Does everyone else here think that putting aside your little quirky interests to do big important things is a good idea? It seems to me that people who choose that way typically don’t end up doing much, even when they’re strongly motivated, while people who follow their interests tend to become more awesome over time. Though I know Anna is going to frown on me for advocating this path...
Though I know Anna is going to frown on me for advocating this path...
Argh, no I’m not going to advocate ignoring one’s quirky interests to follow one’s alleged duty. My impression is more like fiddlemath’s, below. You don’t want to follow shiny interests at random (though even that path is much better than drifting randomly or choosing a career to appease one’s parents, and cousin_it is right that even this tends to make people more awesome over time). Instead, ideally, you want to figure out what it would be useful to be interested in, cultivate real, immediate, curiosity and urges to be interested in those things, work to update your anticipations and urges so that they know more of what your abstract/verbal reasoning knows, and can see why certain subjects are pivotal…
Not “far-mode reasoning over actual felt interests” but “far-mode reasoning in dialog with actual felt interests, and both goals and urges relating strongly to what you end up actually trying to do, and so that you develop new quirky interests in the questions you need to answer, the way one develops quirky interests in almost any question if one is willing to dwell on it patiently for a long time, with staring with intrinsic interest while the details of the question come out to inhabit your mind...
I think the flowchart for thinking about this question should look something like:
If in a least convenient possible world where following your interests did not maximize utility, are you pretty sure you really would forego your personal interests to maximize utility? If no, go to 2; if yes, go to 3.
Why are you even thinking about this question? Are you just trying to come up with a clever argument for something you’re going to do anyway?
Okay, now you can think about this question.
I can’t answer your question because I’ve never gotten past 2.
I mostly-agree, except that question 1 shouldn’t say:
“In a least convenient world, would you utterly forgo all interest in return for making some small difference to global utility”.
It should say: “… is there any extent to which impact on strangers’ well-being would influence your choices? For example, if you were faced with a choice between reading a chapter of a kind-of-interesting book with no external impact, or doing chores for an hour and thereby saving a child’s life, would you sometimes choose the latter?”
If the answer to that latter question is yes—if expected impact on others’ well-being can potentially sway your actions at some margin—then it is worth looking into the empirical details, and seeing what bundles of global well-being and personal well-being can actually be bought, and how attractive those bundles are.
I object to this being framed as primarily about others versus self. I pursue FAI for the perfectly selfish reason that it maximizes my expected life span and quality. I think the conflict being discussed is about near interest conflicting with far interest, and how near interest creates more motivation.
Because even if we don’t have the strength or desire to willingly renounce all selfishness, we recognize that better versions of ourselves would do so, and that perhaps there’s a good way to make some lifestyle changes that look like personal sacrifices but are actually net positive (and even more so when we nurture our sense of altruism)?
Not a clever argument, more of an admission of current weakness. Admitting current weakness has the advantage of having the obvious next step of “consider becoming stronger”.
But saying “Pursuing my interests would increase utility anyway” has the disadvantage of requiring no further actions. Which is fine if it’s true, but if you evaluate the truth of the statement while you still have this potential source of bias lurking in the background, it might not be.
For what it’s worth, I have no trouble answering “yes” to 1, because for me it doesn’t have the altruistic connotations it probably has for other people. My utility function is very selfish and I’m okay with that.
Maybe the personal interests are the real utility, but we don’t want to admit it—because for our survival as members of social species it is better to pretend that our utility is aligned with utility of others, although it is probably just weakly positively correlated. In more complex society the correlation is probably even weaker, because the choicespace is larger.
Or maybe just the utility choice mechanism is broken in this society, because it evolved in an ancient environment. It probably uses some mechanism like “if you are rewarded for doing something, or if you see that someone is rewarded for something, then develop a strong desire… and keep the desire even in times when you are not rewarded (because it may require long-term effort)”. In ancient environment you would see rewards mostly for useful things. Today there are too many exciting things—I don’t say they are mostly bad, just that there is too much of them, so people’s utility functions are spread too much, and sometimes there are not enough people with desire to do some critical tasks.
