Yes, all good points, but one minor bump when I read your comment:
Those may be interesting and complex, but your description matches up fine with diminishing returns.
I don't quite understand what you mean. Given that an agent values having the kind of fun given by playing poker on more advanced levels, I do see a point at which poker suddenly starts generating more fun-returns for each unit of learning-to-play-poker, just before which diminishing returns still applied.
Then a bunch of increments give high value before diminishing returns start being apparent again, at which point there may or may not be more deviations from the standard pattern (I'm not aware of any personally, I have some minor evidence that there might be one more "boost" point).
So yeah. If you'd care to explain how this actually matches with standard diminishing returns theory, I'd be curious to learn about it. If I imagine plotting what I observe of poker-learners on a graph and what a standard diminishing returns model would predict, I don't see the same curves at all.
Diminishing returns doesn't mean that you can't get more out of additional investment - that'd be 'zero returns', after all. But the returns you get out of each additional increment of investment will be less than the previous returns. The thrill you get from your first poker game where you successfully bluffed your way to victory is greater than the 'return' you get millions of hands later from noticing that you are bluffing a decimal point too often, or whatever. (I don't play poker, so I don't know what the relevant examples would be.)
Besides utility, y...
Some time ago I learned of the metaphor of 'digging the bull's horn'. This might sound a little strange, since horns are mostly hollow, but imagine a bull's horn used to store black powder. In the beginning the work is easy and you can scoop out a lot powder with very little effort. As you dig down, though, each scoop yields less powder as you dig into the narrow part of the horn until the only way you can get out more powder is to turn the horn over a dump it out.
It's often the same way with learning. When you start out in a subject there is a lot to be learned (both in quantity of material you have not yet seen and in quantity of benefits you have to gain from the information), but as you dig deeper into a subject the useful insights come less often or are more limited in scope. Eventually you dig down so far that the only way to learn more is to discover new things that no one has yet learned (to stretch the metaphor, you have to add your own powder back to dig out).
It's useful to know that you're digging the bull's horn when learning because, unless you really enjoy a subject or have some reason to believe that contributing to it is worthwhile, you can know in advance that most of the really valuable insights you'll gain will come early on. If you want to benefit from knowing about as much stuff as possible, you'll often want to stop actively pursuing a subject unless you want to make a career out of it.
But, for a few subjects, this isn't true. Sometimes, as you continue to learn the last few hard things that don't seem to provide big, broadly-useful insights, you manage to accumulate a critical level of knowledge about the subject that opens up a whole new world of insights to you that were previously hidden. To push the metaphor, you eventually dig so deep that you come out the other side to find a huge pile of powder.
The Way seems to be one of those subjects you can dig past the end of: there are some people who have mastered The Way to such an extent that they have access to a huge range of benefits not available to those still digging the horn. But when it comes to other subjects, how do you know? Great insights could be hiding beyond currently obscure fields of study because no one has bothered to dig deep enough. Aside from having clear examples of people who came out the other side to give us reason to believe it's worth while to deep really deep on some subjects, is there any way we can make a good prediction about what subjects may be worth digging to the end of the bull's horn?