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leogao

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people around these parts often take their salary and divide it by their working hours to figure out how much to value their time. but I think this actually doesn't make that much sense (at least for research work), and often leads to bad decision making.

time is extremely non fungible; some time is a lot more valuable than other time. further, the relation of amount of time worked to amount earned/value produced is extremely nonlinear (sharp diminishing returns). a lot of value is produced in short flashes of insight that you can't just get more of by spending more time trying to get insight (but rather require other inputs like life experience/good conversations/mentorship/happiness). resting or having fun can help improve your mental health, which is especially important for positive tail outcomes.

given that the assumptions of fungibility and linearity are extremely violated, I think it makes about as much sense as dividing salary by number of keystrokes or number of slack messages.

concretely, one might forgo doing something fun because it seems like the opportunity cost is very high, but actually diminishing returns means one more hour on the margin is much less valuable than the average implies, and having fun improves productivity in ways not accounted for when just considering the intrinsic value one places on fun.

It seems that your point applies significantly more to "zero-sum markets". So it may be good to notice it may not apply for altruistic people when non-instrumentally working on AI safety.

9Viliam2y

I guess is depends on the kind of work you do (and maybe whether you have ADHD). From my perspective, yes, attention is even more scarce than time or money, because when I get home from work, it feels like all my "thinking energy" is depleted, and even if I could somehow leverage the time or money for some good purpose, I am simply unable to do that. Working even more would mean that my private life would fall apart completely. And people would probably ask "why didn't he simply...?", and the answer would be that even the simple things become very difficult to do when all my "thinking energy" is gone. There are probably smart ways to use money to reduce the amount of "thinking energy" you need to spend in your free time, but first you need enough "thinking energy" to set up such system. The problem is, the system needs to be flawless, because otherwise you still need to spend "thinking energy" to compensate for its flaws. EDIT: I especially hate things like the principal-agent problem, where the seemingly simple answer is: "just pay a specialist to do that, duh", but that immediately explodes to "but how can I find a specialist?" and "how can I verify that they are actually doing a good job?", which easily become just as difficult as the original problem I tried to solve.

3CstineSublime2y

I wasn't asking how most people go about determining which goods or services to pay for generally, but rather if you're noticing that they are using the working hours by salary equation to determine what their time is worth, if it's to put a dollar figure on what they do in fact value it at, (and that isolates the time element from the effort or cognitive load element) I didn't specify nor imply that one route took more cognitive load than the other, only that one was quicker than the other, and that differential would be one such way of revealing the value of time. (Otherwise they're not, in fact, trying to ascertain what their time is worth at all... but something else) Nowadays using Public Transport is often no more complicated or takes no more effort than using Uber thanks to Google Maps, but this tangent is immaterial to my question: are you noticing these people are trying to measure how much they DO value their time, or are they trying to ascertain how much they SHOULD value their time?

leogao's Shortform

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leogao's Shortform

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