Following on your Toy Model concept, let’s say the important factors in being (for example) a successful entrepreneur are Personality, Intelligence, Physical Health, and Luck.
If a given person has excellent (+3SD) in all but one of the categories, but only average or poor in the final category, they’re probably not going to succeed. Poor health, or bad luck, or bad people skills, or lack of intelligence can keep an entrepreneur at mediocrity for their productive career.
Really any competitive venue can be subject to this analysis. What are the important skills? Does it make sense to treat them as semi-independent, and semi-multiplicative in arriving at the final score?
It might give a useful heuristic in fields where success is strongly multifactorial—if you aren’t at least doing well at each sub-factor, don’t bother entering. It might not work so well when there’s a case that success almost wholly loads on one factor and there might be more ‘thresholds’ for others (e.g. to do theoretical physics, you basically need to be extremely clever, but also sufficiently mentally healthy and able to communicate with others).
I’m interested in the distribution of human ability into the extreme range, and I plan to write more on it. My current (very tentative) model is that the factors are commonly additive, not multiplicative. A proof for this is alas too long for this combox to contain, etc. etc. ;)
Following on your Toy Model concept, let’s say the important factors in being (for example) a successful entrepreneur are Personality, Intelligence, Physical Health, and Luck.
If a given person has excellent (+3SD) in all but one of the categories, but only average or poor in the final category, they’re probably not going to succeed. Poor health, or bad luck, or bad people skills, or lack of intelligence can keep an entrepreneur at mediocrity for their productive career.
Really any competitive venue can be subject to this analysis. What are the important skills? Does it make sense to treat them as semi-independent, and semi-multiplicative in arriving at the final score?
It might give a useful heuristic in fields where success is strongly multifactorial—if you aren’t at least doing well at each sub-factor, don’t bother entering. It might not work so well when there’s a case that success almost wholly loads on one factor and there might be more ‘thresholds’ for others (e.g. to do theoretical physics, you basically need to be extremely clever, but also sufficiently mentally healthy and able to communicate with others).
I’m interested in the distribution of human ability into the extreme range, and I plan to write more on it. My current (very tentative) model is that the factors are commonly additive, not multiplicative. A proof for this is alas too long for this combox to contain, etc. etc. ;)