That’s why it’s a very important skill to become interested in what you should be interested in. I made a conscious decision to become interested in what I’m working on now becase it seemed like an area full of big low hanging fruit, and now it genuinely fascinates me.
I would suggest spending time with people interested in X, because this would give one’s brain signal “X is socially rewarded”, which would motivate them to do X. Any other good ideas?
What worked for me was to spend time thinking about the types of things I could do if it worked right, and feeling those emotions while trying to figure out rough paths to get there.
I also chose to strengthen the degree to which I identify as someone who can do this kind of thing, so it felt natural
Like you said, talk to people who know the topic and find it interesting.
Read non technical introductory books on the topic. I found the algorithmn’s part of CS interesting, but the EE dimensions of computing was utterly boring until I read Code by Charles Petzold.
Research the history of a topic in order to see the lives of the humans who worked on it. Humans being social creatures, may find a topic more interesting after they have learned of some of the more interesting people who have worked in that field.
First, making games isn’t a little quirky interest. Second, I don’t necessarily have to put it aside. My goal it to contribute to FAI. I will have to figure out the best way to do that. If I notice that whatever I try, I fail at because I can’t summon enough motivation, then may be making games is the best options I’ve got. But the point is that I have to maximize my contribution.
Why do you say it’s not a little quirky interest? I’m asking this as I’ve been fixated on various game-making stuff for close to 20 years now, but now feel like I’m mostly going on because it’s something I was really interested at 14 and subsequently tinkered with enough that it now seems like the thing I can do most interesting things with, but I suspect it’s not what I’d choose to have built a compulsive interest in if I could make the choice today.
Nowadays I am getting alienated from the overall gaming culture that’s still mostly optimized to primarily appeal to teenagers, and I often have trouble coming up with a justification why most games should be considered anything other than shiny escapist distractions and how the enterprise of game development aspires to anything other than being a pageant for coming up with the shiniest distraction. So I would go for both quirky, gaming has a bunch of weird insider culture things going for it, and little, most gaming and gamedev has little effect in the big picture of fixing things that make life bad for people (though distractions can be valuable too), and might have a negative effect if clever people who could make a contribution elsewhere get fixated into gamedev instead.
It does translate to a constantly growing programming skill for me, so at least there’s that good reason to keep up at it. But that’s more a side effect than a primary value of the interest.
You’ve committed mind projection fallacy. :) For me games have started out as a hobby and grew into a full blown passion. It’s something I live and breathe about 10 hours day (full time job and then making a game on the side).
I’ll agree that current games suck, but their focus has extended way past teenagers. And just because they are bad, doesn’t mean the medium is bad. It’s possible to make good games, for almost any definition of good.
I was describing my own mind, didn’t get around to projecting it yet.
Let me put the question this way: You can probably make a case for why people should want to be interested in, say, mathematics, physics or effective reasoning, even if they are not already interested in them. Is there any compelling similar reason why someone not already interested in game development should want to be interested in game development?
Sure, but it would be on case by case basis. I think game development is too narrow (especially when compared to things like math and physics), but if you consider game design in general, that’s a useful field to know any time you are trying to design an activity so that it’s engaging and understandable.
I expect that completely ignoring your quirky interests leads to completely destroying your motivation for doing useful work. On the other hand, I find myself demotivated, even from my quirky interests, when I haven’t done “useful” things recently. I constantly question “why am I doing what I’m doing?” and feel pretty awful, and completely destroy my motivation for doing anything at all.
But! Picking from “fiddle with shiny things” and “increase global utility” is not a binary decision. The trick is to find a workable compromise between the ethics you endorse and the interests you’re drawn to, so that you don’t exhaust yourself on either, and gain “energy” from both. Without some sort of deep personal modification, very few people can usefully work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, at any one task. You can, though, spend about four hours a day on each of three different projects, so long as they’re sufficiently varied, and they provide an appropriate mixture of short-term and long-term goals, near and far goals, personal time and social time, and seriousness and fun.
