[SEQ RERUN] Joy in Discovery
Today’s post, Joy in Discovery was originally published on 21 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
It feels incredibly good to discover the answer to a problem that nobody else has answered. And we should enjoy finding answers. But we really shouldn’t base our joy on the fact that nobody else has done it before. Even if someone else knows the answer to a puzzle, if you don’t know it, it’s still a mystery to you. And you should still feel joy when you discover the answer.
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Joy in the Merely Real, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
I view intellectual property as the logical conclusion of the “unhealthiness” Eliezer is describing. I laugh when I look at all the ridiculous patents and copyrights that exist, but then I get scared when I remember that someone can use legal force against me for discovering those ideas simply because they discovered them first.
This may be why several people find academic careers a little oppressive. In order to be successful you have to work on problems which people don’t know the answer to rather than one you want to know the answer to. The trick I think (I’m in academia) might be to find a problem which lies in the intersection of these two problem sets.
The trick in academia is to find a low-hanging fruit other people in academia care about. And if they do not care about it yet, to do a good enough sales job to make them care.
Yes. But at a fundamental level you should start caring about it too. This may be easier than it sounds because most fields in academia have very good taste and most problems I come across have very interesting structure.
Another trade-off I’ve noticed: when do you work on a problem suited to your thinking toolkit and when do you try to figure out the basic skeletons of a problem you are not comfortable with but you would be very interested in once you understand the language and structure of the problem. I’m interested in ways in which I can build my thinking tools to be highly generalizable and broadly applicable, but at the same time powerful enough to be able to use it to attain specific useful results. Any suggestions people?