“Increasing marginal returns to effort are common” by habryka
Description
Context: Every Sunday I write a mini-essay about an operating principle of Lightcone Infrastructure that I want to remind my team about. This is post #5 in the sequence of these essays, lightly edited and expanded upon in more canonical form.
Most things have diminishing marginal returns. I often repeat the Pareto Principle to others: "You can get 80% of the benefit here with the right 20% of the cost", which is a particularly extreme case of diminishing marginal returns.
But I think for much of the work that Lightcone does, the returns to effort are generally increasing, not decreasing.
To explain, let's start with the simplest toy case of a situation in which trying harder at something gets more valuable the more you are already trying: A winner-takes-all competition.
If you are in a competition where the top performer takes all winnings, then doing half as well as the other contestants predictably gets you 0% of the value. Indeed, inasmuch as you are racing against identical candidates that put in 99% of the possible effort, and your performance is a direct result of the effort you put in, all the value is generated by you going from 98% [...]
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First published:
November 15th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/swymiotpbYFv9pnEk/increasing-marginal-returns-to-effort-are-common
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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