but if we're getting at the point... like the real point..
everything knowledge comes in trees. skills, abilities, talents are all the product of tradeoffs between time and choices of focus. the lazy approach is to attempt to linearize these trees when evaluating people, institutions, programs and the rest. it's this laziness, this linearization, this attempt to construct a global ordered set, that causes all the problems.
similar to the mythology of the "10xer". is it brilliance, or is it having prior exposure to the right things?