I deeply disagree. Taking the whole population is the only sensible interpretation. Answering like "duh, you actually go to the gym, of course you're better than 95% of guys on Earth, that's so unimpressive, anyone could do it if they did it." entirely misses the point. The point is precisely that you actually did it, while 95% did NOT do it and now you are ahead of 95% of people in this thing.
If you always had to be 95th percentile in your current peer group (general couch potatoes, high school championship participants, world championship participants, Olympians, Olympic medalists, Olympic champions, Olympic champions twice in a row), then the 95 just doesn't mean anything. Then you just have to be the single very best according to your logic.
The point is not about "impressive" or not. It's about 95th percentile or not.
This is the typical experience for the ivy league types common on HN though.
They had to beat their way into the 95% of their zone school, then 95% of their magnet high school, then 95% of their elite college's graduating class, then 95% of their big N corporate ladder, etc.
Despite the filtering at every step of the way, the curve is always bellshaped! And it feels like shit if you find yourself on the left side of that curve among your peers.
But I guess it's healthier to think along the lines of: "What do you call a medical student who finished last in their class? Doctor."
I think you're vastly overestimating the readers of this forum. Just by the numbers, you can't have so many people who aced through top-5% in Ivy League schools and darted through the corporate ladder in a top SV company. Not to mention that not everyone is American here.
This is the start of the second paragraph of the article, so it sounds like you disagree with the premise of what we're discussing
All of the examples in this post perfectly apply to this situation: people don't record themselves and check form, don't upload those videos to the internet and get feedback, and don't get help from a personal trainer (one who actually knows something about form). This is why you see people in the gym all the time making basic mistakes: rounded back, non-vertical bar path, bending over too much/not enough.
They have more injuries, don't make progress, or don't get the results they want. Yes, you're not going to get to the top 5% in terms of weight lifted without a lot of dedication and time. But that's more of achievement over time/a career than your ability to execute the skill.
Gaming ladders with automated ELO systems are also not run like tournament ELO systems in more controlled environments like competitive chess. Games like Overwatch, WoW, Starcraft, Hearthstone, etc. will not dynamically update when the player is inactive in order to not discourage players. You have to lose games to lose your ELO category rank, although obviously you can go up and down the leaderboard without playing games. There are some gaming rank systems like CSGO that have some rank decay for inactivity but it is just at a flat rate.
So, "95th percentile" in these systems is not actually indicative of that unless it is based on the precise rank on the leaderboard. In many of these seasonal games rank inflation happens towards the end of the season because of this lack of passive decay. It means that at the beginning of the season, the top rank is very competitive, but as people become less active as the season goes on, it becomes easier to attain rank.
In a lot of domains, if you are 95th percentile, you are extremely competitive. You may be noncompetitive with the 99%ile cohort and the bottom of the 99%ile may be noncompetitive with the 0.1%ile, but to argue that that's not "very good" is just goofy perfectionism. The fact that the author is using goofy noncontrolled systems as an example to support his weakly-defined subjective argument only undermines his own case.
Some people play Overwatch and in their first 1000 games they get to grandmaster. Others get to platinum.
People tend to assume it's easy to get to whatever level they got to, regardless of where they are on the skill curve.
Elo (as used in chess) does not update if you aren't playing games. It's a common criticism of it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen#Personal_life
See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201502...
And it seems like most of the activities we care about rely on learned skills more than physical traits.
Now also his explanation also relies on how dedicated and competitive the average player is.
But the overall point of the piece is that we probably don't try to systematically improve on nearly as many life skills as we should which I think is a valuable and true insight.
> significant portions of their life time in a dedicated attempt to become better [at X]
The thing is, it isn't that easy to actually train for deadlifting for a couple of years, it assumes dedication, some health requirements and basically is the difference between people who do some sport and people who don't. This is obviously ridiculous comparision to anyone talking about anything but playing Overwatch.
So, sure, this surprising life lesson will turn out to be true if you continue to craft the domains you compare in such way that you match competitive ice skaters vs people who were on the ice rink one or twice, MMA fighters vs guys who were in a streetfight once back at school, etc.
And while I don't play Overwatch, I don't think it's actually different than that, it's just that "people, who both can and want to waste significant portions of their life time in a dedicated attempt to become better Overwatch players" are less than 5% of people, who created an account on the Overwatch server (or whatever).