My take is that visionary engineers tend to start by imagining an interesting mechanism they could build, and then hunting for inspiring justifications so that people will give them the resources to do it.
Facebook, space colonies, neurolink, and OpenAI all sort of fit the bill.
There’s a trust that technology is usually good, and that the hard thing is to find an interesting mechanism, coordinate, inspire, and accomplish building it. Once done, people will find uses for it. At least the sales team will find clients, anyway.
Engineering is, in what I’ve experienced as the culture of engineers, the process of realizing the things that can be build.
World betterment happens on its own, because technology is usually good. If not, can be debugged or improved with further technology.
I think this is true-ish. It’s really pretty hard to imagine a novel mechanism that has any utility at all, and get it working. Especially if you need lots of money and other people to work with you.
In a way, it’s even better to lean on a simple story you can think up in 10 minutes to justify your project. Because that’s how much time your funders will spend. And the public. And regulators. There’s a strong short-term incentive to pursue projects that seem best after the least amount of thought.
The long term is made out of a series of short terms.
Of course, we know the failure modes. Externalities, existential threats, hijacking of human psychology, and regulatory capture are a few.
But if you want to understand the reason why engineers act this way, perhaps one place to start is by imagining that tractable, interesting, juicy ideas in a person’s skill set are not very fungible and pretty uncommon.
If you then wanted to better steer these sorts of decisions, how would you do that? How would you get the engineers on board?
I think that 80,000 Hours helps to demonstrate that with reasonable evidence and thought, it’s possible to inform smart people (including engineers) to do more valuable things.
A big issue is that there’s just a dearth of decent information out there. I think that if this can be remedied, things will continue to improve. This includes the fact that many of these flimsy theories are much worse than I think a lot of people assume. If people can help point that out, I’d expect there would be less public reliance on them.
80,000 Hours does seem like a relevant reference class here, and they’ve certainly had an important impact in pushing me away from my original career plans into something I think is more high-impact.
Another example might be Project Drawdown, which publishes “a how-to guide for employees pushing for sweeping climate action and includes EIGHT KEY LEVERAGE POINTS to help the world reach drawdown.”
A third is the SENS foundation, which argues for an anti-aging strategy.
80k thinks about causes on the highest level, as opposed to Project Drawdown (climate change focused) or SENS (aging/health focused).
So there seems to be support for your vision. Many other people seem to believe that it’s high-leverage to concentrate on helping engineers choose impactful projects.
One difference between your vision and all of these approaches is that you’re focused primarily on a negative approach, knocking down flimsy pet theories. By contrast, 80k, Project Drawdown, SENS, and most other examples of this sort of project focus on a positive approach, highlighting the projects and cause areas they think are most important.
There are certainly some examples of a negative approach within, say, 80k or Givewell. Usually, it’s a motivating example (i.e. PlayPumps), or a targeted argument (i.e. 80k’s articles against the impact of becoming a doctor). These can be valuable, of course! It’s just not the majority of the public-facing material in these examples. Though I expect that all these organizations have a big pile of investigations they’ve done of charities, causes, and interventions that they’ve looked into and ultimately concluded are not worth highlighting.
So if we’re using 80k as a reference class, it may be ultimately necessary to also create and focus on a positive agenda for the information you’re presenting. What sorts of engineering projects are important, tractable, and neglected?
One difference between your vision and all of these approaches is that you’re focused primarily on a negative approach, knocking down flimsy pet theories. By contrast, 80k, Project Drawdown, SENS, and most other examples of this sort of project focus on a positive approach, highlighting the projects and cause areas they think are most important.
Agreed. I see the pattern here “flimsy ideas, enormous initiatives” as clear examples of large-scale failures. The solutions that these problems hint at are another important conversation.
So if we’re using 80k as a reference class, it may be ultimately necessary to also create and focus on a positive agenda for the information you’re presenting. What sorts of engineering projects are important, tractable, and neglected?
