The Tyranny of Percentiles
Effective altruists and Vox have argued that to maximize altruistic impact upon the world, begin by selecting a lonely cause. This is decent advice, insofar as your general disposition is beneficent and your motivation is optimization of personal impact. Your humble blogger extended this notion by advocating for boring topics, many of which sustain life economically and otherwise.
Relatedly, if your disposition is fundamentally selfish or, in the parlance of slightly more effete utilitarians, “personal resource maximizing,” a similar calculus is probably worthwhile. When I was a student in the first grade, a full year before my father would purchase the household’s first personal computer1, I liked baseball. As a student at a small, private school, I had maybe sixty classmates, about half of them boys. As many six-year-olds do, I harbored fantasies of playing shortstop on a major league diamond. My fantasies were not a Moonlight Graham-esque2 career, but soon, my aspirations of even a single game were dashed. They were not dashed by a well-intentioned parent or a pragmatic teacher hoping to focus the lad’s attentions upon his academic work. No, they were dashed by the analytical mind of the six-year-old himself.
Of the thirty boys in the class, I thought (and this self-assessment was likely charitable) that perhaps I possessed the third-best skillset in terms of throwing, catching, and hitting a ball. I assumed there were other schools in which a similar status would be achieved. I knew there were fifty states, each with hundreds, if not thousands of schools. I also knew that there were (at the time), 263 major league baseball teams, each with 25 players on their rosters. Suddenly the probability of becoming a professional athlete seemed awfully dim. Moreover, I was unaware that the ability to recognize this fact might portend a career in data science, where my odds would be quite a bit better than the average athletic wannabe.
Putting a finer point on it, there are ~500,000 high school baseball players in the United States, and maybe another 500,000 internationally, so for the sake of Fermi simplicity, let’s call it an even million. Every year, a few hundred players make their major league debuts, many of whom receive their cup of coffee and fade into the recesses of the baseball encyclopedia. Assuming high schoolers have a few years of young adulthood during which such a debut is possible, this would represent ~0.1% of all high school baseball players (omitting, of course, all aspiring children that never make it to a high school roster). 99.9th and up? Enjoy your major league career.
However, if you’re in the 99.8th percentile of diamond-based aptitude, you’re probably crammed into a bus, riding through the hinterlands, and sleeping in motels as a roaming minor leaguer earning poverty-level salaries. If you’re in the 99th percentile, you’re the best company softball player for a mid-size industrial conglomerate, donning the XXL T-shirt and sipping beer between innings.
There are numerous fields with this particular property–a 99.999th percentile thespian is a Hollywood A-lister, earning 8-figures for each film or a Broadway headliner. The 99.9th percentile is a gypsy, scraping out a living in the kickline, filling out the resume with a commercial for RC-Cola. The 99th percentile just killed it in a church production of Bye Bye Birdie.
Writers, artists, chefs, and so many other professions walk the razor’s edge between notoriety and anonymity, between celebrity and poverty, between fine dining rooms and sweltering, claustrophobic kitchens. So, knowing this, and hoping to avoid a horrifying mathematics lecture couched in paternalism and hackneyed advice–maybe pick a profession where the 90th percentile suffices? You cannot choose Lebron James’ musculoskeletal parameters, nor the facial structure of stars and starlets (regardless of what a plastic surgeon might argue). You can, however, aspire to deploy your personal agency in pursuit of competence and expertise. How’s the 90th percentile data scientist faring these days? They might not acquire the trappings of fame and fortune, but their mortgage and high-speed internet bills are paid on time and in full. The 90th percentile dentist ain’t lacking for teeth to fix.
Does this mean everyone should become a data scientist? No (but if you are one, and made it this far, come work with us!). Does this mean students, young professionals, and those managing mid-life crises should consider their vocational choices carefully? You bet. How’s the 90th percentile plumber doing these days (judging by the last bill I paid to have my sewer line rodded, just fine…)? How’s the 90th percentile electrician making out? How ‘bout the 90th percentile nurse? Any of them living like the 99.8th percentile baseball player? Of course not, they’re living much better.
Percentiles are not simply a concept discarded after a random statistics final–they inform how individuals and founders consider the paths they chart for themselves. At AE, we see such thought experiments as much more than academic exercises. They are how to choose where to allocate our time and energy. They help us maximize our impact on human agency.
1
A Macintosh LC II. The hard disk came equipped with 80MB of storage and 4MB of RAM. I distinctly recall thinking “what the hell game could I play that would require four megabytes of RAM?!?!?”
2
The character from W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe,” which ultimately became “Field of Dreams,” which still makes me cry each spring, and contains a character whose experience is clearly fictitious, but whose major league career was very real, and very, very short: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/g/grahamo01.shtml
3
The Rockies and Marlins entered the league in 1993, the Diamondbacks and Devil Rays in 1998.