Talented People Frequently Don’t Rise to the Top
greaterwrong.com
greaterwrong.com
Is it possible that cooking and making-videos-about-cooking are two entirely different skill sets?
The funny thing is I don't disagree with the premise of the article. But I doubt I could think of a worse metric to measure success than YouTube views.
I would much rather watch someone like Adam Ragusea (https://youtu.be/SDpCzJw2xm4), who may not be as good as Bottura, but is much better at cooking than I am and can communicate information well and produces engaging videos.
Also Adam is really good at making videos.
edit: typo
This is a really good point.
To put it in simple geek numerical terms, if I'm level 20, I need someone who's level 50 to show me how to get to level 30 or 40. Someone who is level 100 would be wasted on me, and I'd probably learn less because it's so far out of my league!
Getting to Bottura’s level is not.
If someone wants to get better at cooking they would gain far more value form watching what is essentially a decent home cook rather than a top chef.
The same thing can also be applied to developers most people would gain far more from watching an average developer with good communication skills solving a problem than a top 0.1% talent. Because quite likely the way and speed you think at and your problem solving skills are far closer to them than to someone who designed a programming language or built an entire framework from scratch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZmp69SeMhs
The gap for me, a complete amateur home cook, between one culinary instructor and the next is mostly down to who I find it fun to learn from.
I think you see the same thing in programming: some principal engineers are more fun to listen to, even if they’re not the “most talented”, and the difference doesn’t matter until you’re further into the field.
tldr: People who are top 5% talent and top 5% communicators are only 0.25% of the population, but they have outsized viewership in popular education materials. They’re their own kind of “special talent” in a field.
Those two are actually about learning to cook better, rather than "cooking entertainment", like PBS cooking shows vs. the Food Channel.
And not all masters/good teachers are entertaining or engaging enough for Youtube.
Absolutely. I teach programming and one thing I have learned is my presentations must be heavily scripted to be effective.
It is not that mistakes cannot happen during a presentation, but they should only be included with purpose (“I’m going to show you how this breaks...”). But mistakes that appear when unscripted, unless quickly caught and spun as being introduced on purpose can lead to a lot of confusion.
Even the end result (to me) is scripted and won’t account for all the different scenarios that might occur in a real-world setting (i.e. spec changes, different environments).
It’s entirely possible cooking videos may result in good-looking dishes, but since we never get a taste of the final result... :)
"This is not surprising, the video of a house wife making food is accessible to a higher number of people. A lot fewer people would be able to follow someone who is number one in the world."
Might that be the answer at hand? It certainly seems like it applies to programming videos. If we measure by view counts the things that are around the mean in terms of skill will be more popular.
I would instinctively have thought material conveying the basics would be the most viewed in the long run - since skill is cumulative, everyone at some point will have had to learn the basics, and only those who succeeded would go on to view intermediate content
The woodworking videos I watch are often things I can’t do.
Basically: people with skill level 1 std above the mean are still able to follow content that is 1 std below the mean. But the opposite is not true.
Their #1 chef in the world, with all his accolades, is indubitably "at the top." Michelin, San Pellegrino, etc., all agree. He's risen to the top of the chef world, end of story. But what about the youtube world? Is he a talented youtuber, or is he merely a mediocre youtuber? Well, I kinda hate the format, so I won't try to judge that myself. But he's being compared to talented youtubers who are less-acclaimed as chefs.
From what I gather, youtube is popular among people who want to learn how to do something. I know what it takes to make a fancy meal, and I know what it takes to get food on the table after a long day's work, in time to get it down my kid's gullet before bathtime rolls around. These goals are not compatible. If I wanted somebody to tell me how to make dinner, I'd watch the unacclaimed housewife.
Later on in the article, the author bemoans the difficulty that good chefs have rising to the top of their world. And, yeah, marketing certainly plays a role in that. But so does the extremely low-margin, high-competition nature of restauranting.
They seem to have an appropriate amount of views.
In the modern world, we value merit and motivation over everything else, we don't care about aspirations or self-determination. There will always be a barrier or a filter to stop people from doing what they really want to do. We want people to work hard to prove they want something, and we don't really value what people like, we only value competitiveness.
