CONCEPT
The Equal-Odds Baseline
Simonton's empirical finding that creative quality is a probabilistic function of creative quantity — each attempt carries roughly constant odds of excellence, regardless of where it falls in the career.
The equal-odds baseline is Dean Keith Simonton's most counterintuitive and most thoroughly validated finding: across thousands of creators in dozens of domains, the ratio of masterpieces to total output hovers around a small, stubborn constant. The difference between Edison and a lesser inventor is not a higher hit rate per attempt but a larger denominator. Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays, Beethoven's 722 works, Picasso's 50,000 artifacts — the canonical masterpieces emerge from these large samples through the operation of a roughly constant probability of excellence. The name is deliberately provocative: it asserts that even at the creative peak, the creator cannot reliably produce excellence on demand. Genius is more at-bats, not better swings.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The baseline was established through decades of historiometric analysis in which Simonton and his students counted every work of hundreds of eminent creators, plotting quality ratings against total output across entire careers. The finding held across classical composers, scientific patent-holders, literary writers, painters, and choreographers.