bag in conversation with each other.
Maybe but the US number lines up with 1% of the population lines up with the top 1% figure; if people outside the US are ~50x as likely to be top-1% at various hobbies that’s a bold statement that needs justification, not an obvious rule of thumb!
Or it could be across all time, which lines up with ~100 billion humans in history.