Problem is, we don't understand a lot about motivations, and merit is a myth. People will always fall back to classical argument of natural selection and survival of the fittest to explain how the world is unfair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
In the end, "raising to the top" or asserting one's position in the world, and not feeling like a loser, those things don't matter. There are plenty of people who find their place in the world, but who will still feel like they're missing something once they reach it.
"Doesn't get a lot of youtube views"
"Has three michelin stars"
I think we can stop reading now.
In the article meritocracy is mentioned. Meritocracy is a joke in America. People at the top basically have it rigged for their kids, even worse than what aristocracy brought (which offered a leisurely life).
The Meritocracy Myth by Yale Law Professor Stephen McNamee is a good read regarding this. It is shocking, as in the statistics.
It really is surprising at how little views his videos get, especially the ones where he spends 20 minutes going over his thought process while going over a feature of Basecamp. This is like getting a private mentorship from one of the most talented developers of our generation in how he applies something to a real world use case.
I guess it really boils down to discoverability being mostly about SEO (aka. picking good titles) and how much love you get from the algorithm to push your content in front of folks. But I have a feeling it has a lot more to do with the algorithm at this point due to the sheer number of videos out there.
I know I struggle on YouTube (programming / tech topics), even with 11k subs and posting a new video every week consistently, most of the time I'm getting like 400-600 views after the first day and some videos get more views over time depending on how popular the topic is. These are usually videos with 100% or close to 100% upvotes and lots of positive comments. It's super hard to get to the point where you consistently get a lot of views. I've only had a few videos get more than 100k+ views after all this time.
I weep for the world where this is true. DHH found a niche and through copious application of the "worse is better" approach, became famous. That in itself makes him neither interesting nor particularly talented.
The real tragedy is hundreds of genius engineers posting eye-opening material in their personal blogs, that I have little time to fully follow much less digest, being invisible to the masses.
It's too late to edit my comment but I should have been more specific and included the word "web" in there instead of having it applied to all developers.
I've watched all of DHH's YouTube videos and ignoring his opinionated views on things I think it would be hard to say he's not a good developer. His thought process is very clear and the code he writes (at least in the videos I've seen) seems good, especially since it's in an older code base that's really running in production at scale and not a little toy example to make it look good on video.
In my mind, a talented developer is more than someone who can think of and implement great algorithms. It's pulling together many things (coding chops, ability to communicate, API design, thoughtfulness of the code quality, being able to turn the code into something nice for either developers or app features depending on who the audience is, etc.) and IMO DHH hits all of these marks, so it's surprising to me at how little views his videos gets. I wonder if that's why he stopped making them.
I have seen great restaurants (food wise) fail because they didn't have a good location or the right advertising. I've seen engineers fail because they couldn't articulate their ideas in a way that made people realize their value.
It's not always about your talent, but how to make others realize you are talented.
The author points out that there are "random housewives" with 100x the reach of Michelin star rated chefs. This strikes me as a great example of the fact that the people and content who rise to the top today get there through a complicated dance of specific talents (some cooking talent, probably great screen presence) and choosing a broad addressable market.
You could almost argue that this is more meritocratic than the world we used to live in where a select few had the ability to tell the rest of us what the "best" was.
If literally everyone in a company is talented, how can that company have any hierarchy or structure without it being claimed that talented people frequently don't rise to the top within the company? Some talented people must be at the bottom by definition.
If I got hired tomorrow at Google, I should just be able to decide to kill off Android and Chrome, yeah?
a) Progress slows to a crawl with everyone trying to reach consensus on everything. This also leads to less accountability.
b) Everyone doing their own thing leading to an operational mess and constantly repeated work.
c) An implicit power structure forming and working behind the scenes which then breeds an atmosphere of paranoia and stress.
I'm reminded of these tweets about Valve from Richard Geldreich: https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberated_company
https://kevinmeyer.com/blog/2008/01/no-titles-excep.html
"There is no organization chart
There are no job titles or job descriptions
No performance criteria
No bonuses and no perks
No regularly scheduled meetings
No approval levels for capital or expense spending
No goals
No offices or high-walled cubicles
If the peers accept the idea, then "management" is presumed to accept it – hence the need for very little management
Every employee is simply expected to figure out where they fit
There is one honorary job title: Plant Manager. But it’s not what you think. This facility, what amounts to a very large machine shop filled with heavy 5-axis CNC’s, has hundreds of live plants hanging from the ceiling. The Plant Manager is the person in charge of maintaining the plants."The headline is interesting but the article can easily be summed up as: “McDonalds isn’t the highest quality restaurant, but it’s very popular, and, I have nothing to add to that beyond pointing it out.”.
