Comment by Lerc
6 hours ago
Prioritising is when you choose something over another. A drag racer prioritises time to travel a quarter mile.
Going for the Pareto is when you elect not to prioritise. It is explicitly deciding to not choose one property over another ant to keep everything as much as you can.
I read it as finding the point of maximum effectiveness. The point at which the most is done for the most.
Getting to that point can be calculated (in some cases), but I suspect most folks get there by trial and error. Finding out what is effective, and what is not, and choosing what is effective, over what is not, until there's no longer a choice. That often becomes tribal knowledge, and is handed down. There's always someone trying to improve it, and when they figure it out, that gets added to the tribal knowledge. Basically, that's how nature does it, so there's some serious prior art. Natural Selection is brutal prioritization.
In Morocco, they used to announce the end of the Ramadan fast, by holding up a black thread and a white thread, and waiting until they could not tell the difference.
Then, they'd fire a cannon, and everybody would dig into some awesome soup. Sort of the same thing.