24 chunks · 22 episodes
...The agent is not situated, it has infinite time. Humans are situated, they have opportunity cost and finite time. Due to that asymmetry, agents should never waste a human's time.
...anxious mania. As your individual ability increases by orders of magnitude, the opportunity cost of an incremental minute of yours goes up significantly. You get almost manic, and anxiously addicted to work. Part of it is the joy of being able to...
...p Keynes in the 20's. But actually, the more productive you are, the higher the opportunity cost of a marginal minute. A unit of productivity always gets you an edge over others. Everyone is playing the game, so there's an unending push to get an...
...rms leans towards empowerment to the point of mania. This is due to the extreme opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of a minute is now insane. Which is crushing… but also insane how much you can accomplish. Your hyper productivity forms a cage...
...elming. It's giddy and exciting, but also a lot. Suddenly you realize that your opportunity cost is orders of magnitude higher than before. Every second you aren't feeding your agent swarm is huge amounts of value you aren't creating. You also kn...
... just give up as easily. Especially if there are a finite set of options so the opportunity cost is high. You push through to at least "good enough." If it doesn't work right, you don't just shrug and say "that'll never work, I'll just write it o...
...y plausible. I remember back in the day hearing often "Google's biggest cost is opportunity cost." Throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, and then whatever subset happens to stick, pretend that was the plan all along.
...ff of it. But in all of them, it requires the author to be engaged, live–a huge opportunity cost and fundamental ceiling to scale. LLMs make it so media can be perfectly adapted to a given audience. A new kind of living, liquid media. More like t...
...gs. As long as the downside risk of the seedling is capped and small, it's just opportunity cost, and making it fully legible just kills the seedling before it even gets started.
...ver time? If not, you're wasting your time on low-leverage work that has a high opportunity cost.
...illed for its own sake, even if you have few viewers. Capped downside; negative opportunity cost. Because you enjoy it, you're likely to keep going, and apparently some research says the best predictor of influencer success is keeping it up. 2) Y...
.... For example, a thing that you enjoy doing and gives you energy has a negative opportunity cost. 2) Is there a chance that down that path is a great (as opposed to merely good) outcome? Don't get too hung up on precision for the "great" outcome–...
...ion control makes experimentation more plausible. Worst case scenario it's just opportunity cost. You can land changes and go down a branch and later go, "nah, I'll just leave this here, this path isn't worth going down any more"
... it, in proportion to how good it is. Uncapped upside. All that it costs is the opportunity cost to write it. And if you like the act of writing, if it gives you energy, then there's no cost at all!
... it doesn't have an aha moment from it, then it only took them a few seconds of opportunity cost to tell them. But if it does have the aha moment, it saves them immeasurable time. When navigating an organization through a complex topic, when a 1:...
...eds, the product gets significantly better. If it doesn't, the cost is only the opportunity cost. Larger products with larger bases of use can support larger investments into improving them. The product is unlikely to go away, and even a small im...
...trics past the good enough bar has strongly diminishing returns, and has a huge opportunity cost. Set a "green zone" target on a metric. You may have meetings to set this target. Then, once you reach the green zone, you stop working on it. This s...
... Cost and value here are not just financial considerations but also things like opportunity cost, frustration, meaning. When someone cares intrinsically about something, their "expected value" for it is higher, meaning it can tolerate a higher ex...
Tasks that give you energy can have negative opportunity cost. For example, writing a short explanation post to clarify your thinking (if you like writing). Our intuition is that all things have a positive oppor...
...What's the worst case if this idea doesn't work? A very small, capped amount of opportunity cost. What's the best case if this idea works? Potentially uncapped upside. Capped things are easier to estimate than uncapped things. The average of a ca...