> Opportunity cost is an open-ended economic term, not some obscure math or physics arcana, and it's core is all about preferring one option over another after an assessment (of what you lose by not going with the other, etc).
lol I know its not arcana or hard math, but framing a decision people regularly make in life without any means of holistic assessment or accounting for the options like its a micro-econ problem if you just informally mean "make a judgement call", is the type of terminology abuse that's the hallmark of a pseud.
> but not everybody uses it well. Many waste efforts on multiple things ("jack of all trades"), others chose the thing that makes them worse off professionally or personally over better options open to them, etc.
And this is at the root of my objection to this, what could you possibly mean here by "not everybody uses it well"? To what or whose criteria can you possibly make such an assessment?
> So, that's the point I was making: choosing math over Chinese (as the author suggests) can work out well from a O/C perspective. Understanding math better is more approachable than learning a language like Chinese adequately to make anything of it, and can have a wide impact (especially to a programmer, but also in personal life, business decisions, etc).
You might fall in love with a Chinese national and want to learn your partner's native tongue. You might have your life wholly changed by a work of Chinese literature. This is why this whole framing is utterly insane, there's no way to account for all the ways your life might be bettered by both these pursuits. Why even make some facile pseudo-analytic attempt. It's just dumb STEM dick measuring to pretend like there's a way to assess this.
>And this is at the root of my objection to this, what could you possibly mean here by "not everybody uses it well"? To what or whose criteria can you possibly make such an assessment?
Well, I'm not an alien that just landed. So I have personal experience with life, an understanding of culture, an education, some historical knowledge, etc, and so I can make judgements (even without writing some full formal paper of citing stats) about people making the wrong choices in their lives.
Maybe not perfect judgments, but it's not like I'm some alien that has just landed on Earth from space, and one has to wonder how could I ever possibly "make such an assessment" for others.
But even if you ignore me as a non-authority on the matter, I can argue that people themselves frequently lament their own previous life choices and with they'd gotten with X or Y, or lament how their choice on Y brought them to the bottom, and so on.
So from that alone, we can safely assume that "not everybody uses [their assessments on what options to follow] well".
lol I know its not arcana or hard math, but framing a decision people regularly make in life without any means of holistic assessment or accounting for the options like its a micro-econ problem if you just informally mean "make a judgement call", is the type of terminology abuse that's the hallmark of a pseud.
> but not everybody uses it well. Many waste efforts on multiple things ("jack of all trades"), others chose the thing that makes them worse off professionally or personally over better options open to them, etc.
And this is at the root of my objection to this, what could you possibly mean here by "not everybody uses it well"? To what or whose criteria can you possibly make such an assessment?
> So, that's the point I was making: choosing math over Chinese (as the author suggests) can work out well from a O/C perspective. Understanding math better is more approachable than learning a language like Chinese adequately to make anything of it, and can have a wide impact (especially to a programmer, but also in personal life, business decisions, etc).
You might fall in love with a Chinese national and want to learn your partner's native tongue. You might have your life wholly changed by a work of Chinese literature. This is why this whole framing is utterly insane, there's no way to account for all the ways your life might be bettered by both these pursuits. Why even make some facile pseudo-analytic attempt. It's just dumb STEM dick measuring to pretend like there's a way to assess this.