Perhaps I am mudding the waters too much. I agree with your logic, and with your conclusions. I agree you are better off taking the option where you serve one less person to increase the total payoff.
What I was trying to say in the original post is that for most things there is the thing itself, and the measurement of the thing. For example maybe noisy thermometers are off from the actual temperature by some random variance. Things feel slightly more suspicious for utility, because the measure of the thing kind of is the thing itself, the split between the actual value and the measured value feels less defensible.
I don't think that is right.
If we ask 100 people which of two ice cream flavors they prefer, and get a 51/49 split, that does not at all imply that 99 people couldn't tell the difference and picked randomly, with the 100th person uniquely able to tell the difference. What we have is only similar to that on a population level. Its not that their is one person who can tell the difference perfectly and many who can't tell the difference at all, but instead many people who can all unreliably tell the difference a little bit.
You take a drug that reduces your chances of heart disease by 1%. You don't get heart disease. You will almost certainly never know if you would have got it without that drug.
That is interesting. My guess would have been that you would learn fastest in jobs that are just a little above your current skill set. (Learn fastest does not equal 'most happy').
Although, your claim does seem to fit better with my lived experience.
While the argument itself is nonsense, I think it makes a lot of sense for people to say it.
Lets say they gave their real logic: "I can't imagine the LLM has any self awareness, so I don't see any reason to treat it kindly, especially when that inconveniences me". This is a reasonable position given the state of LLMs, but if the other person says "Wouldn't it be good to be kind just in case? A small inconvenience vs potentially causing suffering?" and suddenly the first person look like the bad guy.
They don't want to look like the bad guy, but they still think the policy is dumb, so they lay a "minefield". They bring up animal suffering or whatever so that there is a threat. "I think this policy is dumb, and if you accuse me of being evil as a result then I will accuse you of being evil back. Mutually assured destruction of status".
This dynamic seems like the kind of thing that becomes stronger the less well you know someone. So, like, random person on Twitter whose real name you don't know would bring this up, a close friend, family member or similar wouldn't do this.
1In a vacuum, that logic seems good.
But, I know of several chain cooperatives that are very large, with lots of shops, etc. I live in the UK if that changes things at all compared to the USA. The ones I know are John Lewis, Waitrose, and Co-Op. (This is sort of double counting as John Lewis owns Waitrose).
So, all but one of the Co-Ops I know about are huge companies, although that comes with an obvious selection bias. (The only small one I know about is a random coffee shop I went to in Bristol that had a sign informing customers that they were helping to support a "radical, collectivist movement" (or something like that), they had 5 types of milk, none of them from animals. This sort of thing is very Bristol.)
I don't know how the US system works at all, and have only a shallow understanding of the UK one (mostly from watching Yes Minister), but I think in the US a lot of posts that in the UK would be civil service are instead political posts. For example, I think US politicians directly pick which ambassadors to send, which is not the UK system.
They are probably very different systems.
How many hour of fully focused time from a knowledge worker do we need for them to pay for themselves? Until we have answered this question, we cannot possibly answer the question of whether employers are getting enough hours.
The linked post seems to implicitly accept that the number of deep-focus hours that employers need from their employees is comparable to the number of hours they are contracted to work. (So, like, most of a 9am to 5pm day for example.)
But I think this is kind of backwards. It is more likely that the number of hours "spent at work" has already been chosen with some knowledge of human behavior, and that the employers are perfectly aware that the number of hours of deep concentration they are buying is a considerably lower number.
2It would maybe create a bit of a free-rider problem, if you had a situation where valuable data could be acquired at a cost (by doing a survey or experiment, or having fast messengers to run to London from Waterloo), then you kind of get exploited by anyone who just copies you.
On the other hand, in the immediate (non-equilibrium) mode the "copy the best trader" strategy is helping the market make good predictions. If their really is someone out there who is making perfect predictions, then having a lot of money follow their lead is going to result in better predictions.
I am curious about why you felt the discussion about minorities was so derailing. Couldn't you have just said "Yes, that is a problem as well. However, the thing I am working on is..."
If it is any consolation, I have never seen that specific discussion, but in situations I have seen that feel analogous most of the people in the audience are actually more sympathetic to your side than they might appear. Its not like anyone is going to interject with "Well, that was a pointless question."
This was a fun post. I liked the way the "how many layers deep" idea was foreshadowed and built up to.
I see you are mostly on substack now, so you probably won't see this.
I was trying to think of a clean example of a many-layer deep interaction, and I think I have identified it in the way that my parents and their friends pay bills at a restaurant. (Obviously you are socially obligated to offer to pay, so you do. But they know that was a "forced move", which means that they can't take your offer to pay as a strong sign that you are genuinely happy to pay, so they don't accept the offer. But, you know that they know all that, so you can see that them rejecting your offer is also a somewhat forced move on their side, so you don't accept their rejection of your offer ... ).