Let me try a different framing and see if that helps. Economic factors mediate how individual task performance translates into firm success. In industries with winner-takes-most effects, small differences in task performance cause huge differences in payoffs. “The Economics of Superstars” is a classic 1981 paper on this. But many industries aren’t like that.
Knowing your industry tells you how important it is to hire the right people. If you’re hiring someone to write an economics textbook (an example from the “Superstars” paper), you’d better hire the best textbook-writer you can find, because almost no one buys the tenth-best economics textbook. But if you’re running a local landscaping company, you don’t need the world’s best landscaper. And if your industry has incumbent “superstar” firms protected by first-mover advantages, economies of scale, or network effects, it may not matter much who you hire.
So in what kind of “industry” are the EA organizations you want to help with hiring? Is there some factor that multiplies or negates small individual differences in task performance?
My point is more “context matters,” even if you’re talking about a specific skill like programming, and that the contexts that generated the examples in this post may be meaningfully different from the contexts that EA organizations are working in.
I don’t necessarily disagree with anything you and Max have written; it’s just a difference of emphasis, especially when it comes to advising people who are making hiring decisions.
Let me try a different framing and see if that helps. Economic factors mediate how individual task performance translates into firm success. In industries with winner-takes-most effects, small differences in task performance cause huge differences in payoffs. “The Economics of Superstars” is a classic 1981 paper on this. But many industries aren’t like that.
Knowing your industry tells you how important it is to hire the right people. If you’re hiring someone to write an economics textbook (an example from the “Superstars” paper), you’d better hire the best textbook-writer you can find, because almost no one buys the tenth-best economics textbook. But if you’re running a local landscaping company, you don’t need the world’s best landscaper. And if your industry has incumbent “superstar” firms protected by first-mover advantages, economies of scale, or network effects, it may not matter much who you hire.
So in what kind of “industry” are the EA organizations you want to help with hiring? Is there some factor that multiplies or negates small individual differences in task performance?
I think that’s a good summary, but it’s not only winner-takes-all effects that generate heavy-tailed outcomes.
You can get heavy tailed outcomes if performance is the product of two normally distributed factors (e.g. intelligence x effort).
It can also arise from the other factors that Max lists in another comment (e.g. scalable outputs, complex production).
Luck can also produce heavy tailed outcomes if it amplifies outcomes or is itself heavy-tailed.
My point is more “context matters,” even if you’re talking about a specific skill like programming, and that the contexts that generated the examples in this post may be meaningfully different from the contexts that EA organizations are working in.
I don’t necessarily disagree with anything you and Max have written; it’s just a difference of emphasis, especially when it comes to advising people who are making hiring decisions.