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Comment by card_zero | Hacker News Reader

Uh, sort of? Genetic variants are like gambles or conjectures. You can spew a lot of them out, let most of them die, and adapt quickly - that's the low-quality (and modern-sounding) r-strategy. It's not that the variants necessarily lack quality (here meaning fitness), it's just that you aren't banking on it, you aren't investing in them individually.

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I don't see the connection to intentionally banking on lower quality across the board here.

Well yeah, there's no potential to cheat the environment by pretending to be fit (as somebody already commented), except mimicry is a way to do that (as also already mentioned). But you can be successfully unconcerned about quality, hoping for returns on rare successes, like with the Chinese Santa snowglobes mentioned elsewhere in the comments.

Could you point to the example you mentioned, I couldn't find it.

Seems to have vanished somehow. In short: person visits Greece, finds nasty Xmas baubles on sale among tourist items, mind boggles that people buy these and furthermore that there are enough sales to justify bringing them to Greece from China, postulates some logic like a 1000% profit per sale making it worthwhile even if only 20% ever sell.

Thanks for pointing out, I see now what you meant. Also thanks for sharing the Wiki article.. it was a difficult read with, I think, sometimes overly simplified examples that to this day seem to be mere hypotheses. But it also provided some valuable insights.. It's one of those rare reads where afterwards you see it everywhere.

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