I very nearly missed this which would have been sad. Might you edit it a little and post it to Less Wrong main? It’d be a great post. A few hints at where psychological/sociological/historical analogies might be drawn would also be cool.
I’d like to have my references in better shape than “vague recollection of code I wrote a decade or two ago” and “vague recollection of decades-old potentially-distorted pop science magazine summary of someone else’s unpublished code” first.
Hmmm… that might be doable. My own code I could probably fix with a rewrite (it was a simple algorithm and even the original BASIC version was a few hundred lines at worst). And as for the latter reference, I found one of the articles which inspired me here:
Looks like this is behind a paywall, though? I seem to be able to access it from work computers (the UTexas library has a subscription to this swath of Scientific American archives) but not home computers.
One other point of reluctance occurs to me: there are conditions under which imagining yourself to be a superstar, while still bad from a selfish viewpoint, might be good for society as a whole: when you’re considering becoming a scientist or inventor. Finding a working tungsten light-bulb filament was more than worth wasting hundreds or thousands of failed filaments in Edison’s experiments, both from society’s point of view and from Edison’s… but what if you look at harder scientific problems, for which each world-changing breakthrough might cost hundreds or thousands of less-successful scientists who would have been happier and wealthier in finance or law or medicine or software or...? Maybe it’s a good thing that lots of smart kids imagine being the next Einstein, then pick a career which is likely to be suboptimal in terms of personal utility but optimal in terms of global utility.
On the gripping hand, maybe the world would be better in the long run if science was seen as inglorious, (relatively) impoverishing, low status… but very altruistic. “Less science” might be a tolerable price to pay for “less science in the wrong hands”.
I very nearly missed this which would have been sad. Might you edit it a little and post it to Less Wrong main? It’d be a great post. A few hints at where psychological/sociological/historical analogies might be drawn would also be cool.
I’d like to have my references in better shape than “vague recollection of code I wrote a decade or two ago” and “vague recollection of decades-old potentially-distorted pop science magazine summary of someone else’s unpublished code” first.
Hmmm… that might be doable. My own code I could probably fix with a rewrite (it was a simple algorithm and even the original BASIC version was a few hundred lines at worst). And as for the latter reference, I found one of the articles which inspired me here:
http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v272/n6/pdf/scientificamerican0695-76.pdf
Looks like this is behind a paywall, though? I seem to be able to access it from work computers (the UTexas library has a subscription to this swath of Scientific American archives) but not home computers.
One other point of reluctance occurs to me: there are conditions under which imagining yourself to be a superstar, while still bad from a selfish viewpoint, might be good for society as a whole: when you’re considering becoming a scientist or inventor. Finding a working tungsten light-bulb filament was more than worth wasting hundreds or thousands of failed filaments in Edison’s experiments, both from society’s point of view and from Edison’s… but what if you look at harder scientific problems, for which each world-changing breakthrough might cost hundreds or thousands of less-successful scientists who would have been happier and wealthier in finance or law or medicine or software or...? Maybe it’s a good thing that lots of smart kids imagine being the next Einstein, then pick a career which is likely to be suboptimal in terms of personal utility but optimal in terms of global utility.
On the gripping hand, maybe the world would be better in the long run if science was seen as inglorious, (relatively) impoverishing, low status… but very altruistic. “Less science” might be a tolerable price to pay for “less science in the wrong hands”.