even though they look like neighbor numbers, the real difference between the top 0.7% and the top 0.001% in any skill is like the gap between a good athlete and a world record holder. it's enormous.
i've seen this up close in personal samples. the 0.7% crowd is rare, they're way above average. but the 0.001% crowd simply lives on a different plane.
i've been following IQ test data for a while now, and this distance has always caught my attention. you look at the paper and think "oh, 0.7 and 0.001 are almost the same", but in practice, not even close.
the problem is that the graph axis stretches way out into the tail. when you're dealing with a normal distribution, the tail end stretches so much that two dots that look glued together are actually separated by an abyss.
to put it in numbers, in a normal distribution the top 0.7% hits right at z ≈ 2.46. meanwhile the top 0.001% is at z ≈ 4.26. that's almost 1.8 standard deviations of difference between them.
this is the kind of thing that separates a super intelligent person from someone who'll probably be cited in academic papers for decades. in sports, it separates an elite player from someone who breaks world records and goes down in history.
the percentages look linear, but they're not. 0.7% and 0.001% both look "very small", so our brain treats them as close. but in the tail of the curve, each tenth of a percentile costs way more than the previous one.
think of it this way. from the middle of the curve to the top 0.7% you've already covered almost half the population. now between the top 0.7% and the top 0.001% you still have to cross territory where almost nobody lives. it's like comparing the top of a mountain to the moon just because both are "up there".
plus, if we're talking about everyday samples, the top 0.001% of the general population probably doesn't even show up in your normal sample. when it does, it's such a rare event that the person automatically stands out from the top 0.7% in the same sample.
i've seen people try to level things up with this, like "oh, i'm in the top 1%, i'm basically the same as the top 0.001%". no, it's not even close (¬_¬)
so next time you see a small percentile number, remember the distance isn't in the number, it's in the curve. the tail is long, and out there at the end, each step is an eternity~