The human brain is both extremely smart and extremely stupid.

One of the most interesting things about the human mind is how fast we are to find inconsistencies in other’s actions or thoughts. We are quick to pickup subconscious cues, taking in a wide variety of sensory information ranging from eye contact, shifting, body language, tone, and facial expression to quickly extrapolate what they’re feeling. A wink and a change in tone is quickly figured out to be a joke. Avoidance of eye contact and shuffling of hands could mean shyness, deceit, or just general uncomfortableness - with other clues, it won’t be too hard for you to figure it out.

Being insanely good at this makes sense from evolution. Social cues and understanding whether or not your best friend is gonna stab you in the back and cannibalize you for breakfast is a pretty important skill to have. Those who dodged becoming a meal/betrayal survive, and those who didn’t - well didn’t.

But the point that I’m trying to get at is that there are some things in life that are so inherently optimized by our genetic code that there is no use in applying your conscious and explicit intelligence to process these things. For example, you would not consciously register how their hand is moving or their eye contact duration. If you did, that would be super unoptimal and make you pretty socially inept.

But on the other hand of things, there are a broad number of things out there that are so new, so different from what our ancestors experienced, that they are wholly underoptimized in our genetic code. Things like theoretical mathematics, solving whacky puzzles, societal acumen/intuition of macroscopic trends in society, quantitative trading, and poker are pretty far from the reach of evolution. The vast majority of people have little interest and little talent for these things. And the average person would do poor in any one of these fields.

If, for any one of these subjects, you plotted frequency on the y-axis and talent/aptitude on the x-axis, you’ll probably find an exponential decay. The very top of people are extremely removed from the mean, being at the end of a very long tail. It would look something like this.

Screenshot 2025-06-07 182304

The curve for something that is genetically optimized looks a lot more like clustered together, with no long right tail (it’s hard to be much better than a genetically optimized mean). Screenshot 2025-06-07 182810

So what does all this mean?

Let’s call them category alpha and beta. It kind of gives you a good idea of what things you should really optimize for in life.

First, you should look for anything in category alpha that you happen to be much better than anyone else at. By “good”, we mean more structurally optimized for - everything from how you think to what you find interest in aligns well with this field. If you happen to start off pretty far right of that bell curve, it’s a good sign that you can put in more effort and go even further along that curve. The more far right you go, the higher the payouts for much less effort than any other field in category alpha.

On the other hand, you should still be aware of anything in category beta. If you’re average or above average, you shouldn’t be worried. But if you’re below average, then you better lock in. Being below average at something that most people are good at (and thus take for granted) means that you are more likely to be judged negatively or misrepresented. Think about it like some people with autism happen to be extremely strong in one subject or another. Yet, their neurodivergence oftentimes means other people judge them (implicity or explicitly) more negatively than what they deserve. You can’t do much about that. We’re judgemental to the core - and most especially in things in category beta.

So here’s the general rule of thumb:

  • Be extremely good at something in alpha
  • Be extremely average at something in beta

You can’t have one or the other. The misinterpreted, weird, esoteric genius is rewarded just as well as an extremely social, bubbly person with no real skills.

With the advance of AI, different fields will weigh these two things differently. Chances are though, that the first criterion will become much much more important than the second, since AI will just push the standard up higher (but will be very difficult for it to be better than the best of humans).

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