[HN Gopher] Talented People Frequently Don't Rise to the Top
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Talented People Frequently Don't Rise to the Top
Author : optimalsolver
Score : 57 points
Date : 2021-03-25 18:11 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.greaterwrong.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.greaterwrong.com)
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| disabled wrote:
| Yeah, the algorithms are meant to keep you online more, and are
| not there to give you good content, as in entertainment, let
| alone things that you need to know. It is ironic, given how much
| data is hoarded about us.
|
| 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.
| Sindrome wrote:
| Life is absurd
| jokoon wrote:
| People said I was talented, and I always loved math and physics.
| I went to prep school for math and physics, and my emotional
| state did not allow me to pass the class.
|
| 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.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| I got interested after reading this and retold the story about
| the chef to my wife, in passing, and she replied with a good
| point, which basically is:
|
| "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.
| hinkley wrote:
| I would presume that the peak would be closer to 1 std
| deviation above mean, since improvement usually means looking
| at things you can't do but aren't scared to try.
|
| The woodworking videos I watch are often things I can't do.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| I assume a bit of opposite - that the number of potential
| viewers decrease as the quality and skill necessary to follow
| the content increases.
|
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| The average person will find a video about grilled cheese
| to be condescending, and won't enjoy watching it at all.
| Watching a video about roast lamb or souffle might inspire
| me to go to a restaurant instead.
| jsty wrote:
| > 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
| xzel wrote:
| If you're looking at an online course I agree the basics will
| be watched more often (as well as due to people not
| completing the course). But if you're looking at something
| like cooking videos I'd expect the videos of people cooking
| cool things would get more views. People love food porn and
| want to watch something exciting about cooking but probably
| won't watch a video about knife basics because it's not as
| engaging to most people. That's what I loved so much about
| Alton Brown and especially Good Eats, he makes so many
| mundane kitchen things exciting. Compare that to Thomas
| Keller's Master Class, which is incredibly informative and
| I'd recommend it to anyone, but also significantly lower
| energy and you really have to want to learn the stuff to
| watch him julienne carrots for 5 minutes.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Seems he does mac and cheese so no? Seems accessible. Maybe
| people don't know this guy is the best chef in the world, I
| didn't so I would not have searched him out.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEDcWd78U1g
| cgrealy wrote:
| This is crazy, but hear me out...
|
| 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.
| jmcgough wrote:
| Agreed. I checked out the channels he mentioned. Some put out
| videos that are completely unwatchable. The first video that
| loads on Massimo Bottura's channel is a portrait-style
| recording of a livestream shot with a phone and covered in
| emojis, it's not designed for the format of youtube at all.
|
| 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.
| jsilence wrote:
| Exactly this! I much rather like to watch a video of someone
| who is better than me, but reachable than someone off the
| charts and beyond my capabilities.
|
| Also Adam is really good at making videos.
|
| edit: typo
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Besides the entertainment value and communication skills
| getting to Adam's level and even beyond is achievable by most
| people who are willing to put in some time.
|
| 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.
| cgrealy wrote:
| > but is much better at cooking than I am and can communicate
| information well
|
| 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!
| munchbunny wrote:
| I think in general there is a difference between being good at
| something and being a good teacher of that thing. Not all
| masters are good at teaching, and not all good teachers are
| masters.
|
| And not all masters/good teachers are entertaining or engaging
| enough for Youtube.
| beaner wrote:
| Not really a problem on the face of it.
|
| 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.
| inetknght wrote:
| Why must a company have any hierarchy? Why "must" there be a
| bottom and a top?
| nnp7000 wrote:
| Because explicit hierarchy is almost always better than
| implicit hierarchy, which is what happens at a "self-
| organizing" company. A company may start off with good
| intentions but without some hierarchy past a certain size or
| tribal connections (e.g. friends and co-founders), then
| either:
|
| 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/for
| mer_valve_...
| PopsiclePete wrote:
| So everyone is equally empowered to make decision on the
| strategic direction of the company?
