https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Sx6SBmyut73u6atgB/the-best-frequently-don-t-rise-to-the-top ArchiveSequencesAbout [ ]Search Log InQuestionsEventsShortformAlignment ForumAF CommentsHomeFeatured AllTagsRecent Comments The best frequently don't rise to the top adamzerner25 Mar 2021 6:10 UTC 24 points 24 commentsLW link World Modeling [ ] Post permalinkLink without commentsLink without top nav barsLink without comments or top nav bars There are a variety of YouTube channels I've come across that seem like they don't get nearly enough views. The best example that comes to my mind right now is probably Massimo Bottura. Wikipedia does a good job of describing who he is: Massimo Bottura is an Italian restaurateur and the chef patron of Osteria Francescana, a three-Michelin-star restaurant based in Modena, Italy which has been listed in the top 5 at The World's 50 Best Restaurants Awards since 2010 and received top ratings from L'Espresso, Gambero Rosso and the Touring Club guides. ... Osteria Francescana was ranked The World's 2nd Best Restaurant at the S.Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants Awards in 2015. In June 2016 Osteria Francescana was ranked No. 1 in The World's 50 Best Restaurants and No. 2 in 2017. The restaurant returned to rank No. 1 in The World's 50 Best Restaurants in 2018. So... arguably the best chef in the entire world. On YouTube. Showing you how he cooks. How he thinks. 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. Market inefficiency, false negative, non-meritocratic, whatever. Another good example is David Heinemeier Hansson. Another wildly successful and influential person. DHH is the creator of Ruby on Rails, which is perhaps the most popular web framework out there. He also is a best selling author, and founder of an incredibly successful company, Basecamp. I feel like I didn't do him justice. He's one of the people I think of when I think about who's had an impact on me. Maybe I should have let Wikipedia introduce him like I did for Massimo. Anyway, DHH has a YouTube channel where he lets you inside his brain and shows you how he thinks about writing software. How many views do you think those videos get? It's in the same ballpark as Massimo: 10-60k. And also similar to Massimo, you can find people who are way less qualified consistently getting hundreds of thousands of views on similar videos. I want to focus on my core point here. DH6, not DH5. You might be able to make points about how being brilliant doesn't necessarily make you good on camera, or about how marketing and promotion matters a lot, or about releasing videos on a consistent schedule, or about how maybe they're not producing the types of content YouTube viewers want to watch. Some of those might be fair points, but do you think that they refute my core point? 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? Here are some examples of very high quality content coming from what I'd consider to be diamonds in the rough, rather than being from famous people like DHH and Massimo: * Programming: Eric Normand and Be A Better Dev * Basketball: hoopvision68 and Mike De La Rosa * Poker: Carrot Corner * Science: funsciencedemos Maybe you're thinking to yourself: "Ok? So, what's your point?" My point is just that it's not meritocratic. That quite often, the best don't rise to the top. Again, maybe you're still thinking to yourself: "Yeah, of course the best don't always rise to the top. Duh. Is that it?" Yeah, pretty much. If this point is already obvious to you, then this post probably won't be very interesting. I'm just saying things you already know. But to me, it's not obvious. I still have an instinct that the best stuff would rise to the top way more often than it actually does. I should be upfront about something: I have a pretty big personal attachment to this question. I spent over five years working on two separate startups that both failed pretty miserably. And in both cases, I felt like the market wasn't very fair to me. I felt like I had pretty good quality products, and that my level of success was not even close to proportionate to the quality I produced. Well, not just the quality of the product, I'm trying to talk about product + marketing + everything else. My logic was, roughly: If my quality is, say, a ^7/[10], my level of success should be somewhere in that ballpark. Maybe the market would be inefficient and I'd only reach a ^5/[10] or a ^4/[10]. Or maybe I'd be lucky and reach an ^8/[10] or ^9/[10]. That didn't happen. And if you talk to other startup founders, I'm sure they'll tell you that I'm not alone. Paul Graham likes to say that you have to be 10x better than the competition to overcome inertia. That is so true. I think