Steve, how vetted any one abstraction is in any one context is a matter of degree, as is the distance of any particular application to its areas of core vetting. Models using vetted abstractions can also be more or less clean and canonical, and more or less appropriate to a context. So there is no clear binary line, nor any binary rule like “never use unvetted stuff.” The idea is just to make one’s confidence be sensitive to these considerations.
Eliezer, the simplest standard model of endogenous growth is “learning by doing” where productivity increases with quantity of practice. That is the approach I tried in my paper. Also, while economists have many abstractions for modeling details of labor teams and labor markets, our standard is that the simplest versions should be of just a single aggregate quantity of labor. This one parameter of course implicitly combines the number of workers, the number of hours each work, how fast each thinks, how well trained they are, etc. If you instead have a one parameter model that only considers how fast each worker thinks, you must be implicitly assuming all these other contributions stay constant. When you have only a single parameter for a sector in a model, it is best if that single parameter is an aggregate intended to describe that entire sector, rather than a parameter of one aspect of that sector.
Steve, how vetted any one abstraction is in any one context is a matter of degree, as is the distance of any particular application to its areas of core vetting. Models using vetted abstractions can also be more or less clean and canonical, and more or less appropriate to a context. So there is no clear binary line, nor any binary rule like “never use unvetted stuff.” The idea is just to make one’s confidence be sensitive to these considerations.
Eliezer, the simplest standard model of endogenous growth is “learning by doing” where productivity increases with quantity of practice. That is the approach I tried in my paper. Also, while economists have many abstractions for modeling details of labor teams and labor markets, our standard is that the simplest versions should be of just a single aggregate quantity of labor. This one parameter of course implicitly combines the number of workers, the number of hours each work, how fast each thinks, how well trained they are, etc. If you instead have a one parameter model that only considers how fast each worker thinks, you must be implicitly assuming all these other contributions stay constant. When you have only a single parameter for a sector in a model, it is best if that single parameter is an aggregate intended to describe that entire sector, rather than a parameter of one aspect of that sector.