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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Optimal Employment - Less Wrong
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Short explanation:
This is not me being misleading in how I present data. I'm presenting what happens by default in both options, not one optimized and one non-optimized option. What you discovered here is that, the plan to save money in the outback is robust and succeeds by default, while the plan to save money in the US is fragile and fails by default.
The longer explanation:
The Australian outback option isn't optimized. It's an off-the-shelf option that is heavily subsidized and in a bizarrely awesome economic climate... something I don't think many people here knew existed.
I think it's fair to compare a typical US job to a typical outback job because this is what you get when you don't put much effort into optimizing your budget in both cases.
The difference is that the outback is already incredible without you having to do anything.
It's actually pretty unfair to compare an outback working budget to the best-case US scenario where you spend tons of time in the US managing your money well to get the cheapest rent, best car prices, lowest food costs, and execute convoluted tax dodging strategies that most people couldn't figure out. It's a very tricky plan that requires lots of things to all go right, lots of time, lots of effort, lots of will-power, lots of knowledge, and lots of discipline.
On the other hand, my option only requires you to get whatever job you want in a remote area of Australia and get all your costs of living heavily subsidized and all your major cost centers nearly erased with no willpower, no planning, and no discipline required.
What you uncovered is not my "misleading" people, but the difference in robustness between the two plans. The Australian outback plan lets you save money by default with almost nowhere to go wrong while the plan that lets you save money in the US is a life-engulfing minefield of time-consuming bargin-hunting, self-denial, and tax evasion.
Opaque potential for devising a plan might look worse in comparison to a specific worked-out plan. But unless you seriously think for enough time about that potential direction for developing new plans, and don't come up with any simple plans, you can't declare your own plan's superiority over the other potential plans. And the argument for this difficulty must reference such effort and rationality of its conduct, ideally should describe the reasoning process that comes to a failure in every considered class of options.
You can perhaps point out a particular plan's superiority over the painful process of trying to come up with an alternative plan, so that if the plan is clearly an improvement over status quo you should just take it and skip the thinking-about-alternatives part. This is a good reason, if you don't expect to be able to come up with a sufficiently better alternative plan whose superiority compensates for the effort spent of devising it, but then again your argument should refer to this fact, and not just to status quo.
In short, your post is useful, since it gives a constructive lower bound on how good you can do, but your argumentation for it being the thing to do is lacking.