I’m not as aggressive at problem/question/cause prioritization as I could be. I can see improvements of 50-500% for someone who’s (humanly) better at this than me.
I’m not great at day-to-day time management either. I can see ~100% improvement in that regard if somebody is very good at this.
I find it psychologically very hard to do real work for >30h/week, so somebody with my exact skillset but who could productively work for >40h/week without diminishing returns would be >33% more valuable.
I pride myself of the speed and quantity I write, but I’m slower than eg MichaelA, and I think it’s very plausible that a lot of my outputs are still bottlenecked by writing speed. 10-50% effectiveness improvement seems about right.
I don’t have perfect mental health and I’m sometimes emotional. (I do think I’m above average at both). I can see improvements of 5-25% for people who don’t have these issues.
I’m good at math* but not stellar at it. I can imagine someone who’s e.g. a Putnam Fellow be 3-25% more effective than me if they chose to work on the same problems I work on (though plausibly they’d be more effective because they’d gravitate towards much mathier problems; otoh ofc not all/most mathy problems are very important)
Relatedly, obviously I’m not the smartest person in the world. I don’t have a good sense of how much e.g. being half a standard deviation smarter than me would make someone a better researcher, anything from “not a lot” to “very high” seems plausible to me. ??? for quantitatively how much effectiveness this adds.
*Concretely, I did a math major in a non-elite liberal arts college, which wasn’t too hard for me. I perceived both my interns last summer as probably noticeably better at math than me (one was a math major at Columbia and the other at MIT). Certainly they know way more math.
Thank you for the specific estimates and the wide variety of factors you considered :-) It may be that @MichaelA is also working primarily on improving cause prioritisation. I guess maybe you’ve both discussed that :D
Some ways someone can be more effective than me:
I’m not as aggressive at problem/question/cause prioritization as I could be. I can see improvements of 50-500% for someone who’s (humanly) better at this than me.
I’m not great at day-to-day time management either. I can see ~100% improvement in that regard if somebody is very good at this.
I find it psychologically very hard to do real work for >30h/week, so somebody with my exact skillset but who could productively work for >40h/week without diminishing returns would be >33% more valuable.
I pride myself of the speed and quantity I write, but I’m slower than eg MichaelA, and I think it’s very plausible that a lot of my outputs are still bottlenecked by writing speed. 10-50% effectiveness improvement seems about right.
I don’t have perfect mental health and I’m sometimes emotional. (I do think I’m above average at both). I can see improvements of 5-25% for people who don’t have these issues.
I’m good at math* but not stellar at it. I can imagine someone who’s e.g. a Putnam Fellow be 3-25% more effective than me if they chose to work on the same problems I work on (though plausibly they’d be more effective because they’d gravitate towards much mathier problems; otoh ofc not all/most mathy problems are very important)
Relatedly, obviously I’m not the smartest person in the world. I don’t have a good sense of how much e.g. being half a standard deviation smarter than me would make someone a better researcher, anything from “not a lot” to “very high” seems plausible to me. ??? for quantitatively how much effectiveness this adds.
*Concretely, I did a math major in a non-elite liberal arts college, which wasn’t too hard for me. I perceived both my interns last summer as probably noticeably better at math than me (one was a math major at Columbia and the other at MIT). Certainly they know way more math.
Thank you for the specific estimates and the wide variety of factors you considered :-) It may be that @MichaelA is also working primarily on improving cause prioritisation. I guess maybe you’ve both discussed that :D