But it’s weirdly bimodal, and I didn’t have a theory that predicted that.
I had a comment a year ago which would predict this. The idea is that we generate value from slack by using that slack to take unreliable/high-noise opportunities. But as long as the noise in those high-noise opportunities is independent, we should usually be able to take advantage of N^2 opportunities using N units of slack (because noise in a sum scales with the square root of the number of things summed, roughly speaking). In other words, slack has increasing marginal returns: the tenth unit of slack is far more valuable than the second unit.
That suggests that individual people should either:
specialize in having lots of slack and using lots unreliable opportunities (so they can accept N^2 unreliability trade-offs with only N units of slack), or
specialize in having little slack and making everything in their life highly reliable (because a relatively large amount of slack would need to be set aside for just one high-noise opportunity).
I had a comment a year ago which would predict this. The idea is that we generate value from slack by using that slack to take unreliable/high-noise opportunities. But as long as the noise in those high-noise opportunities is independent, we should usually be able to take advantage of N^2 opportunities using N units of slack (because noise in a sum scales with the square root of the number of things summed, roughly speaking). In other words, slack has increasing marginal returns: the tenth unit of slack is far more valuable than the second unit.
That suggests that individual people should either:
specialize in having lots of slack and using lots unreliable opportunities (so they can accept N^2 unreliability trade-offs with only N units of slack), or
specialize in having little slack and making everything in their life highly reliable (because a relatively large amount of slack would need to be set aside for just one high-noise opportunity).