Context: Every Sunday I write a mini-essay about an operating principle of Lightcone Infrastructure that I want to remind my team about. This is post #5 in the sequence of these essays, lightly edited and expanded upon in more canonical form.

Most things have diminishing marginal returns. I often repeat the Pareto Principle to others: "You can get 80% of the benefit here with the right 20% of the cost", which is a particularly extreme case of diminishing marginal returns.

But I think for much of the work that Lightcone does, the returns to effort are generally increasing, not decreasing.

To explain, let's start with the simplest toy case of a situation in which trying harder at something gets more valuable the more you are already trying: A winner-takes-all competition.

If you are in a competition where the top performer takes all winnings, then doing half as well as the other contestants predictably gets you 0% of the value. Indeed, inasmuch as you are racing against identical candidates that put in 99% of the possible effort, and your performance is a direct result of the effort you put in, all the value is generated by you going from 98% [...]

---

First published:
November 15th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/swymiotpbYFv9pnEk/increasing-marginal-returns-to-effort-are-common

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Failing to put in the last unit of effort to win a winner-takes-all competition

Two graphs showing marginal value and second derivative against hours per week.

Graph showing value per employee per week versus hours per week with team size parameters.

Graph showing net effective hours from adding one employee per week versus team size for different values of c.

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“Increasing marginal returns to effort are common” by habryka

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Increasing marginal returns to effort are common” by habryka