What is the importance of the Anna Karenina principle?

The Anna Karenina principle can be used to illustrate things, such as Jared
Diamond used it for, like why so few animals have been successfully
domesticated throughout history, as a deficiency in any one of a great
number of factors can render a species undomesticable. Therefore all
successfully domesticated species are not so because of a lack of any
number of possible negative traits.
Successful risk ecological risk assessments are all alike; every
unsuccessful ecological risk assessment fails in its own way. Tolstoy
posited a similar analogy in his novel Anna Karenina: "Happy
families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own
way." By that for a marriage to be happy, it had to succeed in several key
aspects. Failure on even one of these aspects, and the marriage is
doomedthe Anna Karenina principle also applies to ecological risk
assessments involving multiple stressors.
Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of
the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans conjectured, and good to that of the
limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason
also one is easy and the other difficult -- to miss the mark easy, to hit it
difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic
of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad
in many.
By studying the dynamics of correlation and variance in many systems
facing external or environmental factors, we can typically, even before
obvious symptoms of crisis appear, predict when one might occur, as
correlation between individuals increases and at the same time, variance
goes up All well adapted systems are alike, all non-adapted systems
experience maladaptation in their own way But in the chaos of
maladaptation, there is an order. It seems, paradoxically, that as systems
become more different they actually become more correlated within limits.
" for systems belonging to the singular part of the stability boundary a
small change of the parameters is more likely to the send the system into
the unstable region than into the stable region. This is a manifestation of a
general principle stating that all good things are more fragile than bad
things. It seems that in good situations a number of requirements must
hold simultaneously, while to call a situation bad even one failure suffices"
Aristotle states the same principle in the Nichomachean Ethics (Book 2):
[3]

Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class
of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans conjectured, and good to that of the
limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which
reason also one is easy and the other difficult -- to miss the mark easy, to

hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are
characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but
one way, but bad in many.
After a failed attempt to assassinate the British prime minister,
Margaret Thatcher, the IRA said: "Today we were unlucky, but
remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be
lucky always."
General mathematical backgrounds
Vladimir Arnold in his book "Catastrophe Theory" describes "The
Principle of Fragility of Good Things" which in a sense supplements
the Principle of Anna Karenina: "good" systems must meet simultaneously
a number of requirements; therefore, they are more fragile:
... for systems belonging to the singular part of the stability boundary a
small change of the parameters is more likely to the send the
system into the unstable region than into the stable region. This is a
manifestation of a general principle stating that all good things (e.g.
stability) are more fragile than bad things. It seems that in good
situations a number of requirements must hold simultaneously,
while to call a situation bad even one failure suffices.