>The 10X meme is both too extreme, by implying that Fabrice Bellard could kick out simple crud tasks at 10X the speed I do, and not extreme enough,
I understand your point and I think it just reinforces the fact that the "10" in "10x" should not be literally parsed as a number. My previous comment about the common conversational usage of "10x" is just a synonym for "much smarter than average": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13753178
This is a good point. If people used 10x to just mean: 'this person has a different magnitude of skill in a game changing way' then the term makes sense.
It clarifies that it doesn't mean that its 10x faster at tasks, like the original 10x study was about, but more just a shorthand for being of a different class of skill level.
This makes it sort of trivially true, though. Our scale of what skill looks like is naturally normalized to typical human capabilities, and “much” is a a point on that continuum.
If we’re going to talk about talent on a scale that is normalized to typical human abilities, IMO it would be better to assume talent distributed on a Gaussian and talk about n-sigma talents. We’ll end up sounding like Jack Donaghy though I think.
I understand your point and I think it just reinforces the fact that the "10" in "10x" should not be literally parsed as a number. My previous comment about the common conversational usage of "10x" is just a synonym for "much smarter than average": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13753178
Another example of a random comment where "10x" does not literally mean "mathematically multiplied 10 times": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28784181
It was just another example of "10x" as a short way to type out "significantly better" and the "2x" as a synonym for "slightly better".