the same thing is true in other fields too. Cooking is one that comes to mind. I know that over time, I've walked into random little restaurants that seemed to be pretty low on business, but had fantastic food! And it's not like the location or service were terrible or something. They did really well on whatever all encompassing metric of quality you want to use. But despite that, they had very little success. I've been watching the show Chefs Table on Netflix recently. They basically do a little profile/ biography on different world class chefs, and I've been noticing a similar trend where early in their careers they had serious problems with lack of success. Financial issues, depression, coming close to closing down, in some cases acutally going out of business and then re-opening. And then, for whatever reason, in comes a rush of success. But the quality didn't really change! Maybe it changed a little bit, but not enough to account for the amount of change in success. It's not like quality went from ^3/[10] to ^10/[10], more like 9.5/ 10 to ^10/[10], perhaps. Before the rush of success, they were basically the same world class chefs producing the same incredible food. For whatever reason, the success just didn't come. They hadn't risen to the top yet. They were still diamonds in the rough. I get the sense that lack of meritocracy is an issue in most fields, not just startups and cooking. I recall an anecdote about writing and the arts from a blog post I read today: Further, I also know that many writers who are Quite Fucking Good go completely unnoticed throughout their lives. As is the case with virtually everything in the arts, it's not exactly an easy thing to do -- to be externally successful. Again, I don't really have any insightful takeaways here. I've just been noticing myself slowly realizing that the best don't always rise to the top, and these are the examples that have been sticking out to me. adamzerner25 Mar 2021 6:10 UTC 24 points 24 commentsLW link World Modeling [ ] Post permalinkLink without commentsLink without top nav barsLink without comments or top nav bars * gjm 25 Mar 2021 9:39 UTC 21 points Not only has Massimo Bottura's YouTube channel failed to rise to the top of (say) YouTube channels you find if you go looking for cookery content on YouTube--it's failed to rise to the top of YouTube channels you find if you put "Massimo Bottura" into the YouTube search box. (I think its first appearance on the page when you do that is in 29th position.) [EDITED to add:] ... having said which, I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. I took a look at a couple of his videos. One was (for me) practically unwatchable, consisting mostly of Bottura and (I assume) his family being annoyingly loud; I bailed after a few minutes of near-content-free video. Another was just an advertisement for some masterclass thing he's selling. I tried another video with some actual cookery in it and forced myself to watch all of it despite his annoying family, background noise, terrible camerawork, etc. I learned a bit, but if there was anything in it that revealed 3-star Michelin chef magic I missed it. He may be a brilliant chef, but I don't think his YouTube channel is "the best" or deserves to "rise to the top". + frcassarino 25 Mar 2021 12:39 UTC 3 points Parent His videos are clearly filmed with a phone, vertically, with no effort whatsoever in terms of production.Also he posted around 15 videos in the span of a couple of monhts, and never posted again. If you contrast that with cooking channels like Adam Ragusea, it's pretty clear why it didn't become as popular. + adamzerner 25 Mar 2021 19:09 UTC 2 points Parent My perspective is that things like the camerawork and background noise in his videos a) aren't particularly bad, and b) given (a), I'd think it'd only knock him down a few points. Maybe from, let's say 800k views to 700k or 600k, not all the way down to 10-20k (very ballpark-y of course). As far as Michelin chef magic, personally I feel like I have picked up some things, like the amount of ingredients he uses. I see it as valuable to be able to watch someone with that degree of mastery. A lot of times such people don't actually know how to explain or articulate what they're doing correctly, so observing them can be hit or miss, but still seems pretty valuable to me. o gjm 25 Mar 2021 21:59 UTC 4 points Parent It's not just the camerawork and background noise. The information density is low. The bad camerawork, as well as being annoying in itself, makes it difficult to see any details of what he's up to, so you can't e.g. improve your knife skills by observing exactly what he does when chopping things. He explains rather little of what he's doing. At least in