Re: group size and expertise, the life strategy I feel most drawn to as a response follows this argument:
It takes approximately all the effort to be the best at something.
By the pareto principle, it takes a meaningfully trivial amount of effort to be reasonably good at something.
You can thus become reasonably good at several things.
When you are reasonably good at several things, you in yourself form a cross-disciplinary team of those competences, with VERY GOOD intra-team communication.
By combinatorial explosion, given enough distinct competences overall, it’s fairly easy to become the only one in the world who is reasonably good at a particular set of them.
In this framework, the focus then shifts from putting all the effort into developing a single skill, to choosing distinct skills that have a good balance of synergies vs. nonobvious pairings (ie., some skills so naturally go together that having both don’t add much to your useful uniqueness, which is one thing to optimise for here).
Re: group size and expertise, the life strategy I feel most drawn to as a response follows this argument:
It takes approximately all the effort to be the best at something. By the pareto principle, it takes a meaningfully trivial amount of effort to be reasonably good at something. You can thus become reasonably good at several things. When you are reasonably good at several things, you in yourself form a cross-disciplinary team of those competences, with VERY GOOD intra-team communication. By combinatorial explosion, given enough distinct competences overall, it’s fairly easy to become the only one in the world who is reasonably good at a particular set of them.
In this framework, the focus then shifts from putting all the effort into developing a single skill, to choosing distinct skills that have a good balance of synergies vs. nonobvious pairings (ie., some skills so naturally go together that having both don’t add much to your useful uniqueness, which is one thing to optimise for here).