Fundamentally the pattern is “I can’t do that tedious and thankless job, because I’m just not good at it.” Low prestige office jobs are the classic example.
Huh, I think I just realized why I’ve steadfastly avoided learning how to cook or clean.
Of course, knowing this, I should go ahead and learn and then cite the concept of strategic incompetence when explaining to any housemates / boyfriends why my skills shouldn’t obligate me to do a higher proportion of the housework. (As in, “a naive view of comparative advantage in splitting unpleasant tasks leads to all of us developing strategic incompetencies, so we shouldn’t use that view.”)
It is also a way to teach children lots and lots of kitchen physics and chemistry, engineering processes, by adding context and understanding to such mundane tasks as keeping a pot from boiling over (observe convection. bubble formation, heat regulation, vapor and its properties, condensation...).
Yes. I was wondering if I should compose a response to Metus in a way that could help point out that there could be a lot of other things going on that went into this...
For example, instead of shirking, what might be going on is that the seeming “shirker” is in fact a leader with responsibilities roughly of the sort Metus proposed, who has simply found that it helps with subordinate motivation if the leader pretends to seriously need their subordinate in a domain the subordinate understands (rather than to just have comparative advantage in something else that the subordinate doesn’t understand, and then run into inferential distance problems on things like “comparative advantage” and also the other domain).
Or maybe the person is truly world class in something and, as part of the process of leveling up, dropped other skills or let them atrophy without even realizing what was going on necessarily… I’ve heard that Erdös could be given a one serving carton of milk and seem to be genuinely incapable of figuring out how to open the glued pour spout at the top… someone would need to open it for him so all he had to do was lift and drink, otherwise he would just go without (and presumably work on math instead).
Or maybe other things are going on. Or a mixture. The night is very large, and full of wonders...
I think it might be arguably the case that every skill other than whatever is already your likely long term comparative advantage is an anti-skill?
Huh, I think I just realized why I’ve steadfastly avoided learning how to cook or clean.
Of course, knowing this, I should go ahead and learn and then cite the concept of strategic incompetence when explaining to any housemates / boyfriends why my skills shouldn’t obligate me to do a higher proportion of the housework. (As in, “a naive view of comparative advantage in splitting unpleasant tasks leads to all of us developing strategic incompetencies, so we shouldn’t use that view.”)
Cooking is high-status nowadays. If you can do it reasonably well and with flair :-)
Feeding people is also an excellent way of making them like you.
It is also a way to teach children lots and lots of kitchen physics and chemistry, engineering processes, by adding context and understanding to such mundane tasks as keeping a pot from boiling over (observe convection. bubble formation, heat regulation, vapor and its properties, condensation...).
tag: parenting
Yes. I was wondering if I should compose a response to Metus in a way that could help point out that there could be a lot of other things going on that went into this...
For example, instead of shirking, what might be going on is that the seeming “shirker” is in fact a leader with responsibilities roughly of the sort Metus proposed, who has simply found that it helps with subordinate motivation if the leader pretends to seriously need their subordinate in a domain the subordinate understands (rather than to just have comparative advantage in something else that the subordinate doesn’t understand, and then run into inferential distance problems on things like “comparative advantage” and also the other domain).
Or maybe the person is truly world class in something and, as part of the process of leveling up, dropped other skills or let them atrophy without even realizing what was going on necessarily… I’ve heard that Erdös could be given a one serving carton of milk and seem to be genuinely incapable of figuring out how to open the glued pour spout at the top… someone would need to open it for him so all he had to do was lift and drink, otherwise he would just go without (and presumably work on math instead).
Or maybe other things are going on. Or a mixture. The night is very large, and full of wonders...
I think it might be arguably the case that every skill other than whatever is already your likely long term comparative advantage is an anti-skill?