Also agreed. I think a lot of EA analysis now would ideally be used to help inspire future altruistic programs. (Charity Entrepreneurship as perhaps the most obvious example). I think that we’ll be seeing more work like this over the next few years.
My take is that visionary engineers tend to start by imagining an interesting mechanism they could build, and then hunting for inspiring justifications so that people will give them the resources to do it.
Facebook, space colonies, neurolink, and OpenAI all sort of fit the bill.
There’s a trust that technology is usually good, and that the hard thing is to find an interesting mechanism, coordinate, inspire, and accomplish building it. Once done, people will find uses for it. At least the sales team will find clients, anyway.
Engineering is, in what I’ve experienced as the culture of engineers, the process of realizing the things that can be build.
World betterment happens on its own, because technology is usually good. If not, can be debugged or improved with further technology.
I think this is true-ish. It’s really pretty hard to imagine a novel mechanism that has any utility at all, and get it working. Especially if you need lots of money and other people to work with you.
In a way, it’s even better to lean on a simple story you can think up in 10 minutes to justify your project. Because that’s how much time your funders will spend. And the public. And regulators. There’s a strong short-term incentive to pursue projects that seem best after the least amount of thought.
The long term is made out of a series of short terms.
Of course, we know the failure modes. Externalities, existential threats, hijacking of human psychology, and regulatory capture are a few.
But if you want to understand the reason why engineers act this way, perhaps one place to start is by imagining that tractable, interesting, juicy ideas in a person’s skill set are not very fungible and pretty uncommon.
If you then wanted to better steer these sorts of decisions, how would you do that? How would you get the engineers on board?
I think that 80,000 Hours helps to demonstrate that with reasonable evidence and thought, it’s possible to inform smart people (including engineers) to do more valuable things.
A big issue is that there’s just a dearth of decent information out there. I think that if this can be remedied, things will continue to improve. This includes the fact that many of these flimsy theories are much worse than I think a lot of people assume. If people can help point that out, I’d expect there would be less public reliance on them.
80,000 Hours does seem like a relevant reference class here, and they’ve certainly had an important impact in pushing me away from my original career plans into something I think is more high-impact.
Another example might be Project Drawdown, which publishes “a how-to guide for employees pushing for sweeping climate action and includes EIGHT KEY LEVERAGE POINTS to help the world reach drawdown.”
A third is the SENS foundation, which argues for an anti-aging strategy.
80k thinks about causes on the highest level, as opposed to Project Drawdown (climate change focused) or SENS (aging/health focused).
So there seems to be support for your vision. Many other people seem to believe that it’s high-leverage to concentrate on helping engineers choose impactful projects.
One difference between your vision and all of these approaches is that you’re focused primarily on a negative approach, knocking down flimsy pet theories. By contrast, 80k, Project Drawdown, SENS, and most other examples of this sort of project focus on a positive approach, highlighting the projects and cause areas they think are most important.
There are certainly some examples of a negative approach within, say, 80k or Givewell. Usually, it’s a motivating example (i.e. PlayPumps), or a targeted argument (i.e. 80k’s articles against the impact of becoming a doctor). These can be valuable, of course! It’s just not the majority of the public-facing material in these examples. Though I expect that all these organizations have a big pile of investigations they’ve done of charities, causes, and interventions that they’ve looked into and ultimately concluded are not worth highlighting.
So if we’re using 80k as a reference class, it may be ultimately necessary to also create and focus on a positive agenda for the information you’re presenting. What sorts of engineering projects are important, tractable, and neglected?
Agreed. I see the pattern here “flimsy ideas, enormous initiatives” as clear examples of large-scale failures. The solutions that these problems hint at are another important conversation.
Also agreed. I think a lot of EA analysis now would ideally be used to help inspire future altruistic programs. (Charity Entrepreneurship as perhaps the most obvious example). I think that we’ll be seeing more work like this over the next few years.