You still can't predict just who, out of a reasonably large pool of energetic and determined people, will be the ones with the really big payoffs (for whatever definition of payoff, be it monetary, a big discovery or whatever).

You can probably say with some degree of certainty, which people won't do anything big. That might still leave a pretty large group of people, though.

Who else thinks it would be a lot of fun to see a Graham-Taleb debate on startups? In the end, I think he'd probably like what YC does, because you're giving some people the freedom to "tinker" full time, along with the support to take advantage of the tinkering if it produces something cool. Given a non-infinite supply of money and attention time, of course you're going to have to pick and choose who gets those things. I wonder if he would suggest any changes to the format?