I guess it’s necessary to get a bit technical to explain what I mean by that. I do not mean that the number of maximally-good things is small; that is true, but will be true in most environments.
What I mean is that the distribution has a crazy variance (possibly no finite variance); take two “opportunities to do good” and compare them to each other, and an orders-of-magnitude difference is note rare.
The water-in-the-desert analogy really falls apart at that point. It’s more like an investor looking for a good startup to invest in; successful startups aren’t that rare, but the quality varies immensely; you’d much much much prefer to invest in “the next Google/Uber/etc” rather than the next [insert some company from 2010 which made a good profit but which you and I have never heard of].
Opportunities to do the most good are.
I guess it’s necessary to get a bit technical to explain what I mean by that. I do not mean that the number of maximally-good things is small; that is true, but will be true in most environments.
What I mean is that the distribution has a crazy variance (possibly no finite variance); take two “opportunities to do good” and compare them to each other, and an orders-of-magnitude difference is note rare.
The water-in-the-desert analogy really falls apart at that point. It’s more like an investor looking for a good startup to invest in; successful startups aren’t that rare, but the quality varies immensely; you’d much much much prefer to invest in “the next Google/Uber/etc” rather than the next [insert some company from 2010 which made a good profit but which you and I have never heard of].