the video I watched all of, things like quantities and times are left unspecified. He wasn't doing anything particularly imaginative or highly polished. I can readily believe that I was watching a master at work, but I don't think there's anything much to distinguish what I saw from what I'd have seen if he'd been secretly replaced by a merely-competent professional chef. (To be clear, I'm not claiming that all the things I describe are bad. What's relevant here is that they make it matter less just how good he is.) Why, concretely, would I watch one of his videos? # To learn some specific fact or recipe. (For that, a book is usually better.) # To observe his technique doing some "ordinary" thing. (For that, the difference between a three-star Michelin chef and an ordinarily competent professional line cook is probably small. The line cook may actually be better at it--they probably do it more than Bottura does. If some random merely-OK professional has a YouTube channel with better presentation and/ or more variety of things, they're better for this than Bottura. A highly skilled amateur might be just as good for my purposes, in fact; the professional may use some technique that works very well but takes hundreds of hours of practice to do competently, and watching them do it may do little to improve my sub-professional skills if I'm not going to put in those hundreds of hours. And the amateur may make mistakes and then fix them, which the professional is much less likely to do but might be instructive.) # To observe his technique doing some unusual thing that he, specifically, is particularly good at. (That would be good. I don't know of any examples on his channel. Do you?) # To learn from his probably-exceptional culinary judgement. (Plausible, if there were actually anything on his channel demonstrating that judgement. I didn't see any examples in the quick look I had. Did you?) # To be inspired by his probably-exceptionally-ingenious ideas: combinations of ingredients I'd never have thought of, etc. (Also plausible. Also no examples apparent to me.) # To be entertained. (If what I want is merely entertainment, I can turn to TV star Gordon Ramsay, also a multi-Michelin-star chef-proprietor. Or to cooking-comedy channels like You Suck At Cooking. Or many other things. I certainly wouldn't go to Bottura's videos, which I find grating rather than entertaining.) # For the experience of watching a Great Person at work. (I guess? But that isn't a thing I particularly value, except to whatever extent I can see their Greatness actually being operative and learn from it, which--see above--doesn't seem to be the case for Bottura's YouTube channel.) I'm quite sure that if you gave Bottura a skilled production team and used multiple hours of his time per episode, he could produce something as good as anything else out there. I bet he's a more skilled cook than, say, Ramsay at this point. But doing that hasn't been his priority--no doubt he prefers to get on with cooking and with running a restaurant (and, lately, with spending time with his family during the deadly worldwide plague) -- and that's perfectly OK. But it means that what he does produce is neither very instructive nor very enjoyable to watch. For me, at least. o abramdemski 25 Mar 2021 19:38 UTC 4 points Parent This seems to assume roughly linear relationship between quality and reception. As I mentioned in my other comment, this seems far from necessary. We can have something like an exponential relationship between the two, in which case a small difference in quality can create a massive difference in reception. I just don't get why you think moderately bad camera work should a priori best be thought of as some percentage of views lost (taking something from 800k to 700k or 600k) rather than in orders of magnitude (taking something from 800k to 80k or 8k). # adamzerner 25 Mar 2021 20:03 UTC 2 points Parent Good point, exponential does seem like it could sense. I'm not sure. o dmnissley 25 Mar 2021 20:05 UTC 1 point Parent I think you're underweighting production quality (false consensus bias?). Just as an example, my girlfriend is big into youtube, but she only watches high production channels, and will quickly skip past anything that looks like it's been shot on a phone. She'll also basically refuse to watch any movie or show that was shot before about the year 2000 for similar reasons. Another big factor is personality of the creators. She likes to watch channels where she feels some connection to the creators. They're usually a couple of people or more where there is entertaining and comedic banter that's always going on besides whatever subject the actual video is about. It's chiefly entertainment for her, with any