[SEQ RERUN] Marginally Zero-Sum Efforts

Today’s post, Marginally Zero-Sum Efforts was originally published on April 11, 2007. A summary (from the LW wiki):

After a point, labeling a problem as “important” is a commons problem. Rather than increasing the total resources devoted to important problems, resources are taken from other projects. Some grants proposals need to be written, but eventually this process becomes zero- or negative-sum on the margin.


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This post is part of a series rerunning Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts so those interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Futuristic Predictions as Consumable Goods, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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