Why would it be? All careers with leverage seem to follow a Pareto distribution. It would surprise me if any sport, art, or creative endeavor was normally distributed.
You're right. I was thinking the "initial talent" might be normal in the way IQ scores are, but the parent was talking about actual performance, where history, training, etc all come into play.
And empirically, you have Gretzky in hockey, Jordan in basketball....
IQ is normally distributed because it's graded on a curve to make that true by definition. I'm not sure how it's distributed on any sort of 'natural' scale.
No, it's scaled but linearly and not redistributed.
There's still studies of relatively raw distributions and it still looks normal. The biggest deviations from normality are due to an excess mass in the lower range due to disease, and a tendency for scores to spike a tiny bit at certain numbers, probably due to people administering the test fudging a bit sometimes for various reasons.
Maybe a cross-species IQ score would be interesting. Chimpanzees and corvids both can solve many IQ-test problems, but also are not experiencing the Flynn effect as far as we know. So we could measure IQ in multiples of a chimp's IQ, just like we measure cars in multiple's of a workhorse's sustainable pulling output. (Which is actually a less objective measure, when you think about it; we were breeding workhorses to increase that very target at the time the concept of "horsepower" was invented!)
That would be a great start. And it would also force us to acknowledge that a lot of the things that we are doing with these animals are utterly un-ethical.
I don’t even think initial talent is normally distributed. Take Usain Bolt, for example, he’d be a far outlier in a Pareto distribution for sprinters just on the basis of his natural heritage.
I suppose the distribution of aptitude would be a normal distribution in a world where careers were assigned randomly at birth and advancing in your career was on a strict seniority basis. So, for example, you'd see it in career paths that are mostly followed as generational family businesses.
keep in mind that even if football ability were (untrainable and) normally distributed, the distribution of ability among international players would be taken from one of the tails of that bell.
Also a good point. Do you know what the exact distribution would be when sampling randomly and rejecting all values below some threshold? You can tell it would at least be Pereto-ish in general shape.
