[fujimotos]

The basic point of this article seems valid to me.

The point the author is trying to make is that the structure of the payoff function matters a lot. Specifically, you need it to be convex for a try-and-error (or random walk) process to become very rewarding.

For example, think about fuzzing C programs, which has been proven to be very productive in terms of software security. But why is it so productive? This is essentially because a bug in a C program can have a quite significant implication (e.g. remote code execution), thus its payoff function is extremely convex. If there was no such property, fuzzing just wouldn't be so much rewarding (This explains why fuzz tests are less used for programs written in memory-safe languages).

The author believes this idea of "convexity" can explain a broad range of phenomena in the human world. I'm not so sure about its applicability, though.