I don’t know whether it was this post, or maybe just a bunch of things I learned while trying to build LessWrong, but this feels like it has become a pretty important part of my model of how organizations work, and also what kind of things I pay attention to in my personal development.
Some additional consequences of things that I believe that feel like they extend on this post:
Automating is often valuable because it frequently replaces tasks that were really costly because they had to be executed reliably
I am very hesitant to start projects in my free time that come with expectations of reliability. This also has had large effects on trying to get people to organize regular meetups, because those often have a large reliability cost in addition to just the cost of organizing them.
I do think this post is missing a bunch of important things. In particular, there is a dimension of reliability that often reduces cost. A concrete example might be a regular study group, or a set of habits you have for practicing something. They feel cognitively close to me, but in those cases my guess is that by forcing me to perform a task reliably, I am increasing my efficiency, not decreasing it. I have some initial pointers to why that is the case, but it feels to me like this post currently has a hole in it without at least trying to point to this phenomenon.
I don’t know whether it was this post, or maybe just a bunch of things I learned while trying to build LessWrong, but this feels like it has become a pretty important part of my model of how organizations work, and also what kind of things I pay attention to in my personal development.
Some additional consequences of things that I believe that feel like they extend on this post:
Automating is often valuable because it frequently replaces tasks that were really costly because they had to be executed reliably
I am very hesitant to start projects in my free time that come with expectations of reliability. This also has had large effects on trying to get people to organize regular meetups, because those often have a large reliability cost in addition to just the cost of organizing them.
I do think this post is missing a bunch of important things. In particular, there is a dimension of reliability that often reduces cost. A concrete example might be a regular study group, or a set of habits you have for practicing something. They feel cognitively close to me, but in those cases my guess is that by forcing me to perform a task reliably, I am increasing my efficiency, not decreasing it. I have some initial pointers to why that is the case, but it feels to me like this post currently has a hole in it without at least trying to point to this phenomenon.