Doing what’s right is hard and takes time. For a long time I’ve been of the opinion that I should do what’s most important and let my little quirky interests wither on the vine, and that’s what I’ve done. But it took many years to get it right, not because of issues of intrinsic motivation, but because I’m tackling hard problems and it was difficult to even know what I was supposed to be doing. But once I figured out what I’m doing, I was really glad I’d taken the risk, because I can’t imagine ever returning to my little quirky interests.
I think it involves a genuine leap into the unknown. For example, even if you decide that you should dedicate your life to FAI, there’s still the problem of figuring out what you should be doing. It might take years to find the right path and you’ll probably have doubts about whether you made the right decision until you’ve found it. It’s a vocation fraught with uncertainty and you might have several false starts, you might even discover that FAI is not the most important thing after all. Then you’ve got to start over.
Should everyone being doing it? Probably not. Is there a good way to decide whether you should be doing or not? I doubt it. I think what really happens is you start going down that road and there’s a point where you can’t turn back.
I work on non-computationalist approaches to cognitive science (i.e., embodied, dynamical, ecological). I used to pursue interests in all manner of things, including art, movies and games.
Thanks, your statements align very well with my anticipations. I don’t expect this to be easy, and I don’t know exactly what I should be doing, but I know I really want to figure it out.
A couple of years ago, I’d side with Anna. Today, I’m more inclined to agree with you. As I learned the hard way, intrinsic motivation is extremely important for me.
(Long story short: I have a more than decent disposable income, which I earned by following my “little quirky interests”. I could use this income for direct regular donations, but instead I decided to invest it, along with my time, in a potentially money-making project I had little intrinsic motivation for. I’m still evaluating the results, but so far it’s likely that I’ll make intrinsic motivation mandatory for all my future endeavors.)
My trouble is that my “little quirky interests” are all I really want to do. It can be a bit hard to focus on all the things that must get done when I’d much rather be working on something totally unrelated to my “work”.
Does everyone else here think that putting aside your little quirky interests to do big important things is a good idea? It seems to me that people who choose that way typically don’t end up doing much, even when they’re strongly motivated, while people who follow their interests tend to become more awesome over time. Though I know Anna is going to frown on me for advocating this path...
Argh, no I’m not going to advocate ignoring one’s quirky interests to follow one’s alleged duty. My impression is more like fiddlemath’s, below. You don’t want to follow shiny interests at random (though even that path is much better than drifting randomly or choosing a career to appease one’s parents, and cousin_it is right that even this tends to make people more awesome over time). Instead, ideally, you want to figure out what it would be useful to be interested in, cultivate real, immediate, curiosity and urges to be interested in those things, work to update your anticipations and urges so that they know more of what your abstract/verbal reasoning knows, and can see why certain subjects are pivotal…
Not “far-mode reasoning over actual felt interests” but “far-mode reasoning in dialog with actual felt interests, and both goals and urges relating strongly to what you end up actually trying to do, and so that you develop new quirky interests in the questions you need to answer, the way one develops quirky interests in almost any question if one is willing to dwell on it patiently for a long time, with staring with intrinsic interest while the details of the question come out to inhabit your mind...
I find this comment vague and abstract, do you have examples in mind?
I think the flowchart for thinking about this question should look something like:
If in a least convenient possible world where following your interests did not maximize utility, are you pretty sure you really would forego your personal interests to maximize utility? If no, go to 2; if yes, go to 3.
Why are you even thinking about this question? Are you just trying to come up with a clever argument for something you’re going to do anyway?
Okay, now you can think about this question.
I can’t answer your question because I’ve never gotten past 2.
I mostly-agree, except that question 1 shouldn’t say:
“In a least convenient world, would you utterly forgo all interest in return for making some small difference to global utility”.
It should say: “… is there any extent to which impact on strangers’ well-being would influence your choices? For example, if you were faced with a choice between reading a chapter of a kind-of-interesting book with no external impact, or doing chores for an hour and thereby saving a child’s life, would you sometimes choose the latter?”
If the answer to that latter question is yes—if expected impact on others’ well-being can potentially sway your actions at some margin—then it is worth looking into the empirical details, and seeing what bundles of global well-being and personal well-being can actually be bought, and how attractive those bundles are.
