The mathematics of life 101

Why does it seem that so many things around us are mediocre? There is a simple mathematical explanation backed up by a whole strand of statistics. More importantly, there is a psychological twist.
To begin, we may note that many resources in life are distributed along lines that we can call the winner-take-all curve. The Italian mathematician Vilfredo Pareto made a name for himself when he formalized in 1906 the Pareto rule, a.k.a. the 80/20 rule of wealth distribution noticing that eighty percent of the wealth is owned by twenty percent of the people. Over the years it became clear that the same applies not only to money but to other forms of capital as well, social capital prime among those other forms. Some people are social hubs, whether others are the type that stand in the corner. And in those situations it’s pretty straightforward to understand how there is a positive feedback loop that keeps the 80/20 stability intact. But what about things like beauty or other resources that we think might be distributed more equitably? Here another principle kicks in. There is a reason that we call the ‘normal distribution’ (the common way that things distribute themselves in nature) ‘normal’. It’s exactly because this distribution is so normal. The familiar bell curve, where most things are at the center, repeats itself over and over again.
If we had to grade things, regardless of what they are, on a scale of 1 to 10, normal distribution implies that many of them would be 5s and 6s. But here is the problem: when we consider something to be excellent, or very good, we’re aspiring for the 9s and the 10s. Simply speaking, we’re looking for the abnormal.
And then there’s a third principle at work. For complex phenomena our incessant penchant for measurement is carried out over more than one dimension. For us to consider something as falling within the pigeon-holes of ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’, it has to score well on multiple dimensions (we all want our kids to be smart, healthy and social, and our wives to be beautiful, funny, and caring. A 5 out of 10 on each of these dimensions frightens us, doesn’t it?). The more dimensions we have the less statistically probable it is that we’ll get what we want, and yet we still want it. Even if we ignore the implications of normal distribution and assume that all positive traits are evenly distributed (which, to be sure, they’re not), we’re still gonna get stuck because if all those traits are independent of one another, and say that we want a rating of 9 or 10, on three dimensions, chances are 124/125 we’re not gonna get it. That is, we’re aiming for less than 1%, and not the top 20% as we may think.
What’s the twist? OK, here is a preview of Math of Life 201. It’s the little voice in our head, the evil genie, Descartes might call it, that is really to blame here. Plato once said that we never see two sticks lying on the ground. We see a stick and another stick which is either longer, shorter or equal in length to the first one. In other words, the genie endlessly whispers in our inner ear qualitative assessments concerning any phenomena we encounter. Our interactions are always mediated by the genie’s interpretation. The only way to beat the odds of the mathematics of life is to abandon the formulas altogether. The only way to beat normal distribution is to chose to see uniqueness and quality around us. If we keep our trust in numbers we lose.