I had trouble understanding how the different facts and judgments in your post are connected between each other and with the concept of upside decay.
But I want to say that I really appreciate the concept, because something very similar occurred to me once, though at the time I didn’t give it a name. I was studying the careers of creative artists, and there is a lot of discrimination in these fields. Against women, against people who start out in less prestigious institutions, and so on.
My idea was that because many people were excluded and diversity was stifled, this reduced the probability of “hitting the jackpot” with an extremely brilliant artist that would be the far right of the “artistic potential” curve and end up being the next Picasso. I wanted to model this intuition and verify it in the data, but eventually my project changed and I moved on. The idea, anyway, is that you reduce the chance of getting outliers (or even black swans) in the tails, but you only care about positive outliers.
I had trouble understanding how the different facts and judgments in your post are connected between each other and with the concept of upside decay.
But I want to say that I really appreciate the concept, because something very similar occurred to me once, though at the time I didn’t give it a name. I was studying the careers of creative artists, and there is a lot of discrimination in these fields. Against women, against people who start out in less prestigious institutions, and so on.
My idea was that because many people were excluded and diversity was stifled, this reduced the probability of “hitting the jackpot” with an extremely brilliant artist that would be the far right of the “artistic potential” curve and end up being the next Picasso. I wanted to model this intuition and verify it in the data, but eventually my project changed and I moved on. The idea, anyway, is that you reduce the chance of getting outliers (or even black swans) in the tails, but you only care about positive outliers.