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Wisdom is getting right the first-order bits that are natural——that are expressed naturally in the familiar internal language of living.
This implies a not totally obvious conclusion / conjecture: It's much more important (well, much more wise) to ensure that you are able to eventually update on any given dimension, rather than to ensure that you're updating especially fast on some dimensions.
Episode 3: I was considering chromosome selection in relation to other powerful genomic vectoring methods such as iterated meiotic selection, and wondering why chromosome selection can be so powerful. I wrote out a cursory explanation of this phenomenon (which you can read here: https://x.com/BerkeleyGenomic/status/2059901943959674931), and at the end I realized I'd basically restated the above Maxim of updating on all dimensions! I concluded that tweet with:
The lesson: granularity of selection is just very powerful. It's much more important to be able to select on something independently at all, than to be able to select hard on some things.
(In some sense this is a really simple idea, but I haven't heard it before. I assume it's well known in various forms, but my shoggoths didn't immediately find compelling versions of it. Of course, in a sense this is just restating the existence of diminishing returns, or stating a consequence of that in a particular context (many dimensions with independent return curves).)
It seems a lot like what I emphasized in my old embryo selection writeup about the power of multi-stage selection and why I went to the trouble of making an interactive visualization to try to build intution for why 'granularity' (what I'd call multi-stageness) is so important.
2TsviBT
Kinda? It's not really about stages. It's just granularity of selection, period. For example, 1-stage chromosome selection, separately on two people's gametes, is more powerful than 2- or 3-stage iterated embryo selection with realistic numbers, probably.
I wouldn't call that '1-stage' because I'd see that as two stages: one stage to select the sperm, and one stage to select the egg, and then the output is the joint result. (And then you could tack on additional stages, like IES, pushing further out into the tail compared to any of the individual stages.)