Bravo. I think diagrams are underused as crisp explanations, and this post gives an excellent demonstration of their value (among many other merits).
A minor point (cf. ThomasWoodside’s remarks): I’d be surprised if one really does (or really should) accept no trade-offs between “career quality” for “career impact”. The ‘isoquoise ’ may not slant all the way down from status quo to impactful toil, but I think it should slant down at least a little (contrariwise, you might also be willing to trade less impact for higher QoL etc).
Should have erased the left bit of the red line, sorry.
One motivation for having a flat line is to avoid (if the opportunity is available) feeling obliged to trade all the quality for (in)sufficiently large increases in impact. But maybe you can capture similar intuitions by using curved lines: at low levels of quality, the line is flat/almost flat, meaning you are unwilling to trade down further no matter the potential impact on the table, but at higher levels you are, so the slope is steeper at higher qualities. Maybe the ‘isoquioses’ would look something like this:
You could get similar bottom lines by playing with a non-linear Y axis instead.
I appreciate ‘just set a trade-off function’ might be the first step down the totalising path you want to avoid, but one (more wonky than practical) dividend of such a thing is it would tell youwhere to go on the bargaining frontier (graphically, pick the point on the ellipse which touches the biggest isoquoise line). With the curved line story above, if you’re available options all lie below the floor (~horizontal line) you basically pick the best quality option, whereas if the option frontier only has really high quality options (so the slope is very steep), you end up close to the best impact option.
Bravo. I think diagrams are underused as crisp explanations, and this post gives an excellent demonstration of their value (among many other merits).
A minor point (cf. ThomasWoodside’s remarks): I’d be surprised if one really does (or really should) accept no trade-offs between “career quality” for “career impact”. The ‘isoquoise ’ may not slant all the way down from status quo to impactful toil, but I think it should slant down at least a little (contrariwise, you might also be willing to trade less impact for higher QoL etc).
One motivation for having a flat line is to avoid (if the opportunity is available) feeling obliged to trade all the quality for (in)sufficiently large increases in impact. But maybe you can capture similar intuitions by using curved lines: at low levels of quality, the line is flat/almost flat, meaning you are unwilling to trade down further no matter the potential impact on the table, but at higher levels you are, so the slope is steeper at higher qualities. Maybe the ‘isoquioses’ would look something like this:
I appreciate ‘just set a trade-off function’ might be the first step down the totalising path you want to avoid, but one (more wonky than practical) dividend of such a thing is it would tell you where to go on the bargaining frontier (graphically, pick the point on the ellipse which touches the biggest isoquoise line). With the curved line story above, if you’re available options all lie below the floor (~horizontal line) you basically pick the best quality option, whereas if the option frontier only has really high quality options (so the slope is very steep), you end up close to the best impact option.