I definitely imagine looking at a graph of everyone’s performance on the predictions and noticing a cluster who are discontinuously much better than everyone else. I would be surprised if the authors of the piece didn’t imagine this as well.
Some evidence against this is that they described it as being a “power law” distribution, which is continuous and doesn’t have these kinds of clusters. (It just goes way way up as you move to the right.)
If you had a power law distribution, it would still be accurate to say that “a few are better than most”, even though there isn’t a discontinuous break anywhere.
EDIT: It seems to me that most things like this follow approximately continuous distributions. And so whenever you hear someone talking about something like this you should assume it’s continuous unless it’s super clear that it’s not (and that should be a surprising fact in need of explanation!). But note that people will often talk about it in misleading ways, because for the sake of discussion it’s often simpler to talk about it as if there are these discrete groups. So just because people are talking about it as if there are discrete groups does not mean they actually think there are discrete groups. I think that’s what happened here.
Some evidence against this is that they described it as being a “power law” distribution, which is continuous and doesn’t have these kinds of clusters. (It just goes way way up as you move to the right.)
If you had a power law distribution, it would still be accurate to say that “a few are better than most”, even though there isn’t a discontinuous break anywhere.
EDIT: It seems to me that most things like this follow approximately continuous distributions. And so whenever you hear someone talking about something like this you should assume it’s continuous unless it’s super clear that it’s not (and that should be a surprising fact in need of explanation!). But note that people will often talk about it in misleading ways, because for the sake of discussion it’s often simpler to talk about it as if there are these discrete groups. So just because people are talking about it as if there are discrete groups does not mean they actually think there are discrete groups. I think that’s what happened here.