This doesn’t quite feel right to me. From another section:
Age is another factor which the physicists particularly worry about. They always are saying that you have got to do it when you are young or you will never do it. Einstein did things very early, and all the quantum mechanic fellows were disgustingly young when they did their best work. Most mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists do what we consider their best work when they are young. It is not that they don’t do good work in their old age but what we value most is often what they did early. On the other hand, in music, politics and literature, often what we consider their best work was done late. I don’t know how whatever field you are in fits this scale, but age has some effect.
But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.
So this is clearly not about professional success, because he points to professional success as a thing that kills the kind of greatness he’s trying to cultivate in people.
My impression is that he was genuinely pointing at “important” meaning “things that will have an impact”, just that tractability matters as much as as importance-if-you-solve-the-problem, which is why “teleportation” isn’t a good project.
He points to thinking about the important problems as causing success. When people change what they are doing, then they don’t continue to have it:
In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work.
Carrying on from the end of your section:
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren’t good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
The talk is about things that cause people to do great work. When those causal factors change, the work output also changes. He goes on to cover other things which are about professional success:
Working with an open office door, to talk to your coworkers
Changing routine work into more general and important work, which is more satisfying
The importance of self-promotion
Working on presentation skills
How to recruit your boss to fight with outside agencies
How to get your boss to give you more resources
Dressing for success, and getting punished for non-conformity
Lastly, he is pretty specific about his motivations (emphasis mine):
I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.
So he is specifically talking about professional success in science. But—things like the rationality project and EA are good candidates for other fields to which the advice could be applied, especially in light of how important science is to them.
This doesn’t quite feel right to me. From another section:
So this is clearly not about professional success, because he points to professional success as a thing that kills the kind of greatness he’s trying to cultivate in people.
My impression is that he was genuinely pointing at “important” meaning “things that will have an impact”, just that tractability matters as much as as importance-if-you-solve-the-problem, which is why “teleportation” isn’t a good project.
I read this section completely differently.
He points to thinking about the important problems as causing success. When people change what they are doing, then they don’t continue to have it:
Carrying on from the end of your section:
The talk is about things that cause people to do great work. When those causal factors change, the work output also changes. He goes on to cover other things which are about professional success:
Working with an open office door, to talk to your coworkers
Changing routine work into more general and important work, which is more satisfying
The importance of self-promotion
Working on presentation skills
How to recruit your boss to fight with outside agencies
How to get your boss to give you more resources
Dressing for success, and getting punished for non-conformity
Lastly, he is pretty specific about his motivations (emphasis mine):
So he is specifically talking about professional success in science. But—things like the rationality project and EA are good candidates for other fields to which the advice could be applied, especially in light of how important science is to them.