Thanks for sharing this, Owen! I appreciate that you frequently publish your work on LW and the EA forums.
I feel that formalizing the concept of neutral time cost (the number of neutral hours needed to complete an activity) helped me to think about comparative and absolute advantages in a new and helpful way.
Specifically, let’s imagine that Alice and Bob are freelance report writers who have control over how much time they spend working every week, and who tend to produce reports of equal quality. If Alice can write reports slightly faster than Bob, but Alice hates writing, and needs much more time to recuperate after an hour of writing than Bob does, then Bob could be thought of as having an absolute advantage in report-writing.
I like this application. I’d thought about the intra-personal version where I should allocate tasks for myself in time according to mental state and current NTC of the task, but the inter-personal version may be even more natural.
Thanks for sharing this, Owen! I appreciate that you frequently publish your work on LW and the EA forums.
I feel that formalizing the concept of neutral time cost (the number of neutral hours needed to complete an activity) helped me to think about comparative and absolute advantages in a new and helpful way.
Specifically, let’s imagine that Alice and Bob are freelance report writers who have control over how much time they spend working every week, and who tend to produce reports of equal quality. If Alice can write reports slightly faster than Bob, but Alice hates writing, and needs much more time to recuperate after an hour of writing than Bob does, then Bob could be thought of as having an absolute advantage in report-writing.
I like this application. I’d thought about the intra-personal version where I should allocate tasks for myself in time according to mental state and current NTC of the task, but the inter-personal version may be even more natural.
Thanks Owen, really helpful article. Fluttershy—helpful comment, thanks!
Another potential application: developing a set of heuristics based on this to help people manage their chronic health conditions?