Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Pareto Best and the Curse of Doom, published by Screwtape on February 22, 2024 on LessWrong.

I.

Prerequisite reading: Being the (Pareto) Best in the World.

A summary of Being the (Pareto) Best in the World: Being the world's best mathematician is hard. Being the world's best musician is hard. Being the world's best mathematician/musician is much easier, especially since there are multiple slots; an amazing mathematician who is also a competent musician, someone who is good at both, and a competent mathematician who is also an amazing musician can all find a niche.

I like this concept, and have kept it in my back pocket ever since I read it. I have sometimes described myself as a software engineer who was competent at public speaking and project management. That particular overlapping skillset is, it turns out, fairly valuable. While I was attempting to become a better software engineer, I was also trying to add competence at corporate budgets and accounting to that skillset.

These days I spend a lot of time talking to the kind of person who hangs out on LessWrong a lot or spends a lot of time going to Astral Codex Ten meetups. If ever I faced a problem that required a brilliant neuroscientist, or a gifted Haskell programmer, or a world leading expert in training honeybees, well, let's just say I know somebody. There are people out there who are exemplary at the thing they do.

Sometimes they're not very good at other things though. While Being The (Pareto) Best in the World felt optimistic when I first read it, these days I regard it as a curse of doom upon the world, blighting otherwise promising areas of effort and endeavor. I look around at places where it feels like everyone is dropping the ball and see a blasted wasteland where nothing grows because nobody has the right combination of seemingly basic skills.

II.

Imagine a toy model where everyone has a hundred points to put into being good at things.

(This is, to be clear, not just a toy model but an incorrect model. It's easy to look at your incoming university students and notice a strong inverse correlation between math and verbal SAT scores, forgetting that those get summed together during applications and anyone below a certain threshold probably has their application discarded. Still, let's use this model for the moment.)

Leading talents in a field maybe put 75 points in their area. Why not 100? Because you need points in living your life. There's an archetype of the absent minded professor, someone who can understand a complex abstract subject but who shows up to give lectures having forgotten to put their shoes on or eat breakfast.

Hitting 90 points in your field requires someone else to do a lot of the upkeep for you; many FAANG jobs provide food and other amenities, and I don't think it's entirely because it's a cheap perk. Politely, I know some FAANG engineers who I suspect would forget lunch and dinner if it was not conveniently provided for them.

At sufficiently high levels of dedication, seemingly important related skills start to fall by the wayside. Many programmers are not good at documenting their code, writing or reading specifications, or estimating story points and timelines. Fiction authors vary wildly in their comfort with self-promotion, proofreading, and layout. That's what publishers and agents are for.

There's a few indie musicians I enjoy whose mastery of sound mixing or recording technology is not the equal to their actual playing. You can spend 40 points on singing, 40 points on recording, and 20 points on living your life. At this point, you're giving up some noticeable quality somewhere. I'll arbitrarily draw a line at 50 points and say this is where so-called "professional" quality tends to hang out, the people you see do their thing and you think "man, they could make a livin...