freedomandutility

• freedomandutility 20 Dec 2021 23:15 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: greylag’s comment on: Is there a term /​ bet­ter way of phras­ing the gen­eral case where an in­ter­ven­tion helps cer­tain in­di­vi­d­u­als do bet­ter at zero-sum games but doesn’t provide any ex­ter­nal value?

  These are also perfect, thank you!

• freedomandutility 20 Dec 2021 23:13 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Is there a term /​ bet­ter way of phras­ing the gen­eral case where an in­ter­ven­tion helps cer­tain in­di­vi­d­u­als do bet­ter at zero-sum games but doesn’t provide any ex­ter­nal value?

  That is perfect, exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

• freedomandutility 20 Dec 2021 23:12 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Is there a term /​ bet­ter way of phras­ing the gen­eral case where an in­ter­ven­tion helps cer­tain in­di­vi­d­u­als do bet­ter at zero-sum games but doesn’t provide any ex­ter­nal value?

  I think I agree with you, but I also think it’s very useful to think of games as fixed-sum when making decisions relating to them.

• freedomandutility 25 May 2021 17:17 UTC

  5 points

  on: If in­di­vi­d­ual perfor­mance is Pareto dis­tributed, how should we re­form ed­u­ca­tion?

  If ability in the underlying population is normally distributed, competition for jobs should still leads to people from the right side of the normal distribution ending up in the relevant jobs, and people from the left side of the normal distribution not getting the jobs. If we now measure the performance of people with the jobs, shouldn’t we expect the graph to look like the right side of a normal distribution, which looks more like a pareto distribution than an entire normal distribution?

  So surely finding that the performance of employees in a field looks more like a pareto distribution than a normal distribution doesn’t demonstrate that individual performance at the population level is more like a pareto distribution than a normal distribution?