Great post! Was just thinking about an intuition pump of my own re: EV earlier today, and it has a similar backdrop, of vaccine development. Also, you gave me a line with which to lead into it:
The work I do doesn’t end up helping other researchers get closer to coming up with a cure.
Oh but it could have helped! It probably does (but there are exceptions like if your work is heavily misguided to the degree that nobody would have worked on it, or is gated).
By doing the work and showing it doesn’t lead to a cure, you’re freeing someone else who would have done that work to do some other work instead. Assuming they would still be searching for a cure, you’ve increased the probability that the remaining researchers do in fact find a cure.
I encounter “in 99.9% of worlds, I end up making no progress” a lot in my work, and I offer in its place that it is important and valuable to chase down many different bets to their conclusions, that the vaccine is not developed by a single party alone in isolation from all the knowledge being generated around them, but through the collected efforts of thousands of failed attempts from as many groups. The victor can claim only the lion’s share of the credit, not all of it; every (plausible) failed attempted gets some part of the value generated from the endeavour as a whole, even ex post.
Great post! Was just thinking about an intuition pump of my own re: EV earlier today, and it has a similar backdrop, of vaccine development. Also, you gave me a line with which to lead into it:
Oh but it could have helped! It probably does (but there are exceptions like if your work is heavily misguided to the degree that nobody would have worked on it, or is gated).
By doing the work and showing it doesn’t lead to a cure, you’re freeing someone else who would have done that work to do some other work instead. Assuming they would still be searching for a cure, you’ve increased the probability that the remaining researchers do in fact find a cure.
I encounter “in 99.9% of worlds, I end up making no progress” a lot in my work, and I offer in its place that it is important and valuable to chase down many different bets to their conclusions, that the vaccine is not developed by a single party alone in isolation from all the knowledge being generated around them, but through the collected efforts of thousands of failed attempts from as many groups. The victor can claim only the lion’s share of the credit, not all of it; every (plausible) failed attempted gets some part of the value generated from the endeavour as a whole, even ex post.