[temp8964]

There’s 10x in almost every profession, why is engineering different?

If you take physicists with Ph.D. plus 3 years of post-doc as the baseline, of course top physicists are 10x the baseline. And don't interpret the 10x in a superficial silly way which makes post-docs stronger than Einstein.

This goes the same in sports, arts, academics, etc. As long as the field has enough depth for growth, the top players can easily be 10x compare to the majority.

[Thiez]

You mention sports. I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits.

[dragonwriter]

> I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes.

Aggregate productivity metrics are...difficult. But if one assumes that salaries are roughly proportional to value produced, it's not uncommon to have >10:1 ratio in the top professional tier of a sport, much less the whole of a professional sport.

E.g., the NFL has about a 25:1 ratio https://www.comparably.com/salaries/salaries-for-nfl-footbal...

MLB has a 700k minimum salary, a 1.1M median salary, a 4.4M mean salary, and a top salaries of $43.3M (that's a more than a 6:1 mean to minimum, and almost a 10:1 maximum to mean ratio, and over 60:1 overall ratio.)

https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Minimum_salary

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/04/16/ap-stud...

https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/average/

> Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits.

“Fast” and “strong” measured in ways in which this is true are contributors to value produced, but not the measure of value produced by a player. A wide receiver that is the same in all other ways but runs half as fast as the fastest in the league isn't contributing half as much value.

[temp8964]

Did I say don’t interpret 10x in a superficial silly way? A runner can be 10x better than another runner, but 10x better is not 10x faster.