It seems plausible to me that funness could be a mechanism driving usefulness, simply because it would be more motivating and hence would simply be more likely to cause things to get done well.
Yes, I was thinking the same. In cases where there is no order-of-magnitude differences in utility funness might be a good heuristic, since the fun things are more likely to get done.
I think in reality the difference in utility ranges across many orders of magnitude, whereas funness does not change nearly as much. I used to be convinced that research outside of pure math/CS would be incredibly boring, but it turns out that work in basically any field that is trying to solve problems we don’t know how to solve is quite fun. Do I think that machine learning is more interesting than synthetic biology? Yes, but not enough that if Paul convinced me that synthetic biology research was more useful at the margins I wouldn’t switch.
It seems plausible to me that funness could be a mechanism driving usefulness, simply because it would be more motivating and hence would simply be more likely to cause things to get done well.
Yes, I was thinking the same. In cases where there is no order-of-magnitude differences in utility funness might be a good heuristic, since the fun things are more likely to get done.
I think in reality the difference in utility ranges across many orders of magnitude, whereas funness does not change nearly as much. I used to be convinced that research outside of pure math/CS would be incredibly boring, but it turns out that work in basically any field that is trying to solve problems we don’t know how to solve is quite fun. Do I think that machine learning is more interesting than synthetic biology? Yes, but not enough that if Paul convinced me that synthetic biology research was more useful at the margins I wouldn’t switch.