Posts

Is there a term / better way of phrasing the general case where an intervention helps certain individuals do better at zero-sum games but doesn’t provide any external value? 2021-12-20T17:35:08.099Z
Does anyone have an anki deck on ageing / rejuvenation biotechnology that they could share? 2021-10-10T16:54:50.108Z
What are good institutes to conduct a research-based Masters in ageing research? 2021-06-23T15:57:04.848Z
Is there a term for 'the mistake of making a decision based on averages when you could cherry picked instead'? 2021-05-25T19:18:01.604Z

Comments

Comment by freedomandutility on Is there a term / better way of phrasing the general case where an intervention helps certain individuals do better at zero-sum games but doesn’t provide any external value? · 2021-12-20T23:15:19.561Z · LW · GW

These are also perfect, thank you!

Comment by freedomandutility on Is there a term / better way of phrasing the general case where an intervention helps certain individuals do better at zero-sum games but doesn’t provide any external value? · 2021-12-20T23:13:15.713Z · LW · GW

That is perfect, exactly what I was looking for, thank you!

Comment by freedomandutility on Is there a term / better way of phrasing the general case where an intervention helps certain individuals do better at zero-sum games but doesn’t provide any external value? · 2021-12-20T23:12:24.783Z · LW · GW

I think I agree with you, but I also think it's very useful to think of games as fixed-sum when making decisions relating to them.

Comment by freedomandutility on If individual performance is Pareto distributed, how should we reform education? · 2021-05-25T17:17:42.859Z · LW · GW

If ability in the underlying population is normally distributed, competition for jobs should still leads to people from the right side of the normal distribution ending up in the relevant jobs, and people from the left side of the normal distribution not getting the jobs. If we now measure the performance of people with the jobs, shouldn't we expect the graph to look like the right side of a normal distribution, which looks more like a pareto distribution than an entire normal distribution? 

So surely finding that the performance of employees in a field looks more like a pareto distribution than a normal distribution doesn't demonstrate that individual performance at the population level is more like a pareto distribution than a normal distribution?