|
| If I got hired tomorrow at Google, I should just be able to
| decide to kill off Android and Chrome, yeah?
| jsty wrote:
| Well they don't "have to", but completely non-hierarchical /
| flat organisations have a habit of either (1) descending into
| anarchy, or (2) developing hidden hierarchies.
| nickjj wrote:
| It's interesting the author uses DHH in the example because DHH
| is not a ghost online. Besides Rails itself, he has almost half a
| million Twitter followers and even a lot of non-Rails developers
| know who he is.
|
| 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.
| creamytaco wrote:
| "This is like getting a private mentorship from one of the most
| talented developers of our generation".
|
| 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.
| nickjj wrote:
| > I weep for the world where this is true
|
| 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.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| There's being talented and then there's optimizing for being
| seen. People of the former don't necessarily do the latter.
|
| Famous people usually have a strong desire to be famous.
| [deleted]
| georgebonnr wrote:
| Maybe one of the lessons we're learning from removing all the
| gatekeepers is that Michelin stars aren't a truly objective form
| of assigning value. Or, value doesn't exist in a vacuum -- it
| depends on the application, and maybe the applications aren't
| what gatekeepers say they are.
| [deleted]
| tibiahurried wrote:
| Very true. What makes an individual rise to the top is networking
| and politics. Skills don't really matter.
| andyxor wrote:
| So true
| jandrese wrote:
| Being talented at your job doesn't necessarily mean you are
| talented in climbing the corporate ladder or rising to the top of
| a media landscape. They are two different skills.
| moksly wrote:
| Being talented at something doesn't mean you're talented at
| marketing and selling it.
|
| 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.".
| bawolff wrote:
| Or at teaching it.
| moksly wrote:
| Or that. And beyond that, different people learn different
| ways.
|
| 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.
| fvdessen wrote:
| Or maybe being the best Cook in the world is a very different
| skill than making good youtube videos. I tried to watch some of
| Massimo Bottura's videos, and they don't compare well to what you
| would find in a top youtube channel in terms of presentation &
| storytelling. I mean he's just posting badly compressed screen
| captures of vertically recorded tik tok videos ...
| uncomputation wrote:
| In the style of "DH6" the author linked, I don't agree with the
| unwritten assumption he seems to make: that the quality of a
| video is as simple as the qualifications of the person making it.
| Nor is it even the "density" of information provided. The overall
| quality of a YouTube video also involves: accessibility, SEO,
| inviting/entertaining narration or personality, and even some
| technical meta-quality stuff like the quality of the camera,
| audio, etc. All of this factors into the overall experience of
| the viewer and the skill of content creation is oftentimes very
| different from the skill of, for example, cooking, or coding. Not
| all masters are teachers.
| j_walter wrote:
| Talent of a specific activity isn't enough. When did we define
| "rising to the top" as getting the most YouTube views?
|
| 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.
| anm89 wrote:
| "Don't rise to the top"
|
| "Doesn't get a lot of youtube views"
|
| "Has three michelin stars"
|
| I think we can stop reading now.
| meowsinin wrote:
| Who's to say the 'random housewives' are not comparable cooks in
| their niches than the 'top chef'? There are major cultural
| barriers to joining commercial kitchens, so there's likely a
| large contingent of incredibly talented cooks that don't work in
| restaurants.
|
| And also, as another commenter points out, perhaps the 'random
| housewives' have more accessible content.
| meowsinin wrote:
| By cultural barriers I mean culture of heavy drug and alcohol
| use, plus yelling, etc. isn't acceptable to everyone.
| klyrs wrote:
| Weird. A lot of this is focused on youtube stats, and conflates
| "success getting youtube views" with "skill as a chef."
|
| 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.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| I watched some of the Michelin star chef videos. They are pretty
| terrible. Camera is shaky, audio is all over the place, random
| people come in frame and start conversations, instructions are
| not at all clear, etc.
|
| They seem to have an appropriate amount of views.
| dannykwells wrote:
| "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."
|
| 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.
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