I disagree with the premise. The vast majority of selection is extremely parallelizable. In terms of humans, self-selection does most of the work—we don’t even have to consider 99.999% of people for most of our collaboration. Or if we want (and can afford/attract) the best in the world, considering everyone, we set it up so they select among themselves for the first dozen levels of filter.
Training is almost always individual, and non-scalable by it’s nature.
In truth, the mechanisms work together—a few layers of selection to get the most promising interested in training, then additional mixes of training and selection until the greatest at something are pretty damn great.
Edit: on further thought, I think I’m being too narrow. Both search and training are parallelizable, to the extent that the activity is cooperative and driven by the targets rather than strictly on the part of the interested agent. It’s still the case that search is almost always significantly cheaper than training/improvement, but perhaps not in a structural way.
I disagree with the premise. The vast majority of selection is extremely parallelizable. In terms of humans, self-selection does most of the work—we don’t even have to consider 99.999% of people for most of our collaboration. Or if we want (and can afford/attract) the best in the world, considering everyone, we set it up so they select among themselves for the first dozen levels of filter.
Training is almost always individual, and non-scalable by it’s nature.
In truth, the mechanisms work together—a few layers of selection to get the most promising interested in training, then additional mixes of training and selection until the greatest at something are pretty damn great.
Edit: on further thought, I think I’m being too narrow. Both search and training are parallelizable, to the extent that the activity is cooperative and driven by the targets rather than strictly on the part of the interested agent. It’s still the case that search is almost always significantly cheaper than training/improvement, but perhaps not in a structural way.