I’m worried that you’re mis-applying the concept of comparative advantage here. In particular, if agents A and B both have the same values and are pursuing altruistic ends, comparative advantage should not play a role—both agents should just do whatever they have an absolute advantage at (taking into account marginal effects, but in a large population this should often not matter).
For example: suppose that EA has a “shortage of operations people” but person A determines that they would have higher impact doing direct research rather than doing ops. Then in fact the best thing is for person A to work on direct research, even if there are already many other people doing research and few people doing ops. (Of course, person A could be mistaken about which choice has higher impact, but that is different from the trade considerations that comparative advantage is based on.)
I agree with the heuristic “if a type of work seems to have few people working on it, all else equal you should update towards that work being more neglected and hence higher impact” but the justification for that again doesn’t require any considerations of trading with other people . In general, if A and B can trade in a mutually beneficial way, then either A and B have different values or one of them was making a mistake.
I’m worried that you’re mis-applying the concept of comparative advantage here. In particular, if agents A and B both have the same values and are pursuing altruistic ends, comparative advantage should not play a role—both agents should just do whatever they have an absolute advantage at (taking into account marginal effects, but in a large population this should often not matter).
For example: suppose that EA has a “shortage of operations people” but person A determines that they would have higher impact doing direct research rather than doing ops. Then in fact the best thing is for person A to work on direct research, even if there are already many other people doing research and few people doing ops. (Of course, person A could be mistaken about which choice has higher impact, but that is different from the trade considerations that comparative advantage is based on.)
I agree with the heuristic “if a type of work seems to have few people working on it, all else equal you should update towards that work being more neglected and hence higher impact” but the justification for that again doesn’t require any considerations of trading with other people . In general, if A and B can trade in a mutually beneficial way, then either A and B have different values or one of them was making a mistake.