95%-ile isn't that good Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.<br>Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not all people (for many activities, just doing it at all makes you 99%-ile or above across all people). I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate.<br>This post is going to refer to specifics since the discussions I've seen about this are all in the abstract, which turns them into Rorschach tests. For example, Scott Adams has a widely cited post claiming that it's better to be a generalist than a specialist because, to become "extraordinary", you have to either be "the best" at one thing or 75%-ile at two things. If that were strictly true, it would surely be better to be a generalist, but that's of course exaggeration and it's possible to get a lot of value out of a specialized skill without being "the best"; since the precise claim, as written, is obviously silly and the rest of the post is vague handwaving, discussions will inevitably devolve into people stating their prior beliefs and basically ignoring the content of the post.<br>Personally, in every activity I've participated in where it's possible to get a rough percentile ranking, people who are 95%-ile constantly make mistakes that seem like they should be easy to observe and correct. "Real world" activities typically can't be reduced to a percentile rating, but achieving what appears to be a similar level of proficiency seems similarly easy.<br>We'll start by looking at Overwatch (a video game) in detail because it's an activity I'm familiar with where it's easy to get ranking information and observe what's happening, and then we'll look at some "real world" examples where we can observe the same phenomena, although we won't be able to get ranking information for real world examples1.<br>Overwatch<br>At 90%-ile and 95%-ile ranks in Overwatch, the vast majority of players will pretty much constantly make basic game losing mistakes. These are simple mistakes like standing next to the objective instead of on top of the objective while the match timer runs out, turning a probable victory into a certain defeat. See the attached footnote if you want enough detail about specific mistakes that you can decide for yourself if a mistake is "basic" or not2.<br>Some reasons we might expect this to happen are:<br>People don't want to win or don't care about winning<br>People understand their mistakes but haven't put in enough time to fix them<br>People are untalented<br>People don't understand how to spot their mistakes and fix them<br>In Overwatch, you may see a lot of (1), people who don’t seem to care about winning, at lower ranks, but by the time you get to 30%-ile, it's common to see people indicate their desire to win in various ways, such as yelling at players who are perceived as uncaring about victory or unskilled, complaining about people who they perceive to make mistakes that prevented their team from winning, etc.3. Other than the occasional troll, it's not unreasonable to think that people are generally trying to win when they're severely angered by losing.<br>(2), not having put in time enough to fix their mistakes will, at some point, apply to all players who are improving, but if you look at the median time played at 50%-ile, people who are stably ranked there have put in hundreds of hours (and the median time played at higher ranks is higher). Given how simple the mistakes we're discussing are, not having put in enough time cannot be the case for most players.<br>A common complaint among low-ranked Overwatch players in Overwatch forums is that they're just not talented and can never get better. Most people probably don't have the talent to play in a professional league regardless of their practice regimen, but when you can get to 95%-ile by fixing mistakes like "not realizing that you should stand on the objective", you don't really need a lot of talent to get to 95%-ile.<br>While (4), people not understanding how to spot and fix their mistakes, isn't the only other possible explanation4, I believe it's the most likely explanation for most players. Most players who express frustration that they're stuck at a rank up to maybe 95%-ile or 99%-ile don't seem to realize that they could drastically improve by observing their own gameplay or having someone else look at their gameplay.<br>One thing that's curious about this is that Overwatch makes it easy to spot basic mistakes (compared to most other activities). After you're killed, the game shows you how you died from the viewpoint of the player who killed...