Cross-posted from the EA Forum. I’m not sure about the following idea — please send me counterarguments! Not a super fun thing that the following statement is true, but basically every human enterprise looks like a Pareto distribution if you plot percentile-of-success-in-the-domain on the x-axis and metric-of-success on the y axis. In other words, for almost everything humans compete in, the difference in payoff between being at the 98th percentile and the 99th percentile is much larger than the difference between the 56th and 57th percentile.