Pareto priority problems

I have this idea that consumes me. It fills me with awe and hope and has brought me success. It also makes me want to run away...

I first understood the significance of it about 6 years ago. I read about it in a few different books and articles. My friends started talking about it a lot.

I rejected it at first. The idea felt confusing, scary and counter-intuitive. But then I sat with it a little. Poking at it. Testing its implications. Living in its world. This was all it needed to find its way in. Since then it has hooked my attention and hasn’t let go. The evidence was clear, and the implications huge. It was beautiful and terrible and true. I rejected it initially because it was too big. I couldn’t face the uncertain void that it was dragging me towards. Part of me wanted a normal, and normally distributed life.

But I had to let it in. And now it’s always there. It whispers from the back of my mind. Its emotions are hope, and possibility, but also fear, and doubt. It allies with my dissatisfaction and my grandiosity. Its enemies are inertia, certainty, and comfort.

“This is not the thing” it tells me

“There is something better here” it suggests. 

And it commands me:

“Think harder!!”

“Think longer!”

“Zoom out!”

“Go meta!”

“Learn more!”

“Keep looking!”

I sometimes resist…

...but I usually give in.

Six years later, I organise my life around the idea. Every day, week, month, quarter, and year I set aside time, days every year, to give the idea the undivided attention it demands. It compels me to search and to compare and to be open to new possibilities.

It has given me a lot. Most of the things I’ve achieved, and most of the positive changes I’ve made to my life have come from the idea. I changed jobs, moved house, introspected, learnt, and grew. I am very grateful for the life it has pulled me towards. But the big wins also serve to make it harder to ignore. There could always be something bigger, something orders of magnitude better. So it holds my attention.

But it can be exhausting sometimes, it can be so confusing and uncomfortable. Some days I can’t bear the uncertainty of it all. Some days I want to be free, to close my eyes and ignore the idea forever. Some days I want to run away and not look back.

“Maybe that’s actually a good plan” the idea interjects. “Seems possible!”

“But where are you going to run to?”

“There are a lot of options, and some are probably vastly better than others...”

What was this post?
This is a personal lament about the concept of pareto distributions. These distributions can refer to the highly variable outcomes of many important decision-making situations. Situations where some small minority of the options you can pick from have massively better outcomes than others. Insofar as you can acquire information about your options, spending time prioritising can provide huge returns. These distributions are everywhere. If you want to avoid missing out big, they demand that you spend much more effort on analysis, ignoring sunk costs, going meta, and prioritisation than is intuitively comfortable. It’s this realisation that motivates me to review my life and career as much as I now do. And it’s this realisation makes the related ideas in Effective Altruism so compelling. Because occasionally this ideas delivers vast rivers of gold.

From Prospecting for Gold by Owen Cotton-Barratt