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We read @nayafia article on talent distributions and organizations adaptations to them on @yak governance chat today and I have Some Thoughts. https://nadia.xyz/top-talent

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

The basic idea that there are three types of orgs that adapt to the three types of talent distributions (normal, Pareto, bimodal) seems empirically correct to me, though you can argue about nature vs nurture and how learnable the underlying outlier type is. But there’s a couple of subtleties.

First, while the basic typology of linchpin, A-player, and average player is fine, I think the “10xer” literally applies to the A-player  type. High percentile person on a Pareto. The linchpin type is incommensurable with others. Sui generis.

The ambiguity exists because the term is now a meme pointing to linchpins as well.

I think there are 2 types of linchpins: 

a) neurodiverse types with a savant talent (“think different”)

b) high-agency permissionless types who’ve somehow broken out of reality distortion field of org (“see different”)

In my experience type a) (eg: true aspergers ) often struggle and crash-and-burn, and are very poorly socialized. Orgs do adapt to them IF they are sufficiently priceless (heh)

But most actual 10xers are “see different” types within a domain. They are high but not savant intelligences with perspective leverage

They have unlocked high agency usually through a mix of imagination and a kind of red-pill organization enlightenment moment (similar to but not the same as my sociopath archetype in Gervais principle).

A reference point: 

Type A’s literal 10x types are “smart, and gets things done” types but linchpin/memetic-10xers are what Steve Yegge calls “done and gets thing smart” types. They own the domain in a way beyond the authority of CEO. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html

Iirc the book quotes another physicist saying something like: 

Schwinger was smart in a way you’d say if I was 10x smarter I’d be able to do what he did, but Feynman was smart in a way that looked like magic and you couldn’t think like him even if 10x smarter.

(someone look up exact words?)

Feynman was an archetypal genius, but I’d argue his genius lay in “see different” and he wasn’t actually that much higher in raw savant smarts than his peers. People like Schwinger were probably smarter that way.

He got to “done, and get things smart” (Feynman diagrams which allow anyone to do the calculations easily via a clean mental model) where Schwinger “merely” was smart and got things done (difficult renormalization math building on Tomonaga). Scare quotes “merely” because we’re talking Nobel grade here.

This maps to “talent hits the target others can’t hit, genius hits the target others can’t see” 

Former is difficult because it’s far away. The latter might be very easy *if you actually see it*

How do you routinely see what others don’t see? How do you reliably get the “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points” as Alan Kay said?

Thus is what memetic 10xers/linchpins seem great at. And IME it’s usually a red pill perspective thing on top of high but regular intelligence, NOT neurodiverse savantness

I have no idea what unlocks this. It’s a more complex phenomenon than Gervais principle sociopathy. “Unseeing” the reality distortion field is only necessary, not sufficient.

Btw I avoid the term 10xer because of this conflation of Schwingers and Feynmans it causes. They are very different and organizations react very differently to their presence. Specifically, re Nadia’s examples, I think “top ML people” types are mostly Schwingers. Steve Jobs types are Feynmans.

Schwingers cause the org to go either Pareto or bimodal depending on exactly how rare and weird they are. Every sufficiently distinct savant skill creates a different subtype of bimodal org.

Feynmans usually cause an “induced” bimodal — the linchpin see-different type creating a zone of people adapted to working with them. Not quite tribal inner circle but like complementary intellects (maybe they can see the unusual target once pointed out before it is actually hit?)

More importantly, Feynmans tend to create systems (Feynman diagrams… done-and-get things-smart systems) that move the organization itself to a different place. Bimodal orgs get transformed into Pareto ones and Pareto ones get transformed into normal ones. They have an effect like commoditization or automation.

Thanks to @jenna @kpats @bryanking and others on the @yak call… this line of thought includes contributions from all of them.

Another reference point. In his definitive biography of Feynman, Beat of a Different Drum, Jagdish Mehra points out a difference between Feynman and Julian as Schwinger, who shared the 1965 Nobel along with Sin-Ito Tomonaga… https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/ceremony-speech/