= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
John_Maxwell_IV comments on How I Ended Up Non-Ambitious - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (237)
Generic "ambition" is a serious case of putting the cart before the horse. If you have ambition to do something, that's great; if not, deciding you should be "ambitious" and then trying to figure out what to be ambitious about rarely ends well.
I think this is why I get creeped out by ambitious people sometimes. I'd much rather my doctor be passionate about medicine than be someone who decided medicine was more "prestigious" than nursing. As a personal anecdote, I am currently in medicine because I want to specialize in psychiatry. I am passionate about psychiatry and plan to be an awesome psychiatrist. I am not quite as passionate about organic medicine with its heart attacks and kidney infections, and although I work hard at it and am pretty good, some of my classmates who get up every morning super excited because they've dreamed of treating kidney infections their whole lives are better. I don't begrudge them this and if I ever got a kidney infection I'm going straight to them and not to the doctor who went into medicine as a subgoal of something else; if they ever get depression I hope they'll come to me for the same reason.
I understand it's the same in many other fields. Paul Graham writes that successful startup founders start with a problem they want to solve, eg Larry Page and Sergey Brin were frustrated with terrible online search; unsuccessful startup founders decide they would really like to earn fantastic amounts of money and only worry about what business they'll do it in as an afterthought.
The only problem here is charity: I do think it may be morally important to be ambitious in helping others, which might even include taking a lucrative career in order to give money to charity. This is especially true if the Singularity memeplex is right and we're living in a desperate time that calls for a desperate effort. See for example Giving What You Can's powerpoint on ethical careers. At some point you need to balance how much good you want to do, with how likely you are to succeed in a career, with how miserable you want to make yourself - and at the very least rationality can help clarify that decision.
I consider myself lucky, because making money is what I intrinsically want to do due to all the turn-based strategy games I played as an adolescent. Fuzzy life goals like "find what you like and make a career out of it" don't really appeal to me--in practice, what I like has changed too often historically, and besides, there's nothing to optimize and no rules to game!
Alpha Centauri is an almost perfect example of a computer game that teaches optimizer thinking:
http://www.amazon.com/Meiers-Alpha-Centauri-Alien-Crossfire-Expansion/dp/B003NMA3DG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327214061&sr=8-1
Unlike the civilization series, the designers decided that since the game was based in the future, they would throw in all kinds of crazy stuff. This gives a big advantage to players who read through the entire manual and develop strategies like "I won't have to deal with drones if I build punishment spheres everywhere, but then I won't have any scientific research. So I'll have to probe the hell out of the other factions in order to steal their advances. Hm, the Believers would be perfect for this, since they're terrible at science but that won't matter." My brother and I have spent hours talking about the game and bouncing strategies like this one off each other. Did I mention that it's insanely fun and addictive?
I played Alpha Centauri for a few weeks back when it came out, ended up going back to Civilisation, more out of habit I suppose than anything else. These days I'm playing Civilisation IV Beyond the Sword.
What is interesting about being taught optimizer thinking within a computer game is that if that thinking stays within the game, then it's not real world applicable as optimal. If however one stops playing the game and then takes the learned strategies applicable in the real world, into the real world - then gaming is useful, otherwise gaming is just entertainment. I love gaming, don't get me wrong - it's just that (simplistically) x hours of gaming translates into x hours of missed revenue/earnings in the real world, or x hours of real world knowledge unlearned.
I agree, it's not inevitably going to be useful. In my case, I was spending so much time planning my games out that I was no longer having fun, so I started to wonder why I didn't put forth the same optimization efforts in real life. Explicitly trying to transfer the optimizer mindset might help ("Here's a decision about my life I have to make. Oh yeah, I remember, making decisions is fun!")
Railroad Tycoon II might be a better choice for making money in particular–you can fantasize about how if you actually were alive at that time and you had $10K in capital, investor connections, and railroad knowledge you could have made a fortune too. Then after playing the game for a while, you could start looking around for equivalent present-day opportunities. (Did you know that at one time, railroad stocks made up over half the value of the US stock market?)
That thought helped break a friend of mine out of a Farmtown addiction. Iirc, she was considering making a spreadsheet for Farmtown when the light dawned.
The best lesson I got from the Railroad Tycoon games was pausing at the start, carefully inspecting all of the cities, and finding the 3-4 best pairs to set up routes between, then snagging those before the AI could. (The AI would politely wait a minute or so for you to move first, then start building, and if you built a station in a city they wouldn't. So you set up the best one as a route to make money off of, claim the others, and then they only have terrible routes to pick from, and so stagnate while you grow massively.)
That sort of strategy doesn't work well in real life, but the meta-strategy - know your environment and plan carefully - is rather useful.
SMAC is one of my favorite games. I find it unsatisfying from a strategy standpoint, though, because the factions are so unbalanced- the University is top-tier (unsurprising for a game set in the future!) and the Believers are terrible.
(For example, the example you mention- Believers going probe-heavy- is the best strategy for the Believers, but will lose out to Hive doing infinite city strategy. Hive can outproduce you, use police to keep their drones in line more effectively, and doesn't have the crippling early-game research penalty.)
Back when I played SMAC a lot, I found the unbalanced thing was useful for player-vs.-AI games; once I got good enough to reliably beat the AI with the powerful factions, I could play the weaker factions as a challenge. For multiplayer games, though, not so much.
It did, however, make me long for a version of SMAC where you programmed units with AI guidelines rather than control them individually, and where probes could read and alter enemy unit programming.