It's not that everyone contributes equally. It's that everyone's contribution matters. And while small contributions are less impressive, they are also more numerous, much more numerous which means that it's not out of the question that in aggregate they matter more; which means they should not be discounted. As Napoleon allegedly said "quantity has a quality of its own".

The Pareto principle gets "interesting" when you involve hierarchical categories. For instance, the category of "researchers" is arguably arbitrary. Why not research labs? Why not research universities? If we write off 80% of universities, 80% of labs in that top 20% of universities and 80% of researchers within that top 20% of labs then actually the number of impactful researchers would in fact be .2 * .2 *.2 or 0.8% of researchers which seems extreme.

That said if we took 20% of all working people are doing useful work, then can you guarantee not all research scientists are within that category?

And indeed there are different fields and the distributions of effectiveness may be incomparable.

I think the nature of scientific and mathematical research is interesting in that often "useless" findings can find surprising applications. Boolean algebra is an interesting example of this in that until computing came about, it seemed purely theoretical in nature and impactless almost by definition. Yet the implications of that work underpinned the design of computer processors and the information age as such.

This creates a quandary: we can say perhaps only 20% of work is relevant, but we don't necessarily know which 20% in advance.

But without the 80%, how would the 20% exist?

You still need the other 80% of the folks to get the remaining 20% of the work done :)

I don't see it as egalitarian — you need 80% people doing ground work so that you can send couple guys to the moon. Without those 80% digging the trenches you have nothing.

Also the evidence for Newton hypothesis seems so much stronger. Like, how do you even measure the invisible influence of mediocre scientists?

“Might as well not exist” - what should be done of the bottom 80% of society then? I’m sure this applies to SWEs too.

> Nature is usually 80/20. In other words, 80% of researchers probably might as well not exist.

What does this even mean? Do you think in an ant colony only the queen is needed? Or in a wolf pack only the strongest wolf?