Meta-question: does the cognizance, cohesion and awareness that goes into identifying that 1% emerge from the 99% quotient of inefficient aimless wandering, or somewhere else?

Meta-meta-question: assuming that it does, how does the line get described (let alone drawn) dividing "this work contributes to identifying the 1%" from "this is a waste of time"?

(Insert something about gradient descent and local vs global maximums here)

I'll call this a genuine question, I could definitely use some refinement of my own optimization of this problem space (and not wind up in micro-optimized dead ends etc).