Talent vs. luck model reproduced: equal funding is ~9x more efficient than funding winners
ChenhaoTan · x · 2026-11-12
Living Science revisits Pluchino et al.'s 2018 "Talent vs. Luck" simulation and actually reproduces it.
- In a simulation of 1,000 people with fixed talent over 40 years, luck alone turns small talent differences into extreme success inequality; winners are rarely the most talented
- The team rebuilt unreleased experiments alongside the authors' demo; every result reproduces, though some printed numbers are off by more than chance
- Tested against real careers in tennis, film and poker: real winners are far more exceptional than the model's (70th percentile) — the tennis titles leader sits at the 99.4th percentile of points won, the top-voted film at the 99.9th of ratings
- The funding advice holds: giving one unit to everyone is 9x as efficient as giving ten units to the top quarter, at every talent weight tested; a real lottery-vs-panel funding study still doesn't exist
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