Nehaveigur

I’ve been a collector and connoisseur of fine concepts for some time now and it doesn’t happen often that I come across one that is entirely new to me, but this happened yesterday.

Adam Mastroianni on Experimental History writes about strong and weak link problems, and rather than try to summarize his excellent post, I’m going to copy the table he made to define the two kinds of problems and add examples for each.

When you have a Strong Link Problem, you want to:	When you have a Weak Link Problem, you want to:
Increase outliers/variance/weirdness because you’ll benefit from having more very good things	Decrease outliers/variants/weirdness because you’ll be harmed by having more very bad things
Don’t gatekeep because you might accidentally keep the best out	Gatekeep because it keeps the worst out
Ignore the worst	Improve the worst
Improve the best	Ignore the best
Accept risk, because the downside doesn’t matter	Avoid risk, because the downside is all that matters
Examples: 1. Music (you listen to what you like and ignore the rest) 2. Olympic success (a country’s medal count hinges on its top athletes) 3. Venture capital (one billion-dollar winner can offset many failures) 4. Breakthrough research (one paradigm-shifting discovery drives progress) 5. Literary reputation (a single classic novel can define an author’s legacy) 6. Art exhibitions (one masterpiece elevates the whole show) 7. Sports teams (star players often dictate the game’s outcome)	Examples: 1. Food safety (a single contaminated ingredient spoiling a dish) 2. Engineering (a broken transmission in a car engine ruins a car even if the rest of the engine is in great working order) 3. Nuclear security (one lax facility can endanger everyone) 4. Construction (the weakest beam determines overall safety) 5. Cybersecurity (a lone vulnerability can compromise the entire system) 7. Supply chains (one failing supplier can disrupt the whole production line)

For many of the most interesting problems, reasonable people will disagree if they should be strong or weak link. Education, the economy and the welfare state come to mind.