Then I'm even more confused about the lack of cooperative-problem-solving between managers and employees.  In fact, with fewer than 20 employees, why even HAVE a formal manager?  You need some leaders to help prioritize and set direction, but no line-management or task breakdowns.

 

I think the "noticing" part can vary a LOT based on the implied reason for the manager's request, and the cost/reward function of how close to "correct" the predictions are.  There's a whole lot of tasks in most corporate environments that really make no difference, and just having AN answer is good enough.  An interested, conscientious employee would be sure this was the case before continuing, though.

The real puzzle is what is the blocker for just asking the manager for details (or the reason for lack of details).  I didn't work in big, formal, organizations until I was pretty senior, so I've always seen managers as a peer and partner in delivering value, not as a director of my work or bottleneck for my understanding.  This has served me well, and I'm often surprised that much less than half of my current coworkers operate this way.  "I need a bit more information to do a good job on this task" is about the bare minimum I'd expect someone to say in such a situation, and I'd usually say "do we have more functional requirements or background information on this?  I can make something up, but I'd really like to understand how my answer will be used".

Especially for the estimating parameters for a model question, I don't understand why one wouldn't ask for more information about the task and semantics of the parameters.  If it were a coworker of mine, I'd mention it in a 1:1 that they need to take more ownership and ask questions when they don't understand.

 

I think you need to define "effective" a bit more formally to answer this, and to state WHICH tests you're talking about.  I don't know if the two dimensions you mention are the only (or even primary) purposes of most wide-scale standard testing.

They do seem to be effective at making funding a little tiny bit more transparent, and at showing parents which school districts they should be looking for when they're choosing a city to live in.  National standardized test are somewhat effective at showing relative academic/IQ strength, to a somewhat coarse degree (very diagnostic in the middle of the range, less so in the tails).

They probably do improve education in some cases, where the teachers/curriculum would otherwise wander into unimportant topics and ineffective methods.  They almost certainly don't improve it beyond a pretty middle-of-the road level.   I think they probably help mid- and upper-level students in lower-level districts more than they help lower level students anywhere.  

For most readers of LW, if you're scoring near the top 10% of almost any standardized tests, they should mostly be ignored - the differnece betwen 90th percentile and 99th is mostly luck and approval-seeking-drive (note: this is overstated - it's also conscientiousness, IQ, and social/innate support for wanting to learn that specific material).  If you're learning out of curiosity and self-driven reasons, you're well outside the range where standardized tests can show you anything.   If you're scoring below that, then consider whether you should shift your study to include more common academic topics, or whether there are different metrics you'd prefer to measure yourself against.

 

I expect that there's no simple relationship between these factors and success.  Both are required, and it's idiosyncratic which one is most lacking in any given margin between not-success and success.

Assuming all cars are traveling at a speed that gives 3 seconds of time between cars, any change to speed limit cannot affect the traveler throughput, and each car added lowers the speed of all other cars, including those at the front.

I don't think this assumption holds.  I don't know what shape the actual speed-distance relationship is, but it's not a straight line at a given number of seconds.  

I also think the throughput measure (cars entering/exiting per hour) is rarely the most important thing for drivers or even planners.  Average trip time outweighs it heavily.

1. European Roulette has a house edge of 2.7%. I think in the UK, gambling winnings don't get taxed. I think in the US, you wouldn't tax each win, but just your total winnings.

If you go the casino route, craps is slightly better.  Don't pass is 1.40% house edge, and they let you take (or lay, for don't pass) "free odds" on a point, which is 0% (pays true odds of winning), getting it down below a percent.  Taxes may not matter if you can deduct the full charitable contribution.  

Note that if you had a perfect 50% even-money bet, you'd have to win 10 times to turn your $1000 into $1.024M. 0.5 ^ 10 = 0.000977, so you've got almost a tenth of a percent of winning.   

Also, you don't necessarily need to think about investment strategy or influencing corporate decisions in a coop, since you can grant someone a proxy.

You definitely need to think about these things to value working in a coop (or a corporation in which part of your compensation is voting stock) vs "just a job".  If you are going to just grant a proxy, you'd prefer to be paid more in money and less in control.

Also also, why are socialist-vibe blogposts so often relegated to "personal blogpost" while capitalist-vibe blogposts aren't? I mean, I get the automatic barrage of downvotes, but you'd think the mods would at least try to appear impartial.

I upvoted, but I don't expect it to be particularly popular or front-page-worthy.  It may be partly about the vibe, but I suspect it's mostly about the content - it's a little less rigorous in causality of impact than the more common front-page topics, and it comes across as an attempt to influence rather than to explore or analyze from a rational(ist) standpoint.

There's an important question of scale here.  One size almost certainly does not fit all, and the best governance for a multinational many-billion-dollar enterprise is different from that of a local consumer-service organization.

Also, there's a large group of people who seem to prefer to have a "pure employment" model, without having to think about investment strategy or influencing corporate decisions.  

1. If you spend 8000 times less on AI alignment (compared to the military),
2. You must also believe that AI risk is 8000 times less (than military risk).^[1]

No.  You must believe that spending on military is 8000 times more helpful to your goals.  And really, in a democracy or other multilateral decision framework, nobody actually has to believe this, it just has to be 8000 times easier to agree to spend a marginal amount, which is quite path-dependent.

Even if you DO believe the median estimates as given, you have to weight it by the marginal change that spending makes.  Military spending keeps the status quo, rewards your constituents, makes you look good, etc.   AI spending is ... really confusing and doesn't really help any political goals.  It's absolutely not clear that spending more can increase safety - the obvious thing that happens when you spend is acceleration, not slowdown.