I feel like the missing ingredients are risk, variance, cost, time horizon etc. "Moonshot" type endeavours are not paradoxes. They do involve considerable unce

I feel like the missing ingredients are risk, variance, cost, time horizon etc. "Moonshot" type endeavours are not paradoxes. They do involve considerable uncertainty and usually some kind of large investment (time, money or something else). Most can't afford them and don't have any particular reason to believe they will be more successful than everyone else who has tried. Relative to most people's resources, time preference and risk tolerance they are bad bets. If you are starving then your strategy for getting food should usually be the one with the highest overall chance of success, you care much less about factors like effort/reward ratio or getting the highest possible payoff. The most common strategy for people who want a tiny chance at an enormous payoff is to buy a lottery ticket. Millions of people do that every week. Such bets absolutely do feel paradoxical at times because multiplying a very small chance of success times a huge (usually easier to reason about) payoff seems to break people's brains a bit. This is often described as a "bug" in human cognition, though I have always felt it's an instinct for "exploration" in the sense of occasionally making small bets with huge potential payoff "just in case" your world model is wrong. Also that the way humans process probabilities and payoffs seems more logarithmic than linear (making small probabilities "feel" bigger than they really are).