@zach.zeta.s: Three of my favorite things here: Math, Chess, and a Political-Economy discussion. #statistics #math #politics #economics #engineering

Dylan :

Don’t need a graph for this: money makes money. Just by the fact of having more money, you will earn more money without doing a single thing. 2 different people investing in the S&P500 will have exponentially different returns over time

zendayasshots :

a billionaire has a billion times more money than a dude with nothing but a dollar in his pocket. a trillionaire has a BILLION times more money than a millionaire. the dude's so obscenely wealthy, even a millionaire is broke compared to him

🐝🦯 :

bad use of data. elo is for active chess players. if you mapped everyone’s skill it would also be shaped like a log normal distribution like income is. as most people don’t know how to play at all and would cluster around the equivalent of 200-400 elo

R&Mdad123456 :

ELO ratings are not linear. They are logarithmic. Magnus is 8 million to 1 over a 100 elo.

Zephyr :

This seems like it’s more about how the elo system works and less about meritocracy? Elo is built to have diminishing returns (the opposite of compounding, as wealth does). If elo compounded (the higher your elo the more elo you gain when you win), or even if it linearly increased with every win, I bet you’d see a Pareto distribution. My elo is half of Magnus’s, that doesn’t mean that if I played against him I’d win half as much as he does. He’d probably win thousands of times before I won once, if ever. Just like I’m sure that if Elon were in my position right now, he’d almost certainly be wealthier than me in some time. Just because elo is built to not be Pareto distributed doesn’t mean that chess skill isn’t. So I’m not sure if this is a fair argument for wealth not being meritocratic

Doodles :

I took an inequality economics course a couples years ago and wow it opened my eyes

josedio08 :

So I do think you’re right, in a sense, that wealth generation probably isn’t as meritocratic as chess, but I do have a few concerns with your methodology. First, I don’t really understand why the distribution says anything about whether or not it’s competitive. Even if you start out with an equal playing field, a more meritocratic and competitive process could still result in that sort of distribution if you have compounding winnings and zero-sum games, which we literally see in wealth creation. While the distribution of winners in chess does not display that feature. I mean, part of my complaint is that chess ELO is almost inherently normalized. I’m also not sure that the data you use makes too much sense. I think it would make more sense to look at age-adjusted, self-made wealth accumulation conditional on starting position.

Boibz :

wealth generation isn't a zero-sum game. there is no loser like in chess. only people who win more, which doesn't lower the Elo of others.

Crispy :

One of the worst analogies I’ve ever seen 💀

kava :

ok? this is clearly an issue of scale. just because magnus carlsen is closer to the mean in standard deviations when it comes to rating doesn’t mean that’s the case in real life. there’s a much bigger disparity

xero792 :

I like how you said you pulled stats from chess.com but showed screenshots from lichess

Eric's A Nerd :

This is mostly just an observation of the non-linearity of ELO ratings. My ELO is 800, Magnus's is over 3200, he is not "4x better" than me at Chess, he is wildly, superhumanly better than me at Chess; it wood not be unreasonable to describe the skill gap as about the same as the wealth gap between me and a billionaire. It would be possible to express Chess skill with a paretto distribution instead, if you used other metrics for Chess skill.

Eric Look🪞🫳🗝️ Revolution :

alejandroechever3879 :

This is misunderstanding the data used quite a bit. The elo on chess.com is not entirely accurate for grandmasters as they don't play much classical games on that platform, and net worth is determined by other players in the market which the stock owner has no real control over.

leaf :

these things arent comparable at all. in chess it becomes harder and harder to gain elo the more elo u have, whereas its the opposite in finance

Gauthyeah :

This doesn’t mean chess is meritocratic. The ELO score is defined statistically and has a bell curve by definition, it’s not a consequence of the sport being meritocratic.

eliano :

welcome to feudalism

orthodoxy :

this seems like youre using specific distributions to determine whether or not something is merit-based or not. Not sure why meritocracy would have to follow a bell shape or why a pareto distribution means something isn't merit based

Ross.H :

what chess elo would someone have if they were to have the same position as Elon Musk but on the chess graph

soulsearching08 :

This sounded very interesting however I am too dumb to understand. Have a nice day

marcelmorgun :

it’s a power law. because it can snowball

Not Really The Platypus :

was this graph just of people in the US? I'd be interested to see the graph for countries with different philosophies than capitalism!

ComradeWilly :

Make a scrollable html page describing this