Consultants are easy to find for the sorts of things he does, with the resources he has. You have to remember that he makes second-screen videos for children. The sorts of consultants he actually needs are relatively cheap, relatively lacking in prestige, and generally less competitive than the ones that people in different fields would need.
The difficulty of finding a consultant scales exponentially against the quantifiability of your goal.
“Make the biggest cake.” → discrete and quantifiable goal, with pre-existing records (so you can tell at a glance who is the best at what they do, based on the simple comparison of a single number).
“Do good management.” → very difficult! Consultants are usually kids without management experience (McKinsey). Those who aren’t aren’t necessarily good at management; how do you know? Very difficult to quantify except by means of using proxy measures, very difficult to find a good consultant.
“Invent a (good) new field of philosophy.” → much harder; requires you to already understand things at at least a high level so that you have the taste to know who has succeeded in this and who hasn’t in recent memory (to override the fact that it’s at least in part a matter of taste and therefore unquantifiable), and requires them to be willing to actually help you out, but it’s an academic field, so quite competitive.
“Write good rationalist fanfiction.” → impossible; never been done before; everyone who has tried is only an aspiring good rationalist fanfiction author; consultant pool of zero.
Consultants are easy to find for the sorts of things he does, with the resources he has. You have to remember that he makes second-screen videos for children. The sorts of consultants he actually needs are relatively cheap, relatively lacking in prestige, and generally less competitive than the ones that people in different fields would need.
The difficulty of finding a consultant scales exponentially against the quantifiability of your goal.
“Make the biggest cake.” → discrete and quantifiable goal, with pre-existing records (so you can tell at a glance who is the best at what they do, based on the simple comparison of a single number).
“Do good management.” → very difficult! Consultants are usually kids without management experience (McKinsey). Those who aren’t aren’t necessarily good at management; how do you know? Very difficult to quantify except by means of using proxy measures, very difficult to find a good consultant.
“Invent a (good) new field of philosophy.” → much harder; requires you to already understand things at at least a high level so that you have the taste to know who has succeeded in this and who hasn’t in recent memory (to override the fact that it’s at least in part a matter of taste and therefore unquantifiable), and requires them to be willing to actually help you out, but it’s an academic field, so quite competitive.
“Write good rationalist fanfiction.” → impossible; never been done before; everyone who has tried is only an aspiring good rationalist fanfiction author; consultant pool of zero.