educational content just being a bonus. I would posit that most people who watch youtube have preferences closer to hers than to yours, although my own are probably closer to yours. Here's an example of the kind of video I'm talking about: # adamzerner 25 Mar 2021 20:50 UTC 2 points Parent Yeah, maybe. My thinking is that some people care about it more than others, but in my experience watching YouTube videos (and I happen to watch a ton of cooking videos on YouTube), I recall seeing videos that seem basically even to Massimo in terms of production quality, personality, etc., yet have hundreds of thousands of views. * Dave Lindbergh 25 Mar 2021 15:30 UTC 16 points Sigh. To make something work in a competitive world, you need to make it work on all the relevant metrics--at least "good enough" on all of them, and better than the competition on some of them. Suppose you offer a product that's measured on 4 metrics (imagine: quality, speed, price, size, ease of use, beauty, weight, ...), A, B, C, D. Some potential customers will weigh some metrics more heavily than others. Some will ignore some metrics completely. But in general you need to do at least ^5/[10] on all of them and better than that on some of them. Metric A: ^7/[10] Metric B: ^8/[10] Metric C: ^2/[10] Metric D: ^10/[10] That's a losing product. It's fantastic on D, but bad on C, and that kills it for most customers. Maybe there are a few people who don't care much about C and will love the product. But not many. That's what happened to Massimo Bottura (C was production quality). You're the weird customer who doesn't care about C and notices mainly D. Probably that's what happened to your startups. Sorry--it's tough. But that's the reality. --- Added: Of course the same is true for other competitions, for example mate selection. Happily most people are only looking for a single mate, so it's not that difficult to find somebody who values D a lot, C hardly at all, and also measures well on your own preferred metrics. It's not that easy for a startup or a YouTuber, who need numbers. + Dagon 25 Mar 2021 17:16 UTC 5 points Parent Yup. The modeling error here is that "quality" is a single dimension, and that it's both absolute and roughly linear in value. All three of these are false. What Dave Lindbergh is calling "metric", I'd call "dimension of value" (because the metric is an indicator of the value, not the value itself. Also, because metric implies universality, and value is relative and marginal). There are hundreds (or perhaps tens of thousands) of dimensions of value, which have different scales and weightings for different customers. As pointed out, having experts agree that one is providing the values to the critics and high-end customers that make them a top restaurateur does not correlate terribly well to those that make for popular youtube videos. + adamzerner 25 Mar 2021 19:24 UTC 4 points Parent I agree with the general point but disagree that that's happening with Massimo, and more generally with the other examples of lack of success. I do think that's part of what happened with my startups though. * Richard Horvath 25 Mar 2021 13:18 UTC 9 points I agree that often the best don't rise to the top, but you have bad examples here. You are confusing expertise in different domains: just because one is exceptional in something, it does not follow they are good at teaching it or making videos of it. This is especially apparent in Bottura's channel. He might be the best chef in the world, but his youtube content is mediocre. + adamzerner 25 Mar 2021 20:09 UTC 2 points Parent You are confusing expertise in different domains: just because one is exceptional in something, it does not follow they are good at teaching it or making videos of it. I agree about there being different domains, that each is important, and that expertise in one does not imply expertise or even competency in another. You might be able to make points about how being brilliant doesn't necessarily make you good on camera, or about how marketing and promotion matters a lot, or about releasing videos on a consistent schedule, or about how maybe they're not producing the types of content YouTube viewers want to watch. What I was trying to get at is that all things considered, if you encapsulated all of that in some one-number metric of quality, a) IMO all of the examples I gave were very high quality, and 2) in general, I have a strong impression that very high quality frequently doesn't lead to success. o Viliam 25 Mar 2021 21:57 UTC 2 points Parent Maybe the one-number metric that matters on YouTube has a very strong component of how technically well the video was made. Like, even if someone who "deserves it" makes technically great videos and gets tons of