If your target is to teach programming 101, you’re probably going to have more views than someone teaching people how to do banking related cobol.
The startup version of this is the person wanting to get rich but not learn anything needed to become actually successful in anything. Always looking for the shortcut or quick-fix recipe because it's NEVER about talent as a type of success but instead as power and wealth which are only side-effects of talent.
>Yet his videos only get 10-20k views. That might sound like a lot on the surface, but pay attention to view counts on YouTube and you’ll find random housewives consistently getting hundreds of thousands of views for their cooking videos.
>I think you have to consider that some sort of failure.
An expected failure by the vast majority of youtube watchers to seek this kind of excellence.
The lack of insight is key here, because really this isn't a hard problem at the surface. You need a compelling story, or product, that resonates with people. The more people it resonates with, the larger your audience.
Also, it never occurred to the author that DHH or Massimo don't *want" a big audience. They might want to explain their work to true fans and die hards, and not have to make it broadly accessible to the point where it could get 1M+ views. It's not about talent. It could be a choice.
And also, as another commenter points out, perhaps the ‘random housewives’ have more accessible content.
> Yet his videos only get 10-20k views. That might sound like a lot on the surface, but pay attention to view counts on YouTube and you’ll find random housewives consistently getting hundreds of thousands of views for their cooking videos.
Most people don't want to cook at chef level. They want to learn easy recipes to cook home, often with little time investment.
Even now that I know this guy exists, I have no interest in watching his videos. But be sure that when I am looking for an answer to an easy cooking question, I'll be finding one of those "random housewives".
> My core point is that there are people like DHH, like Massimo, who should be getting way more views on their videos, given the quality of the content they’re producing and what they’ve done to promote that content. Do you disagree with that?
Yes.
The Massimo Bottura has a total of 13 videos from months ago, with random titles that mean nothing like "Let's burn the house down". DHH has 12 videos published years ago, and they are not even all about software. Why should I watch those? Because he is famous?
Most of Bottura's videos are live, produced with a hand held phone and no preparation. I'm not disputing his knowledge, but is presentation is dismal. Where is the quality of the content? Where is the effort in promoting? I see very little of both.
It's also quite ironic that the two people he takes as examples raised at the top of their respective professions, invalidating his point. They are just not the best teachers/presenters, which is not their core skill, and that's why they are not at the top of that hierarchy. Being good at something does not automatically grant you the right to be revered in every other field.
In a field with millions of people, to be at the top 100, you not only have to have a lot of talent, but you also have to have a lot of luck. It's not enough to just have talent.
Because if you have the top talent but no luck, in a million people you would be ranked at 50,000 because 95% of the selection process considers merit, the other 5% is luck. To be in the top 100, you would need to be very talented and be in the top 1% of lucky people.
With different talent/luck ratios the numbers obviously change, but even in a system where you are 95% merit based, luck still plays a HUGE role to be at the very top.
It's math.
And keep in mind there are billions of people in this world. Programming alone has millions of people.
Famous people usually have a strong desire to be famous.
True, but in life, there are people who do things because they have to do things, and then there are people who do things because they want to do things...
Highly spiritually advanced people (and I don't claim to be one of them -- far from!) -- no longer do things for a reward -- that's because to them,
the act of doing and the reward for the doing -- are one in the same...
That is, because they live life at such a high level of self-expression -- they have unified action and reward.
For them, there is no time delay between the action and the reward...
To use a analogy borrowed from psychology, think of this as having attained "Self-Actualization" in Maslow's "hierarchy of needs"...
People at that level -- no longer worry too much about rewards...
If they compete with anyone for any prize, for any reward -- then they only compete with themselves, their past selves, that is, with their past achievements, to see what more can be accomplished -- to see what more can be learned or experienced next...
They truly exemplify Bruce Lee's time honored quote:
“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”
-Bruce Lee
Doing the work is half the challenge; marketing the work is the other half.
Writes a post about it.
Why is this on the front page?