Love this speech. Thanks for linking it to the discussion. Neil Gaiman is incredibly talented and very intelligent. I was pleasantly surprised, the first time I saw this, by how good of an orator he is. That was my first exposure to him, outside of his comic books, and I found it very moving.

Highly suggest this speech for anyone; creative arts or otherwise.

Salmon's point isn't that there is no variance in creative skill, it's just that there isn't enough to matter in the scheme of being "the best in the world". There's not nearly enough variance to compensate for the luck required to be in the top 100 out of several million.

What you're describing is a "3-sigma" difference, but to be an A-list Hollywood star you'd need to be in something like the 50th sigma. That just isn't explainable by skill.

My problem with his article is that he seems to only define "success" and "recognition" in terms of being within that top 100.

There are a lot of startups that are profitable and have users loving their products that will never sell to Facebook for $1 billion. Using Salmon's argument, it takes pure luck to get to that Instagram-level of success. I buy that. I don't think it follows that all of those small profitable startups are therefore financial failures, which seems to be the conclusion he's drawn.

I don't think he does. You have to take the argument in context - he's talking about Nassim Taleb, who's interested in "Black Swan" 50-sigma outcomes.

Um, the 50'th sigma is nonexistent on any physical scale. The 27'th sigma is 10^-317, and the 28'th sigma is too small to represent with doubles. For comparison, the number of atoms in the universe is about 10^80.

Hollywood actors are, at best, in the 3-4'th sigma.

Taleb and Salmon are thinking about a non-normal fat tail distribution (that's the point of Taleb's book) so it's entirely possible.

I don't have enough data to prove or disprove this statement - although I do know a lot of working and non-working artists, and anecdotally skill seems to win out.

I'd agree, if you're intending to be an A-list star and won't settle for anything less, luck is going to have to play a pretty significant role. But there are a lot of jobs and opportunities for an actor, for example, outside the "best of the best" situation.

I was mostly replying in support of the comment above from randomdrake, however.

That's his point though - extreme success requires extreme luck, not extreme skill. I think you're in violent agreement with Salmon.