followers, most of them follow the channel for "wrong reasons", that is, they would not have subscribed if the same content had lower technical quality. So if someone who "deserves it" makes technically crappy videos, they only get a few followers. In other words, most people watch YouTube because they want some short funny visual experience. Not because they want to learn from world-class experts. Okay, maybe they watch something short funny visually attractive that allows them to pretend to themselves that they are doing it to learn. That would kinda reduce your thesis to "the best at X frequently don't rise to the top when Y matters". The difficult part is figuring out what exactly it is that matters on YouTube (or on the market). * eihli 25 Mar 2021 13:04 UTC 5 points 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? What do you mean by "... who should be getting way more views... ...Do you disagree with that?" (To provide context around my thoughts as I write, I'm thinking of the phrase "the purpose of a system is what it does".) I'm thinking there's at least two meanings with at least two different ways to interpret. First, you could mean "I have an understanding of the system that leads me to expect a different distribution of popularity by viewcount. I have an understanding of the system. Good content - high viewcount. It should do this. It does that. Do you disagree? " Second, you could mean "I have an understanding of meritocratic justice such that the distribution of popularity as judged by viewcount is unfair. Good content - high viewcount. Life should be this way. It is that way. Do you disagree?" If neither of those hit the mark or if anyone has alternatives, I'd like to know. For the first interpretation, "do you disagree" can't really be applied to your understanding of the system. You understand it the way you do. I suppose a similar question that might be more appropriate could be "How might the system differ from my expectation such that I am surprised by this behavior?" A brief response to that question would be something along the lines of YouTube's purpose having to do with money, algorithms to keep people viewing and clicking on ads, what makes something viral, etc... For the second interpretation, that might be a long-winded philosophical topic that I expect could be summed up with "Yeah... that sucks." * abramdemski 25 Mar 2021 19:31 UTC 4 points Funny enough, I've recently been contemplating asking a question here on LW like "what actually-quite-good youtube channels are out there?" precisely because I suspected there were a lot of hidden gems like you mention! I didn't get around to it, though, perhaps because watching youtube feels low status so I felt like it would be embarassing to visibly put effort into optimizing my youtube-watching. Anyway, there are a few reasons why I thought this was a priori plausible: 1. First and foremost, I see this as an example of the tails come apart (ie Goodhart). Even if quality and reception are very highly correlated, you should expect the top of the two to be different, based on noise alone. But maybe that's not satisfying: what's driving the noise? Why isn't reception exactly proportional to quality? 2. A big factor here, for a lot of cases, is going to be network effects. Small fluctuations in popularity don't get corrected, they get exacerbated. Two people can release similarly great videos, and the fact that one gets its first views from the right people (who show all their friends) can snowball into a big lead. And this can snowball into making one channel a huge success while the other practically-equivalent channel is lost in obscurity. 3. But there are also going to be a lot of "noise" factors that aren't random at all. EG, how clickbaity a video is. Out of two similar videos, if one is a little more informative but the other is a little more clickbaity, I expect the clickbaity one to do better. The third point means we could see the tails come apart to a very high degree, even if there's no noise in the system at all. To possibilities like #3, you respond: I want to focus on my core point here. DH6, not DH5. You might be able to make points about how being brilliant doesn't necessarily make you good on camera, or about how marketing and promotion matters a lot, or about releasing videos on a consistent schedule, or about how maybe they're not producing the types of content YouTube viewers want to watch. Some of those might be fair points, but do you think that they refute my core point? 