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Normal_Anomaly comments on What Should I Do? - Less Wrong
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I'm holding off on proposing a solution. The Law of Comparative Advantage is a relevant concept here, because whatever you end up doing would have been done by someone else if you had made a different choice. You should pick the thing where you are the most above average in expected success, because that's where the marginal gain to the world from you doing it is highest.
My other advice is, don't forget to do something you'll enjoy. For a start, it will make you more motivated. You'll be doing good in the world whatever you pick--and while you can't be sure which thing will do the most good, you have a better chance at figuring out what you'll most enjoy.
I believe that if I donate to charity, more will be donated to charity. If I do research in a field, more research will get done in that field. If I start a company, more companies will get started. (All of this in in expectation). This holds even more true for a particularly charity, a particular research program I consider important, or a particular need I think needs to be filled.
I'm not too worried about this. I enjoy both thinking and deliberating in a very broad sense, and I could direct the time I spend on both in pretty arbitrary directions before it became unfun. My plan is to find out what would be best, and then think about how to perturb it to keep me happy enough to remain productive.
I agree on charity, but what if the funding for research in a field is limited, and there is someone who is better at doing research than you are, but worse at doing job interviews, so by deciding to go into that field, you take their place? Similarly for starting companies, if there's a profitable niche, it will be filled by someone sooner or later, unless there's some reason only you can see that niche.
I found out that if I work in some field I'll get bored after a time-frame of months to years, and this was not something I expected when I was in college. Luckily I'm in a position to easily change what to work on. Sometimes what became boring will be interesting again if I leave it for a while.
If you're still in college, you're probably not yet aware of how easily you get bored, so this may be something to keep in mind. (I wish I had more data about how easily people get bored. Most people seem to stay in one field their entire lives without complaining too much, but are they just going through the motions after a while?)
Even in the worst case, I suspect I am much better at doing research than the marginal person who would lose their job. Maybe there are some weird other issues with imperfect candidate selection, but I don't see why those would have any effect on average.
In reality, I expect the situation to be much better, for two reasons. For one, even holding the total amount of research funding fixed, how do you think that the allocation between various fields or subfields is done? I believe the number of competent researchers/grant-writers working in a field effects the fraction of funding it captures. For two, most people in most fields pursue programs which are optimized for maintaining status, not for doing good. You shouldn't expect the amount of socially optimal research to be conserved unless funding agencies are very good. In practice they actually seem to be astoundingly bad (at least for this way of evaluating good/bad). I guess these points are the same, but at different levels: working on the best programs within the best subfields of the best fields is important, and I don't think the average person you statistically expect to replace is doing any of these.
I believe this for a sufficiently generous notion of "later," and for enterprises which create marketable value proportionate with the good they do. But I care about shorter timescales than niches generically get filled on, and my notion of value is quite different than most peoples. Evidence for the first point comes from the amount of money that goes to successful entrepreneurs. Evidence for the second comes from looking around at the world, or reasonable expectations of marketplaces.
In both cases, I think others' remarks are essentially correct: markets work to distribute labor evenly in some sense, but my motives are different from my competitors' and so I suspect I will displace people who are doing substantially different things.
I guess I don't know if this will be a problem. I have definitely gotten bored of particular problems, but at MIT at least there are a pretty wide variety of problems being worked on and it seems pretty easy to move around. Maybe it will become harder to move around (I imagine I can avoid this) or a higher level of meta-boredom will set in which would require a more disruptive change.
Right now this is not high on my list of reasons not to go into academia, though it would be good to know more before spending years getting a PhD.
Another thing to check is how much you like writing and publishing academic papers. I tried it once and found the process quite painful, both the writing and the publishing parts. (And that was one of the actual reasons I didn't try to go into academia. I didn't find out about the boredom issue until later.) I'm not sure if I'm being rational or just rationalizing, but it seems that I can spread my ideas (and get plenty of credit) just by writing about them informally on mailing lists and blogs.
Are you sure? In my experience most people who claim they'd enjoy doing anything, say that because it seems like the kind of think that is virtuous to say/believe.
He didn't say he'd enjoy doing anything, he said there was a fairly wide range of things he enjoys.
Which spill over effect due to your specific involvement will be the largest?
You're assuming perfect equivalence between success and value creation. That is a very shaky assumption in any realistic human society. Success may stem from creating value and trading it, but also from winning zero- or negative-sum games such as signaling arms races and rent seeking contests, and even the created value can be offset by the negative externalities you generate. Humans are amazingly capable of rationalizing away such unpleasant observations when it comes to themselves and people they like and admire, as well as exaggerating them when it comes to those they dislike, so evaluating any concrete success scenario accurately is a very difficult problem.
(Of course, if you're altruistic, you'd also care about your positive externalities for which you capture no benefit, and similar caveats apply there too.)
By "success" I meant successfully doing useful research/getting money to charity/spreading rationality. Which I think is closer to "value creation" or "positive externalities" than what you seem to be calling "success," namely personal welfare.
All I meant was that if he would create an above average amount of value in one area, but even more in another, relative to the rest of the labor pool, he should go with the one where he's best by comparison.
Actually, I didn't mean only personal welfare. What I wrote certainly applies to career success that brings money and power, but also to all other kinds of accomplishments that are commonly seen as worthy and admirable.
In fact, often it's even more difficult to judge the latter accurately. People are used to arguing whether someone who profits from success has deserved it, and they're normally willing to listen to someone who argues either way in some particular case. However, when it comes to accomplishments that are seen as selfless idealism, it's much more difficult to criticize those without being perceived as weird or malicious. This despite the fact that these can be about signaling games, rent-seeking, and unaccounted externalities just as much as any for-profit endeavor, no matter how admirable and high-status they are commonly perceived.
Agreed.
If anything, it seems like he's trying to create positive externalities, not make his personal life as good as possible.