You've heard of the 80/20 rule, of course, but allow me to propose a more developed pointless heuristic: the 1/5/15/80 rule. Not very catchy, but potentially information rich.
In any given domain, you should presume 1-5% of people have sufficient capacity to actively participate.
A further 15% will have the capacity to passively participate: they'll be able to engage with and take cues from the top 1-5%, but won't have the mettle to do what they do.
A further 15% will have the capacity to passively participate: they'll be able to engage with and take cues from the top 1-5%, but won't have the mettle to do what they do.
The remaining 80% are effectively inert: they do not participate in the domain to any meaningful extent. Any edge case participation they do engage in will be almost entirely conditioned by the participation of the top 1-5%.
I started thinking about this a few years ago to help a junior colleague to whom I'd made a book recommendation that he'd very much enjoyed understand why not everyone did what that book suggested. "Why is everyone leaving such great advice on the table?"
Simple, really: if 100 people hear about the book, 80 won't read it at all. 15 will skim it or read a synopsis by someone else. 5 might read it fully, and 1 will actually internalise it and take some real lessons from it.
Of course, I pulled this out of the air based on my vauge understanding of the 80/20 rule, but it seemed intuitively true based on my experiences.
Most people don't actually do anything. It is only by dint of the heroic efforts of others that they can be compelled not to mill.
Most people don't actually do anything. It is only by dint of the heroic efforts of others that they can be compelled not to mill.
But since then, this ratio feels like it's been gangstalking me. It shows up again and again in different datasets. Go and examine a dataset of a wrongthink political opinion – like support for lockdowns. You'll see the ratio. Average IQ of politicians by nation? It's there.
There's reason for both optimism and pessimism in this of course. On the plus side, it doesn't take many people to really make a change. But on the other hand, contra what many seem to think about competence collapse etc, it doesn't take many people to keep a system running.
We'll start to see exactly how threadbare things can get as time goes on, I suspect. But many I think will be astonished at just how few "good" men it takes to prop up an enormous edifice of filth.
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