I think you’re right locally, but I’d limit it to “easier and safer” in one way. I’d say the bigger overall risk by far is doing ambitious, harder to evaluate work.
Your point is valid, but it’s a one-sided argument. So I’m going to fill in a little of the other side.
Funding is a large and fairly obvious countervailing risk steering people away from doing more ambitious, broader work intended to address the whole difficult problem. Funding for safety work has been heavily to severely biased toward technical work in recent years, probably primarily because it’s easier to gauge success in that type of work.
I agree that there can be motivated reasoning for doing work that’s non-technical and therefore not vulnerable to obvious and outright failure. But there are strong arguments for not doing more legible things just because they’re more legible.
It’s not impossible to gauge the success of work aiming at solving big problems, it’s just a bit harder than judging success of narrow technical work.
To state the strong form: we will individually be taking on real, easily measurable challenges and making measurable progress if we all rearrange deck chairs under the streetlight. That doesn’t make it a good idea. Good work needs to have a good chance to actually shift the future. Evaluating whether it does is a large part of the challenge.
I think you’re right locally, but I’d limit it to “easier and safer” in one way. I’d say the bigger overall risk by far is doing ambitious, harder to evaluate work.
Your point is valid, but it’s a one-sided argument. So I’m going to fill in a little of the other side.
Funding is a large and fairly obvious countervailing risk steering people away from doing more ambitious, broader work intended to address the whole difficult problem. Funding for safety work has been heavily to severely biased toward technical work in recent years, probably primarily because it’s easier to gauge success in that type of work.
I agree that there can be motivated reasoning for doing work that’s non-technical and therefore not vulnerable to obvious and outright failure. But there are strong arguments for not doing more legible things just because they’re more legible.
It’s not impossible to gauge the success of work aiming at solving big problems, it’s just a bit harder than judging success of narrow technical work.
To state the strong form: we will individually be taking on real, easily measurable challenges and making measurable progress if we all rearrange deck chairs under the streetlight. That doesn’t make it a good idea. Good work needs to have a good chance to actually shift the future. Evaluating whether it does is a large part of the challenge.