Original post: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ntLmCbHE2XKhfbzaX/how-much-does-performance-differ-between-people

Narration by Liam Nolan

Audio editing by Garrett Baker

Some people seem to achieve orders of magnitudes more than others in the same job. For instance, among companies funded by Y Combinator the top 0.5% account for more than ⅔ of the total market value; and among successful bestseller authors, the top 1% stay on the New York Times bestseller list more than 25 times longer than the median author in that group.

This is a striking and often unappreciated fact, but raises many questions. How many jobs have these huge differences in achievements? More importantly, why can achievements differ so much, and can we identify future top performers in advance? Are some people much more talented? Have they spent more time practicing key skills? Did they have more supportive environments, or start with more resources? Or did the top performers just get lucky?

More precisely, when recruiting, for instance, we’d want to know the following: when predicting the future performance of different people in a given job, what does the distribution of predicted (‘ex-ante’) performance look like?

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