I’m glad you brought this up. I actually anticipated this question and wrote up a responses in an earlier draft of this article but it didn’t end up making the final cut because it’s more my intuitive opinion rather than a well-established fact.
Most people capable of following this analysis without throwing their hands up in confusion or reacting to it emotionally are probably on life auto-pilot [see Concern 1 below] and optimizing heavily for prestige at the expense of all other goals. They want to be a Professor, Doctor, Software Engineer… something that impresses other people (and perhaps more importantly, impresses themselves). Sure, they don’t say it like that, but when you confront them with an opportunity like this to earn more real money and have a better overall job experience, in a way that doesn’t include the same kind of prestige they were aiming for, they suddenly have all these interesting objections (link false objection) about why it couldn’t work for them.
[Concern 1]
Some people are probably thinking, “But why not combine the thing you do for money with your intellectual pursuits??” What can I say. The economy is dumb. If the value you’re creating doesn’t exist in the next fiscal quarter (or at least the next 1-5 years), our economy doesn’t value it. Since good ideas are essentially free to transmit forward into the future indefinitely, the total value of your good ideas are more heavily concentrated in 2016 − 3000, not in 2011-2015. Unfortunately, that same period of time that gets the majority of value from your good ideas isn’t part of the “long term” economic time horizon of 5 years from now so it gets discounted down to zero. So you shouldn’t be surprised to find that there are far fewer employment opportunities for pursuing intellectual careers than people who are capable of carrying out highly valuable careers doing intellectual work. In fact, it seems like the few jobs that do exist for “intellectual pursuits” like professorships and think tank work are basically economic mistakes which are primarily funded as a way to gain status from new ideas, not to create economic value from them. Are you sure you want to marry your financial well-being to the availability of these scarce, arbitrary, economic mistakes?
Personally, I’m still hoping to create economic value from new ideas. If that doesn’t work, of course I’ll need money, and I’ll try to remember to be flexible.
I prefer to work on things that interest me intellectually. This is worth more to me than any wage. Service labor does not interest me. How does this economic disparity aid a rationalist who has desires other than money?
I think his reply actually does address this, claiming that maximizing the interesting things you can do intellectually is best achieved by making a lot of money in a simple and not time-consuming or stressful way, and using the rest of your time to do those other things.
I think this claim might even be valid for some people, but for me (and possibly you) it isn’t. See my other post. If neither of those considerations apply, then part-time service labor might actually be the best way to work on things that interest you intellectually.
I’m glad you brought this up. I actually anticipated this question and wrote up a responses in an earlier draft of this article but it didn’t end up making the final cut because it’s more my intuitive opinion rather than a well-established fact.
Personally, I’m still hoping to create economic value from new ideas. If that doesn’t work, of course I’ll need money, and I’ll try to remember to be flexible.
You haven’t addressed the main issue:
I prefer to work on things that interest me intellectually. This is worth more to me than any wage. Service labor does not interest me. How does this economic disparity aid a rationalist who has desires other than money?
I think his reply actually does address this, claiming that maximizing the interesting things you can do intellectually is best achieved by making a lot of money in a simple and not time-consuming or stressful way, and using the rest of your time to do those other things.
I think this claim might even be valid for some people, but for me (and possibly you) it isn’t. See my other post. If neither of those considerations apply, then part-time service labor might actually be the best way to work on things that interest you intellectually.