If individual performance is Pareto distributed, how should we reform education?

They have no formal lessons on prosocial behaviours

Um?

• How and when to say "please" and "thank you"
• How to address and talk to police, firemen, and other public officials
• The importance of "sharing", etc.
• The bad of "bullying", etc.
• How and when to write thank-you letters and other social niceties
• Appropriate ways to talk to someone who lost a family member

These and others were all things that I recall from my grade school years. One could critique the means and content of these lessons all day, but it seems unsupportable to claim that there are no lessons on such behaviours.

(If you're autistic, your problem may be that you were taught the explicit, formal, and decontextualised rules that schools include, but failed to pick up the implicit, informal, and contextually-dependent behaviours that schools don't include.)

Maybe zero-sum was not the right expression, because I think it is broader than strictly zero-sum games. I meant winner-takes-most situations, where the reward of the best performer is outsized with respect to the reward of the next-best. This does not necessarily mean that the game is strictly zero-sum. In many cases, it is just that the product you deliver is scalable, so everyone will just want the best product (of course, preferences may mean that the ranking is not the same for everyone). 

I am also convinced that all the things you mentioned have a fat tail, even if they don't follow strictly a Pareto distribution (probably books/records will be the most close to Pareto, salaries the most close to a Gaussian but with a fat tail on the right). But I think this does not reflect the distribution of quality/skill but the characteristics of the markets.

Example: book sales. I like fantasy books, but the number of books I read per year is capped. So there are a few authors I follow, plus maybe once per year I look for reviews and check if some good book by other authors has come out. If a certain book I would read is not released, chances are I would read the next best one, and find that in fact it is not much worse. Of course, books of much better/worse quality would convince me to read more/less, but in practice the quality delivered by different authors is close enough that this is a relatively small effect. If everyone had the same taste in books, and everyone read 10 books per year, we would all be reading the same 10. If an outstanding book came out, book number 10 would pass from one billion sales to zero. Of course, this is way oversimplified: we have different tastes, and the interaction of objective quality with subjective tastes, plus other factors, creates a Pareto-like distribution of sales. 

Example 2: tech companies. In most western countries, Google has a market share which is 10x Bing. It's not that Google is 10x better than Bing. If people used Bing, they would maybe waste 10% extra time to get to the result they want. But that's fairly consistent across different people. So Google is like a runner which is 10% faster and wins 90% of races. This is not true for all companies, but for most of the largest ones rely on mechanisms which create winner-takes-most situations (IP, brand recognition, network effects, economies of scale). That's why you have a fat tail in wealth created by entrepreneurs (IMHO).

To go back to research. Scientific breakthroughs are not a limited resource, it's true. But given the area of expertise of a researcher and the state of the art in the field, the most promising research topics are limited. And there are many researchers going into those topics. The first to find even a partial solution will easily get published on a fast track. The others will get published but much extra work will be required: compare with previous results, fight referees which favor other approaches, show extra rigor in the analysis... All this will lower their apparent productivity. Or, if you are not confident, you can take a less promising topic: you have less risk but your expected productivity goes down anyway. To this, add that better researchers get access to better complements: more funding, more and better collaborators, maybe less teaching responsibilities if you are in academia. All this widens the productivity gap between the best and the not-so-worse. Funding is particularly perverse because it's partially awarded on past results without dividing by money spent to obtain them, so good/lucky researchers enter into a cycle of more results -> more funding -> even more results -> even more funding ...

In general, I think fat tails in outcomes are present everywhere because they come out naturally from the interaction of incentive structures (e.g. markets, IP, funding), economies of scale, and network effects. But they don't need to reflect an underlying distribution of abilities. I obviously cannot prove that they never do, but I my standard assumption is that they don't. (You could say that I have a prior that ability is distributed in a Gaussian way given that as far as I know all human characteristics that are directly measurable on an absolute scale look more Gaussian-like than Pareto-like)

I do with my son.

Never mind. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RDokeedGWxHGggvAh/if-individual-performance-is-pareto-distributed-how-should?commentId=8MSALh9tWNcrEbwrg [LW(p) · GW(p)] brought the point home for me.

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