It seems like there are two separate claims here, which is “societies tend to produce goods that are their comparative advantage” and “you, an individual, should try to do this.” I’m mostly focused on the second one, and whether it applies to things like the x-risk ecosystem. People have talked as if it did apply. My guess is that insofar as there’s formal math, it’s much less clear and might be dominated by other considerations.
It still feels vaguely like “what is my comparative advantage” within a particular community aimed at a particular task should be a relevant factor.
The very crude algorithm I think I’ve been doing is “look at the list of things I seem particularly good at” (that I might have absolute advantage in), and then look at the things that are in-demand (which, I might plausibly turn out to have comparative advantage at). That at least narrows the search space a bit to “things that are good hypotheses for being my comparative advantage.”
I once had a discussion with Scott G and Eli Tyre about this. We decided that the “real thing” was basically where you should end up in the complicated worker/job optimization problem, and there were more or less two ways to try and approximate it:
Supposing everyone else has already chosen their optimal spot, what still needs doing? What can I best contribute? This is sorta easy, because you just look around at what needs doing, combine this with what you know about how capable you are at contributing, and you get an estimate of how much you’d contribute in each place. Then you go to the place with the highest number. [modulo gut feelings, intrinsic motivation, etc]
Supposing you choose first, how could everyone else move around you to create an optimal configuration? You then go do the thing which implies the best configuration. This seems much harder, but might be necessary for people who provide a lot of value (and therefore what they do has a big influence on what other people should do), particularly in small teams where a near-optimal reaction to your choice is feasible.
In principle, for work done for market, I guess you don’t need to explicitly think about free trade. Rather, by everyone pursing their own interests (“how much money can I make doing this”?) they’ll eventually end up specializing in their comparative advantage anyway. Though, with finite lifetime, you might want to think about it to short-circuit “eventually”.
For stuff not done for market (like dividing up chores), I’d think there’s more value in thinking about it explicitly. That’s because there’s no invisible hand naturally pushing people toward their comparative advantage so you’re more likely to end up doing things inefficiently.
This actually has been a major question for me.
It seems like there are two separate claims here, which is “societies tend to produce goods that are their comparative advantage” and “you, an individual, should try to do this.” I’m mostly focused on the second one, and whether it applies to things like the x-risk ecosystem. People have talked as if it did apply. My guess is that insofar as there’s formal math, it’s much less clear and might be dominated by other considerations.
It still feels vaguely like “what is my comparative advantage” within a particular community aimed at a particular task should be a relevant factor.
The very crude algorithm I think I’ve been doing is “look at the list of things I seem particularly good at” (that I might have absolute advantage in), and then look at the things that are in-demand (which, I might plausibly turn out to have comparative advantage at). That at least narrows the search space a bit to “things that are good hypotheses for being my comparative advantage.”
I once had a discussion with Scott G and Eli Tyre about this. We decided that the “real thing” was basically where you should end up in the complicated worker/job optimization problem, and there were more or less two ways to try and approximate it:
Supposing everyone else has already chosen their optimal spot, what still needs doing? What can I best contribute? This is sorta easy, because you just look around at what needs doing, combine this with what you know about how capable you are at contributing, and you get an estimate of how much you’d contribute in each place. Then you go to the place with the highest number. [modulo gut feelings, intrinsic motivation, etc]
Supposing you choose first, how could everyone else move around you to create an optimal configuration? You then go do the thing which implies the best configuration. This seems much harder, but might be necessary for people who provide a lot of value (and therefore what they do has a big influence on what other people should do), particularly in small teams where a near-optimal reaction to your choice is feasible.
In principle, for work done for market, I guess you don’t need to explicitly think about free trade. Rather, by everyone pursing their own interests (“how much money can I make doing this”?) they’ll eventually end up specializing in their comparative advantage anyway. Though, with finite lifetime, you might want to think about it to short-circuit “eventually”.
For stuff not done for market (like dividing up chores), I’d think there’s more value in thinking about it explicitly. That’s because there’s no invisible hand naturally pushing people toward their comparative advantage so you’re more likely to end up doing things inefficiently.