Chris, I appreciate your zeal and the argument you've formed given the information you have. You have correctly pointed out a fundamental logic flaw with the "get a job you love" mentality, and your alternative is certainly worthy of consideration.

As rational agents, we should be inclined to pick a model which is more robust to empirical data (given the same degrees of freedom). From your post I infer that you are not an economist, so you might be unfamiliar with the "Easterlin Paradox," which shows that indeed wealthier people within a country are generally happier than poorer people of that same country, however, that relationship does not hold when we compare poorer countries with wealthier countries. In the context of your argument, this data implies that a person could just move to a country in which the job-they-love earns a higher income than the average of that country, thus maximizing both relative and total utility. This alternative requires less assumptions than your monetary targeting, and it is not bound by path dependent uncertainty. It is therefore more optimal.

But the interesting thought of "relative utility" only begins at that example. In the classical economic framework of absolute utility, it is deduced that riskier assets must be priced higher than less risky assets. Empirically it turns out that this is often not the case! The enlightening cognitive bias research of kahneman, tversky, and ariely (among others) in behavioral economics has put a spotlight on the exceptions to the classical view. And we now generally accept that people are "irrational" with respect to the mathematical definitions of the Hicksian synthesis — we try to explain the why.

Back to the original dilemma: should we optimize for money, or should we optimize for the job-we-love. The answer is inextricably dependent upon who we are going to compare ourselves to, whether consciously or not. I think this makes the problem much much harder than you imagined.

I like the way you're approaching the problem. However, I think the temptation for a familiar conclusion is too great and that you might be missing some possibilities.

See:

A lot of this just boils down to having an acceptable style guide that an editor can enforce without worrying >too much about taking every issue to the author for approval.

The solution you're putting forth suggests that there needs to be a single person in charge of coalescing the many suggestions and edits.

But the great thing about version control is the ability to branch and tag. There could be an arbitrary number of editors who each have their own branch and set of improvements that they are working on—where non-editor contributors could switch branches and commit changes specific to that branch's needs.

In the end, all branches would need to merge into the trunk. This process doesn't necessarily need a single editor either.

Cheers

Thanks for the help!

So this is the footnote:

1. Neanderthals may have had larger brains than modern humans (Ponce de León et al. 2008) and it is an open question how much Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of modern humans. It is possible that the marginal fitness returns on cognition have leveled off sharply enough that improvements in cognitive efficiency have shifted the total resource cost of brains downward rather than upward over very recent history. If true, this is not the same as Homo sapiens sapiens becoming stupider or even staying the same intelligence. But it does imply that either marginal fitness returns on cognition or marginal cognitive returns on brain scaling have leveled off significantly compared to earlier evolutionary history

That appears to be circular reasoning. It only implies that "marginal fitness return on cognition" has leveled off if we define fitness as a function of brain size—we have no fitness measurement otherwise.

My previous suggestion, that the most important brain developments in our genus are independent of brain size, needs an explanation with a much different anchor.

Thank you Carl. I am having some difficulty navigating to that discussion. Can you provide a direct link?

Hominid brain size has not been increasing for at least the past 100,000 years. In fact, the range is tighter and median is lower for homo sapiens vs homo neanderthalensis.

Given that information, how does this change your explanation of your data?

The most important brain developments in the genus have come during the time when brain size was not increasing. This means that size can not be an explanatory variable.

Cheers, ZHD