LESSWRONG
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All of bloop's Comments + Replies

Being the (Pareto) Best in the World
bloop4y34

I agree with many of the premises here, and I like this as a way of conceptualising skillsets, but I'm not sure I find it all that useful.

The main omission in this essay, to my mind, is any mention of skill interdependence. If you're one of the first people to discover the fertile gerontology/statistics niche, then you might get your 15 minutes of fame, and your early adopter status might give you a comparative advantage. But as soon as it becomes commonly recognised how fertile the ground is in this niche, there'll be tons of people right b... (read more)

Raemon4y10
This may be a gross oversimplification, but I think the point approximately stands. As soon as a niche with high problem density is discovered, the density of skilled problem-solvers in that area quickly rises to meet it. You can only stand out if (a) you're an early adopter, (b) you have skills that others in your area would find it prohibitively difficult to replicate, or (c) your niche isn't too fruitful - i.e. nobody is interested in trying to rake in a share of the profit.

This was a good crystallization of this point, thanks.

Being the (Pareto) Best in the World
bloop4y10

I hope you don't mind me leaving a second comment, because it's kind of orthogonal to the first.

It’s no secret that an academic can easily find fertile fields by working with someone in a different department.

(Emphasis mine.) Speaking as an academic, I think this is far from true. Interdisciplinarity is a very popular buzzword, and we're all told to strive for it, but the vast majority of us don't find fertile grounds for cross-curricular collaboration when we try. It's possible on the overlap of mathematics and physics, or compu... (read more)