dynomight
Karma: 2,371
Thanks for pointing this out. I had trouble with the image formatting trying to post it here.
That’s definitely the central insight! However, experimentally, I found that explanation alone was only useful for people who already understood Monty Hall pretty well. The extra steps (the “10 doors” step and the “Monty promising”) seem to lose fewer people.
That being said, my guess is that most lesswrong-ites probably fall into the “already understood Monty Hall” category, so...
In principle, for work done for market, I guess you don’t need to explicitly think about free trade. Rather, by everyone pursing their own interests (“how much money can I make doing this”?) they’ll eventually end up specializing in their comparative advantage anyway. Though, with finite lifetime, you might want to think about it to short-circuit “eventually”.
For stuff not done for market (like dividing up chores), I’d think there’s more value in thinking about it explicitly. That’s because there’s no invisible hand naturally pushing people toward their comparative advantage so you’re more likely to end up doing things inefficiently.