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Notes -
Would you say that Dartmouth applicants are a nationally representative sample? If not, why assume it?
The 25th-75th percentile SAT scores of Dartmouth students are 1500-1570. The 99.5th percentile among test takers is around 1560 and extrapolating to a nationally representative sample they estimate the 99.5th there at around 1520.
Self-selection is also a form of sorting. The latest ED table had prospective engineers' SAT scores averaging 1174, vs 1028 for all students
His claim may be wrong (the data is a little sparse) but there is nothing "balls to the wall insane" about it.
.3% of the US is the top 900,000 Americans. Are you expecting groundbreaking inventions from most of them?
Even if this had been justified it would have been against the rules here.
And if you are in that top .3% or 900k Americans you can do a few more filters to get a smaller pop-sub group for the role. Tech firms tend to have a core age group. Let’s call it 25-40. So that reduces it by 75-80%. Let’s call it 225k people. Maybe 20% want a career in tech. So like 45k people. Decided to do AI in 2018 before it was cool. I’d probably say maybe 10% remain. So 4,500. Sociable enough for leadership can filter that to 20%. So 900. Ambition as a personality trait. Let’s call it 300. They probably wanted one girl on the executive team and engineering is heavily male. That’s probably another 20% remain. So like 60 potential AI leaders for OpenAI to promote heavily who are top .3% intellect, female-engineer, ambitious, social. And then can slap on some right time right place to be the chose one.
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