One problem with this whole GEM-vs-Pareto concept: if chasing a Pareto frontier makes it easier to circumvent GEM and gain a big windfall, then why doesn’t everyone chase a Pareto frontier? Apply GEM to the entire system: why haven’t people already picked up the opportunities lying on all these Pareto frontiers?
Answer: dimensionality. If there’s 100 different specialties, then there’s only 100 people who are the best within their specialty. But there’s 10k pairs of specialties (e.g. statistics/gerontology), 1M triples (e.g. statistics/gerontology/macroeconomics), and something like 10^30 combinations of specialties. And each of those pareto frontiers has room for more than one person, even allowing for elbow room. Even if only a small fraction of those combinations are useful, there’s still a lot of space to stake out a territory.
That said, the way John talks about it there I think ‘boon of dimensionality’ might be more apt still, but in Screwtape’s context ‘curse’ is right.
I think curse of dimensionality is apt, since the prerequisite reading directly references it:
That said, the way John talks about it there I think ‘boon of dimensionality’ might be more apt still, but in Screwtape’s context ‘curse’ is right.