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? (I don't disagree at all, but) I think you're implicitly assuming something like: even if DHH is a little less clickbaity than competitors, this should only translate to a somewhat cooler reception. This is reinforced by your expectation that: If my quality is, say, a ^7/[10], my level of success should be somewhere in that ballpark. Maybe the market would be inefficient and I'd only reach a ^5/[10] or a ^4/[10]. Or maybe I'd be lucky and reach an ^8/[10] or ^9/[10]. But reception can be highly nonlinear, perhaps closer to exponential. So, at the upper ends of quality, small differences in quality lead to very large differences in reception. We could see something like: Quality Reception ^1/[10] ^0/[10] ^2/[10] ^0/[10] ^3/[10] ^0/[10] ^4/[10] ^0/[10] ^5/[10] ^0/[10] ^6/[10] ^0/[10] ^7/[10] ^1/[10] ^8/[10] ^2/[10] ^9/[10] ^5/[10] ^10/[10] ^10/[10] Again, even without randomness, in a system like this you could see the effects you're describing. * Maximum_Skull 25 Mar 2021 8:10 UTC 4 points The meritocratic part is the best are significantly more likely to rise to the top, real world is best thought of as a stochastic place, full of imperfect information and surprises. Being the best at content creation is not the same as being the best at YouTube: size of one's target demographic matters, the ability to self-promote matters, ability to network matters, ad-friendliness of content matters... Akin to evolution, the system does not select the *best* creators in the conventional sense of creating the best videos, being the best at writing and so on. In fact, one might argue for the opposite being the default. The selection criteria are messy, the variance in outcomes is significant, the variance in perceived selection criteria even more so. My takeaway is that one should be lucky and avoid being unlucky, while trying to stack the deck as much as one can in order to manipulate variance. + adamzerner 25 Mar 2021 20:57 UTC 2 points Parent The meritocratic part is the best are significantly more likely to rise to the top, real world is best thought of as a stochastic place, full of imperfect information and surprises. That makes sense, I agree. * aphyer 25 Mar 2021 19:38 UTC 3 points Without commenting on the rest of your point, this part: If my quality is, say, a ^7/[10], my level of success should be somewhere in that ballpark. Maybe the market would be inefficient and I'd only reach a ^5/[10] or a ^4/[10]. Or maybe I'd be lucky and reach an ^8/[10] or ^9/[10]. is something I don't think you should necessarily have expected from a market to begin with. Assuming that your startup was in a scalable field (e.g. a software company as opposed to a restaurant) with an efficient market, what you expect to happen is that quality ^7/[10] should lead to success ^0/[10] - there is no reason that anyone would buy from you when they could instead buy from a ^10/[10]. In reality there are lots of reasons this isn't quite the case. Maybe your product is ^7/[10] overall but genuinely the best in the world for certain specific users/ use cases. (C++ and Python both continue to exist). Maybe the market just isn't very efficient and some people end up buying inferior products. (PHP also continues to exist). But on the whole expecting a ^7/[10] product to experience a ^7/[10] success is not actually what you should expect to see. + adamzerner 25 Mar 2021 20:16 UTC 2 points Parent Agreed. I think the caveat you make about some people preferring one and others preferring another use case is an important one, but in general I agree that my logic was wrong and it's an important mistake to avoid. * Jonathan_Graehl 25 Mar 2021 17:14 UTC 2 points Quantity/ frequency matters. Algorithms should minimize the chance that initial luck (bad or good) leaves a lasting effect on end popularity. Really great, accessible stuff pumped out regularly will eventually rise. + Dagon 25 Mar 2021 19:03 UTC 4 points Parent Algorithms should minimize the chance that initial luck (bad or good) leaves a lasting effect on end popularity. Why would algorithms care about that at all? They're optimizing clicks, and I see no reason they'd want to give up any power to try to reverse the effects of luck. * romeostevensit 25 Mar 2021 9:11 UTC 2 points Taste is illegible to people without it. * Archimedes 25 Mar 2021 22:31 UTC 1 point The idea that better quality cooking corresponds to higher viewership is only a rough expectation even when all else is held equal, which never actually happens. YouTube popularity is highly memetic and subject to algorithms, network effects, and plain dumb luck. The factors involved in success are numerous and difficult to predict, but some of the most important factors are quality content, posting regularity, high entertainment value, viewer engagement, and having an angle or niche to stand out. Being the best cook in the world guarantees not a single one of these. Back to top