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Really? How many 10th percentile people do you meet?
The 10th percentile are the ones breaking into bald men's heads looking for gold or deflowering virgins to cure their AIDS. Or they star in the genre of youtube videos exposing how stupid and ignorant American university students are: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AkIUqH498PQ
The more cerebral of this cohort might subscribe to conspiracy theories about how the earth is flat, how everything is actually naval law and most countries are secretly enrolled as corporations in Delaware... They still cannot string a sentence together though, nor can they spell.
I'd say those people are more like 2nd percentile. Either that or I have too high an opinion of the average human being (I find that hard to believe but am open to the possibility). I think 10th percentile is more like the people manning the tills at your supermarket rather than the dangerously stupid as in your comment. Would you not agree? If not then what percentile human being would you say is doing menial supermarket work?
Some 10%ers will be doing supermarket work of course, they might be perfectly fine, honest and upright people. Others will abuse welfare or spend their entire lives heading in and out of prison.
But on a global level, we see whole countries of the bottom 10% where nothing works: the bureaucracy is a complete shambles and infrastructure is a mess. The characteristic of the bottom 10% as a group is that they erode civilization, they're not merely pawns that do menial tasks.
Scott Alexander memorably pointed out that they do not have alphabetical organization in Haiti - this rather impedes efficient administration. They still have not managed to repair the National Palace where the President lives since the earthquake in 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_crisis_(2018%E2%80%93present)
Or from another angle, someone actually wrote this as a story and published it. A real adult thought other people would like to read this. It's pretty bad: https://www.webnovel.com/book/30212039405390805/81118027365538549
I believe that the difference between me and von Neumann is less than the gap between me and this guy. Not in our work capacity but in our general faculties and comprehension.
My church is putting together a big fund for sending Haitian children to school and privately I thought, what's the point of educating Haitians?
Still not sure what to make of it.
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The tenth percentile of the general population is living off some combination of government aid and crime. They’re certainly not cashiers; even restricting to college students, the tenth percentile will not have the work ethic or the numeracy for this.
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Yeah, people tend to flatter themselves that there is a huge gulf in abilities between their own tier and the tier immediately below them (but, strangely, never the tier immediately above them).
It's why so much internet energy is spent talking about "midwits".
A simpler and more accurate model : intelligence matters a lot at every level with no high or low cutoff.
I freely and openly admit that the people above me are much more exalted than I could ever hope to be. I recently interviewed a candidate at work who was applying for a quant job and he absolutely floored me with how intelligent he was, telling me things I hadn't realized about the mathematical question I ask people a few short tens of minutes after seeing the question for the first time. I came away from that interview thinking that I had just come into contact with someone blessed with true shape rotator greatness.
At least I am at the level where I could appreciate what I had just seen, unlike the average 95th percentile person who is so far removed from it that he wouldn't be able to tell the difference between me and this person had he been the one taking the interview instead.
Fair enough.
For the record, I get midwit vibes from many doctors myself.
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