H’okay, we agree that the devil is in the details (choosing the starting point). Take for example the heavy machinery operating. Say I build a doomsday device, replete with big red buttons that cause it to go off. I could now say “I doesn’t take any skill at all to press the button, ergo power without a commensurate investment”. Alternatively, I could say “Zat doooomsday device was very hard to build, Mr. Bond, even if it is now easy to operate!”. The heavy machinery only corresponds to easy power if you factor out the difficulty of devising and building it.
You could say “your limbic system has so much power, it only needs to feel sufficient hate to instruct the precentral gyrus to shoot ze gun”, if you factor out the cognitive achievement by your frontal cortex as a whole in procuring said gun.
Now, I’m not saying that power does in fact always correspond with effort, other than maybe as a general trend (absolute statements involving social dynamics are always stupid, eh, mostly). But defaulting to the “correct” context is somewhat difficult, knowing which scope the “effort” falls into. Take a billionaire leaving his estate to his playboy son. No effort, right? Depends on the scope. Every action you take is built on a long evolutionary process, now whether that may be called effort depends on definitional squabbles (granting agency to mindless processes, subsuming your ancestors into an “ancestor agent unit”).
If we do start off with the individual human, it is in fact a good observation that we’re just seeing the delta of effort to achieve a certain outcome from that point on. So by privileging a starting point (the individual human, mostly an adult no less), we would in fact expect the power/difficulty correlation to weaken drastically, since we’re consciously choosing to look only at deltas, without considering the effort put into selecting for the right genes, the right environment, your parents sending you to private school etc.
I do think you’ll get little disagreement with the subject matter itself, although I’d dispute that most LW’ers often get this bias, but then you said “may”, which is kind of a cop out ;-).
Similarly, writing a game in machine code [is] pretty dumb, and has no significant payoff beyond writing the game in a higher-level language.
H’okay, we agree that the devil is in the details (choosing the starting point). Take for example the heavy machinery operating. Say I build a doomsday device, replete with big red buttons that cause it to go off. I could now say “I doesn’t take any skill at all to press the button, ergo power without a commensurate investment”. Alternatively, I could say “Zat doooomsday device was very hard to build, Mr. Bond, even if it is now easy to operate!”. The heavy machinery only corresponds to easy power if you factor out the difficulty of devising and building it.
You could say “your limbic system has so much power, it only needs to feel sufficient hate to instruct the precentral gyrus to shoot ze gun”, if you factor out the cognitive achievement by your frontal cortex as a whole in procuring said gun.
Now, I’m not saying that power does in fact always correspond with effort, other than maybe as a general trend (absolute statements involving social dynamics are always stupid, eh, mostly). But defaulting to the “correct” context is somewhat difficult, knowing which scope the “effort” falls into. Take a billionaire leaving his estate to his playboy son. No effort, right? Depends on the scope. Every action you take is built on a long evolutionary process, now whether that may be called effort depends on definitional squabbles (granting agency to mindless processes, subsuming your ancestors into an “ancestor agent unit”).
If we do start off with the individual human, it is in fact a good observation that we’re just seeing the delta of effort to achieve a certain outcome from that point on. So by privileging a starting point (the individual human, mostly an adult no less), we would in fact expect the power/difficulty correlation to weaken drastically, since we’re consciously choosing to look only at deltas, without considering the effort put into selecting for the right genes, the right environment, your parents sending you to private school etc.
I do think you’ll get little disagreement with the subject matter itself, although I’d dispute that most LW’ers often get this bias, but then you said “may”, which is kind of a cop out ;-).
Fun aside: RollerCoaster Tycoon was written in asm, in the late 90s.