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Pareto Efficiency is a well understood concept in economics, which basically is a condition where no one actor could be made better off without some one being made worse off. This condition allows one to define a Pareto frontier of distributions that are Pareto Efficient of Pareto Optimal.

The question I have is whether there are similar measures or statements about the efficiency of Standard Model parameters? What references might be available?

Update: If we say we are saying the parameters are optimized for life, how is that term proposed to be defined?

My thoughts this morning were that at the heart of the anthropic principle there really is a statement of information preservation. So if a change in parameters leads to a loss of global information, it seems that might be a good place to start. If there are reasons why this is infeasible or nonsensical, those would be good answers.

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What do you mean for a parameter to be 'better' or 'worse' off? Perhaps more attuned for life? – Columbia Feb 11 at 3:20
That might be one possibility from a heuristic standpoint, if we had a good definition of life. I was inclined to think more along the lines of some conservative principle. For instance, in economics one can resort to accounting principles and states that all credits and debits zero out, or rather that all wealth is accounted for. This is arguably not entirely true, since we can not properly account for human ingenuity, except perhaps as learning curves in a macro sense. However, new ideas and science has some ability to generate wealth, so it would be hard to assess. – Hal Swyers Feb 11 at 10:48
Point being, pareto optimization must make some statement that all variables account for the full space of options for the modeled system. Generally, this isn't entirely true. So if we choose to say life, then it would have to be well defined to have any real viability. – Hal Swyers Feb 11 at 10:53
@Columbia I updated to reflect your comment. I am definitely in the non-anthropic camp, although granted it would be nice to think that my life is the one that is optimized on ;-) I think the general trend in science is to show that non-privileged approaches are generally more physical. – Hal Swyers Feb 11 at 11:12

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