I object to this being framed as primarily about others versus self. I pursue FAI for the perfectly selfish reason that it maximizes my expected life span and quality. I think the conflict being discussed is about near interest conflicting with far interest, and how near interest creates more motivation.
Because even if we don’t have the strength or desire to willingly renounce all selfishness, we recognize that better versions of ourselves would do so, and that perhaps there’s a good way to make some lifestyle changes that look like personal sacrifices but are actually net positive (and even more so when we nurture our sense of altruism)?
Isn’t this statement also a clever argument for why you’re not going to do it anyway, at least to an extent?
Not a clever argument, more of an admission of current weakness. Admitting current weakness has the advantage of having the obvious next step of “consider becoming stronger”.
But saying “Pursuing my interests would increase utility anyway” has the disadvantage of requiring no further actions. Which is fine if it’s true, but if you evaluate the truth of the statement while you still have this potential source of bias lurking in the background, it might not be.
For what it’s worth, I have no trouble answering “yes” to 1, because for me it doesn’t have the altruistic connotations it probably has for other people. My utility function is very selfish and I’m okay with that.
Maybe the personal interests are the real utility, but we don’t want to admit it—because for our survival as members of social species it is better to pretend that our utility is aligned with utility of others, although it is probably just weakly positively correlated. In more complex society the correlation is probably even weaker, because the choicespace is larger.
Or maybe just the utility choice mechanism is broken in this society, because it evolved in an ancient environment. It probably uses some mechanism like “if you are rewarded for doing something, or if you see that someone is rewarded for something, then develop a strong desire… and keep the desire even in times when you are not rewarded (because it may require long-term effort)”. In ancient environment you would see rewards mostly for useful things. Today there are too many exciting things—I don’t say they are mostly bad, just that there is too much of them, so people’s utility functions are spread too much, and sometimes there are not enough people with desire to do some critical tasks.
That’s why it’s a very important skill to become interested in what you should be interested in. I made a conscious decision to become interested in what I’m working on now becase it seemed like an area full of big low hanging fruit, and now it genuinely fascinates me.
How to become really interested in something?
I would suggest spending time with people interested in X, because this would give one’s brain signal “X is socially rewarded”, which would motivate them to do X. Any other good ideas?
What worked for me was to spend time thinking about the types of things I could do if it worked right, and feeling those emotions while trying to figure out rough paths to get there.
I also chose to strengthen the degree to which I identify as someone who can do this kind of thing, so it felt natural
I’m spitballing different ideas I’ve used:
Like you said, talk to people who know the topic and find it interesting.
Read non technical introductory books on the topic. I found the algorithmn’s part of CS interesting, but the EE dimensions of computing was utterly boring until I read Code by Charles Petzold.
Research the history of a topic in order to see the lives of the humans who worked on it. Humans being social creatures, may find a topic more interesting after they have learned of some of the more interesting people who have worked in that field.
First, making games isn’t a little quirky interest. Second, I don’t necessarily have to put it aside. My goal it to contribute to FAI. I will have to figure out the best way to do that. If I notice that whatever I try, I fail at because I can’t summon enough motivation, then may be making games is the best options I’ve got. But the point is that I have to maximize my contribution.
Why do you say it’s not a little quirky interest? I’m asking this as I’ve been fixated on various game-making stuff for close to 20 years now, but now feel like I’m mostly going on because it’s something I was really interested at 14 and subsequently tinkered with enough that it now seems like the thing I can do most interesting things with, but I suspect it’s not what I’d choose to have built a compulsive interest in if I could make the choice today.
Nowadays I am getting alienated from the overall gaming culture that’s still mostly optimized to primarily appeal to teenagers, and I often have trouble coming up with a justification why most games should be considered anything other than shiny escapist distractions and how the enterprise of game development aspires to anything other than being a pageant for coming up with the shiniest distraction. So I would go for both quirky, gaming has a bunch of weird insider culture things going for it, and little, most gaming and gamedev has little effect in the big picture of fixing things that make life bad for people (though distractions can be valuable too), and might have a negative effect if clever people who could make a contribution elsewhere get fixated into gamedev instead.
