Promoted to curated: I’ve applied the ideas in this post to a variety of domains since I first read it, and I think it was quite useful in a lot of them (examples of questions I was thinking about: “How much more progress should we expect in Science given that at least 10x more resources are available for recruiting scientists?” and “How much does the size of the EA and Rationality community determine the quality of people working at organizations in the community?”).
I do think I had to read this post at least twice to really grasp any of the core points, and am still struggling with some of them. I think this was partially the result of trying to translate a mathematical econ paper into a post without any equations, which is always a really big challenge, but I also think I could have benefitted from a longer initial section that just summarized the econ paper, and then a separate section that commented on it. As it stood, I think I ended up somewhat confused about which points were covered in the econ paper, and which ones were your points.
But overall, I think this post changed my mind on some important ideas, which is one of the most valuable things a post can do. Thanks a lot for writing it.
Promoted to curated: I’ve applied the ideas in this post to a variety of domains since I first read it, and I think it was quite useful in a lot of them (examples of questions I was thinking about: “How much more progress should we expect in Science given that at least 10x more resources are available for recruiting scientists?” and “How much does the size of the EA and Rationality community determine the quality of people working at organizations in the community?”).
I do think I had to read this post at least twice to really grasp any of the core points, and am still struggling with some of them. I think this was partially the result of trying to translate a mathematical econ paper into a post without any equations, which is always a really big challenge, but I also think I could have benefitted from a longer initial section that just summarized the econ paper, and then a separate section that commented on it. As it stood, I think I ended up somewhat confused about which points were covered in the econ paper, and which ones were your points.
But overall, I think this post changed my mind on some important ideas, which is one of the most valuable things a post can do. Thanks a lot for writing it.