katydee comments on How I Became More Ambitious - Less Wrong

60 Post author: Swimmer963 04 July 2013 11:34PM

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Comment author: Nornagest 04 July 2013 12:50:55AM 1 point [-]

I think that one can have a significantly bigger impact (10x-100x on average?) on the world by being goal-driven in a reflective way than one can by following one's instincts without reflections.

How did you arrive at these numbers, out of curiosity?

Comment author: JonahSinick 04 July 2013 01:15:20AM 3 points [-]

I don't have a tight argument.

One thing that I see as relevant is the impact of funding bed net distribution relative to the impact of usual work, and another thing that I see as relevant is the amount of social value that founding Google produced relative to the founders' earnings. But these things don't address small probability edge cases in which specific targeted interventions turn out to be many orders of magnitude more important than most activity.

I hope to write about this more in the future.