Recycling an email I wrote in a Existential Risk Reduction Career Network discussion. The topic looked at various career options, specifically with an eye towards accumulating wealth—the two major fields recognized being finance and software development.
Frank Adamek enquired as to my (flippant) vanilla latte comments, which revealed a personal blind-spot. Namely, that my default assumption for people with an interest in accumulating wealth is that they’re motivated by an interest in improving the quality of their own life (e.g., expensive gadgets, etc.).
I should know—especially in X-Risk Network context—that wealth accumulation is not necessarily predominantly selfish, and that instead wealth can be an effective multiplier to benefit positive futures. Thanks for mentioning this Frank.
The motivation for copying this email here is two-fold.
One, what else can further rational critic of my own rants teach me?
Two, I’ve lurked in this community for a long time, but can’t muster gusto to contribute. The quality-bar for top-level posts is well beyond my thinking and writing skills. Which is great, because it means I get to learn and grow. But there’s a flip-side, which is the gap between Less Wrong discourse and that of my day-to-day interaction with friends, family, and coworkers. I don’t have a solution to this, but perhaps an increase in open-thread comment mediocrity helps close the gap.
Ugh, probably not. Alas, here goes—posted as a reply to myself, because of comment-length limits.
A number of people mention this one way or another, but an explicit search for “local maximum” doesn’t match any specific comment—so I wanted to throw it out here.
Wireheading is very likely to put oneself in a local maximum of bliss. Though a wirehead may not care or even ponder about whether or not there exist greater maxima, it’s a consideration that I’d take into account prior to wiring up.
Unless one is omniscient, the act of a permanent (-ish) state of wireheading means foregoing the possibility of discovering a greater point of wireheaded happiness.
I guess the very definition of wireheadedness bakes in the notion that you wouldn’t care about that anymore—good for those taking the plunge and hooking up I suppose. Personally, the universe would have to throw me an above average amount of negative derivates before I’d say enough is enough, screw potential for higher maxima, I’ll take this one...