It is probably often motivated in that way, though interestingly something I had in mind while writing my comment was something like an opposite bias (likewise not accusing you specifically of it). In that in rationalist/EA circles it sometimes feels like everyone (myself included) wants to do the meta-research, the synthesizing across disciplines, the solving of the key bottlenecks etc. and there’s a relative lack of interest in the object-level research, the stamp collecting, the putting things in place that’s a prerequisite for understanding and solving the key bottlenecks. In a way that puts the meta stuff as the highest good while glossing over the fact that the meta stuff only works if someone else has done the basic research it builds on first.
Now your post wasn’t framed in terms of meta-research vs. object-level research nor of theory-building vs. stamp-collecting or anything like that, so this criticism doesn’t apply to your post as a whole. But I think the algorithm of “try to ensure that your research is valuable and not useless” that I was responding to, while by itself sensible, can easily be (mis?)applied in a way that causes one to gravitate toward more meta/theory stuff. (Especially if people do the often-tempting move of using the prestige of a discovery as a proxy for its usefulness.) This can then, I think, increase the probability that the individual gets to claim credit for a shiny-looking discovery while reducing the probability that they’ll do something more generally beneficial.
Toy model: suppose that each empirical result has some probability of being useful. For every U useful empirical results, there are T theoretical discoveries to be made that generalize across those empirical results. Suppose that useful empirical results give you a little prestige while theoretical discoveries give you a lot of prestige, and each scientist can work on either empiricism or theory. Given enough empirical findings, each theorist has some probability of making a theoretical discovery over time.
Then past a certain point, becoming a theorist will not make it significantly more likely that science overall advances (as the number of theoretical discoveries to be made is bounded by the number of empirical findings and some other theorist would have been likely to make the same discovery), but it does increase that theorist’s personal odds of getting a lot of prestige. At the same time, society might be better off if more people were working on empirical findings, as that allowed more theoretical discoveries to be made.
Of course this is a pretty general and abstract argument and it only applies if the balance of theorists vs. empiricists is in fact excessively tilted toward the theorists. I don’t know whether that’s true, I could easily imagine that the opposite was. (And again it’s not directly related to most of what you were saying in your post, though there’s a possible analogous argument to be made about whether there was any predictably useful work left to be done in the first place once Alice, The Very General Helper, and The One Who Actually Thought This Through A Bit were already working on their respective approaches.)
It is probably often motivated in that way, though interestingly something I had in mind while writing my comment was something like an opposite bias (likewise not accusing you specifically of it). In that in rationalist/EA circles it sometimes feels like everyone (myself included) wants to do the meta-research, the synthesizing across disciplines, the solving of the key bottlenecks etc. and there’s a relative lack of interest in the object-level research, the stamp collecting, the putting things in place that’s a prerequisite for understanding and solving the key bottlenecks. In a way that puts the meta stuff as the highest good while glossing over the fact that the meta stuff only works if someone else has done the basic research it builds on first.
Now your post wasn’t framed in terms of meta-research vs. object-level research nor of theory-building vs. stamp-collecting or anything like that, so this criticism doesn’t apply to your post as a whole. But I think the algorithm of “try to ensure that your research is valuable and not useless” that I was responding to, while by itself sensible, can easily be (mis?)applied in a way that causes one to gravitate toward more meta/theory stuff. (Especially if people do the often-tempting move of using the prestige of a discovery as a proxy for its usefulness.) This can then, I think, increase the probability that the individual gets to claim credit for a shiny-looking discovery while reducing the probability that they’ll do something more generally beneficial.
Toy model: suppose that each empirical result has some probability of being useful. For every U useful empirical results, there are T theoretical discoveries to be made that generalize across those empirical results. Suppose that useful empirical results give you a little prestige while theoretical discoveries give you a lot of prestige, and each scientist can work on either empiricism or theory. Given enough empirical findings, each theorist has some probability of making a theoretical discovery over time.
Then past a certain point, becoming a theorist will not make it significantly more likely that science overall advances (as the number of theoretical discoveries to be made is bounded by the number of empirical findings and some other theorist would have been likely to make the same discovery), but it does increase that theorist’s personal odds of getting a lot of prestige. At the same time, society might be better off if more people were working on empirical findings, as that allowed more theoretical discoveries to be made.
Of course this is a pretty general and abstract argument and it only applies if the balance of theorists vs. empiricists is in fact excessively tilted toward the theorists. I don’t know whether that’s true, I could easily imagine that the opposite was. (And again it’s not directly related to most of what you were saying in your post, though there’s a possible analogous argument to be made about whether there was any predictably useful work left to be done in the first place once Alice, The Very General Helper, and The One Who Actually Thought This Through A Bit were already working on their respective approaches.)