Simonton's Equal-Odds Rule

Dean Simonton studies intelligence, creativity, talent and genius. He has spent a few decades trying to predict which scientists are likely to produce great work, and when in their careers they are most likely to produce it.
Generally speaking, I'm not that interested in the study of intelligence, or of individual differences in general. I think the important things in human life are the things we all share. We all want to be noticed, to be liked, to avoid pain and suffering . . . the differences between individuals seem trivial in comparison to these huge commonalities.

So I hadn't read Simonton's work, but I learned about it from my friend Teya Rutherford (former member of the writing workshop, now a professor in North Carolina) who learned about it from her former adviser, Michael Martinez. This is from his 2010 book Learning and Cognition: The Design of the Mind (p.224)

"Dean Simonton's (1996) studies of eminence in a variety of fields, including science, further sharpen our knowledge of conditions that lead to high levels of professional achievement. Among the more surprising of Simonton's findings is that high levels of professional recognition, or eminence, are strongly a function of overall productivity. This contrasts with a more intuitive belief that highly acclaimed scholars receive recognition for every work that they produce. That is not the overall pattern. Instead, Simonton found that the probability of producing a highly recognized work product, such as an influential research article, is roughly the same for all contributors, whether eminent or not. This is what Simonton called the equal-odds principle. What distinguishes highly eminent scholars is the overall volume of works they produce. By sheer dint of productivity, those who reach professional eminence stack the odds in their favor of producing another masterpiece."

Simonton (1997) found that the same principle was true longitudinally, when he tried to predict when in their careers scientists would produce their greatest work. All he found was that their great works were most likely to happen during whatever period they were producing the most work overall.

In other words, the models that fit the data best were the ones where Simonton assumed that every piece of work, by every scientist, every point in their careers, had an equal chance of making it big.

Simonton is a fan of Campbell's (1960) 'blind variation and selective retention' model, which describes creativity as an essentially Darwinian process. Ideas are like genetic mutations: a bunch of different ones are randomly generated (blind variation) and the good ones are kept (selective retention). Similarly, you write and submit a bunch of different papers and grants (blind variation), and a subset get published or funded (selective retention).

The equal-odds rule said that the proportion of items (i.e., the proportion of ideas that actually get turned into research projects, or the proportion of submitted papers that are publighed) remains roughly constant, both cross sectionally (that is, across different scientists) and longitudinally (across all the years of a scientist's career). Later researchers (e.g., Jung et al., 2015) summarized this rule as 'quantity yields quality.'

Should you only invest in the projects that are going to be great? No, because here's another interesting thing: You can't know ahead of time which papers will turn out to be your best ones:

"Because the selection processes function at so many different levels, the variation procedure that happens at the cognitive level must be necessarily blind to the ultimate reception of any given conceptual combination. Even if a creator has a sound notion about what kind of product is most likely to get published or performed, he or she must be less confident about the long-term impact of that offering. As values shift, novel technologies emerge, or new facts appear-- what was once a success may later become a failure, and what was once ignored may later become belatedly acclaimed. In the long run, creators must lack foresight regarding the sociocultural merits of their ideas. If it were otherwise, we would have to consider creators a special class of prophets." (Simonton, 1997, p. 67).

The take-home message from this research seems to be that if you want to produce great scientific work, you should just focus on producing as much work as possible. Do your work conscientiously of course, but don't worry if you don't feel 'brilliant.' Just write every day and keep submitting stuff. Some of it will be brilliant; most will be average; some will be embarrassingly bad . . . It doesn't matter. Just keep writing.