[extropy-chat] Top 1%

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 03:27:50PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote:

> Sure they can! Just select the top 1% of the people applying to you, and
> you can honestly say you have hired the top 1%. Who cares that it is not

But that's not what they're claiming, of course.

> the *overall* 1%? :-)
> 
> Assuming everybody pulls equally strongly, we should expect that the most

One hell of an assumption. Top talent chooses *very* carefully where it
is going.

> brilliant minds are most likely to work in the largest companies. So there

Not necessarily, depends on the distribution. You're probably correct, though.

> ought to be 76,000/17,787 = 4.27 times more brilliant minds at Microsoft
> than Apple. Google ought to have 0.14 times the number of geniuses as
> Apple. IBM 4.68 times more than Microsoft. However, I doubt the pulling

My guess is that they're neither at Microsoft, Google, Apple, or IBM.

> equally strongly assumption is true. But given the rarity of extreme
> talent and that it may be tricky to reliably attract I still think the
> size does matter - the law of large numbers almost always wins.
> 
> Whether the top 1% actually help much is another matter.

At least in IT there is a very large difference between top talent and
merely average. 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.ativel.com
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070306/04c70953/attachment.bin>