I have a model that there’s something like a Pareto distribution where 20% of the people in a field contribute to 80% of the Actually Important advances, and of those advances about 80% of those people are a further 20% split of people who are deliberately and strategically choosing fields such that they can rationally expect to make advances. This implies that for instance in climate change, there will be ~4% of people who have actually done a fermi estimate of their impact on climate change that will contribute ~64% of the relevant advances in the field.
One thing you can say is that this is awful, and you really would like to have a field without this ridiculous distribution, and try to tell people to really wait to go into this field so they can contribute to Actually Important things. But it seems like there’s a lot of countervailing forces preventing this, including the status incentive of saying “this is a field only for people who work on “Actually Important things.” If your timelines are really short, you might not be worried about this, but it does seem like something to worry about over a decade or so of putting this message out in a specific field.
The other way to handle it would be to expect the Pareto distribution to happen because most people just aren’t strategic about their careers, and do rationalize. The goal in that case is to just try and grow the field as much as possible, and know that some small percentage of the people who go into the field will be strategic thinkers who will contribute quite a bit. Not only does this strategy seem to actually capture the pattern of fields that have grown and made significant advances in solving problems, but it also has the benefit of getting the additional ~36% of Actually Important advances that come from people who aren’t strategically trying to create impact.
I have a model that there’s something like a Pareto distribution where 20% of the people in a field contribute to 80% of the Actually Important advances, and of those advances about 80% of those people are a further 20% split of people who are deliberately and strategically choosing fields such that they can rationally expect to make advances. This implies that for instance in climate change, there will be ~4% of people who have actually done a fermi estimate of their impact on climate change that will contribute ~64% of the relevant advances in the field.
One thing you can say is that this is awful, and you really would like to have a field without this ridiculous distribution, and try to tell people to really wait to go into this field so they can contribute to Actually Important things. But it seems like there’s a lot of countervailing forces preventing this, including the status incentive of saying “this is a field only for people who work on “Actually Important things.” If your timelines are really short, you might not be worried about this, but it does seem like something to worry about over a decade or so of putting this message out in a specific field.
The other way to handle it would be to expect the Pareto distribution to happen because most people just aren’t strategic about their careers, and do rationalize. The goal in that case is to just try and grow the field as much as possible, and know that some small percentage of the people who go into the field will be strategic thinkers who will contribute quite a bit. Not only does this strategy seem to actually capture the pattern of fields that have grown and made significant advances in solving problems, but it also has the benefit of getting the additional ~36% of Actually Important advances that come from people who aren’t strategically trying to create impact.