It does translate to a constantly growing programming skill for me, so at least there’s that good reason to keep up at it. But that’s more a side effect than a primary value of the interest.
You’ve committed mind projection fallacy. :) For me games have started out as a hobby and grew into a full blown passion. It’s something I live and breathe about 10 hours day (full time job and then making a game on the side).
I’ll agree that current games suck, but their focus has extended way past teenagers. And just because they are bad, doesn’t mean the medium is bad. It’s possible to make good games, for almost any definition of good.
I was describing my own mind, didn’t get around to projecting it yet.
Let me put the question this way: You can probably make a case for why people should want to be interested in, say, mathematics, physics or effective reasoning, even if they are not already interested in them. Is there any compelling similar reason why someone not already interested in game development should want to be interested in game development?
Sure, but it would be on case by case basis. I think game development is too narrow (especially when compared to things like math and physics), but if you consider game design in general, that’s a useful field to know any time you are trying to design an activity so that it’s engaging and understandable.
I expect that completely ignoring your quirky interests leads to completely destroying your motivation for doing useful work. On the other hand, I find myself demotivated, even from my quirky interests, when I haven’t done “useful” things recently. I constantly question “why am I doing what I’m doing?” and feel pretty awful, and completely destroy my motivation for doing anything at all.
But! Picking from “fiddle with shiny things” and “increase global utility” is not a binary decision. The trick is to find a workable compromise between the ethics you endorse and the interests you’re drawn to, so that you don’t exhaust yourself on either, and gain “energy” from both. Without some sort of deep personal modification, very few people can usefully work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, at any one task. You can, though, spend about four hours a day on each of three different projects, so long as they’re sufficiently varied, and they provide an appropriate mixture of short-term and long-term goals, near and far goals, personal time and social time, and seriousness and fun.
Doing what’s right is hard and takes time. For a long time I’ve been of the opinion that I should do what’s most important and let my little quirky interests wither on the vine, and that’s what I’ve done. But it took many years to get it right, not because of issues of intrinsic motivation, but because I’m tackling hard problems and it was difficult to even know what I was supposed to be doing. But once I figured out what I’m doing, I was really glad I’d taken the risk, because I can’t imagine ever returning to my little quirky interests.
I think it involves a genuine leap into the unknown. For example, even if you decide that you should dedicate your life to FAI, there’s still the problem of figuring out what you should be doing. It might take years to find the right path and you’ll probably have doubts about whether you made the right decision until you’ve found it. It’s a vocation fraught with uncertainty and you might have several false starts, you might even discover that FAI is not the most important thing after all. Then you’ve got to start over.
Should everyone being doing it? Probably not. Is there a good way to decide whether you should be doing or not? I doubt it. I think what really happens is you start going down that road and there’s a point where you can’t turn back.
Just being curious, what are you doing now, and what were your interests before?
I work on non-computationalist approaches to cognitive science (i.e., embodied, dynamical, ecological). I used to pursue interests in all manner of things, including art, movies and games.
Thanks! That sounds interesting, will we see a LW post describing your progress?
Thanks, your statements align very well with my anticipations. I don’t expect this to be easy, and I don’t know exactly what I should be doing, but I know I really want to figure it out.
A couple of years ago, I’d side with Anna. Today, I’m more inclined to agree with you. As I learned the hard way, intrinsic motivation is extremely important for me.
(Long story short: I have a more than decent disposable income, which I earned by following my “little quirky interests”. I could use this income for direct regular donations, but instead I decided to invest it, along with my time, in a potentially money-making project I had little intrinsic motivation for. I’m still evaluating the results, but so far it’s likely that I’ll make intrinsic motivation mandatory for all my future endeavors.)
My trouble is that my “little quirky interests” are all I really want to do. It can be a bit hard to focus on all the things that must get done when I’d much rather be working on something totally unrelated to my “work”.
I’m not sure how to solve that.
Indeed. Humans in general aren’t good at trying to be utility-function-satisfying machines.
The question you’re asking is “is there life before death?”