Most of this matches my experience pretty well. I think I had my best ideas during phases (others seem to agree) when I was unusually low on guilt- and obligation-driven EA/impact-focused motivation and was just playfully exploring ideas for fun and out of curiosity.
One problem with letting your research/ideas be guided by impact-focused thinking is that you basically train your mind to immediately ask yourself after entertaining a certain idea for a few seconds “well, is that actually impactful?”. And basically all of the time, the answer is “well, probably not”. This makes you disinclined to further explore the neighboring idea space.
However, even really useful ideas / research angles start out being somewhat unpromising and full of hurdles and problems and need a lot of refinement. If you allow yourself to just explore idea space for fun, you might overcome these problems and stumble on something truly promising. But if you had been in an “obsessing about maximizing impact” mindset you would have given up too soon because, in this mindset, spending hours or even days without having any impact feels too terrible to keep going.
Great post, thanks for writing!
Most of this matches my experience pretty well. I think I had my best ideas during phases (others seem to agree) when I was unusually low on guilt- and obligation-driven EA/impact-focused motivation and was just playfully exploring ideas for fun and out of curiosity.
One problem with letting your research/ideas be guided by impact-focused thinking is that you basically train your mind to immediately ask yourself after entertaining a certain idea for a few seconds “well, is that actually impactful?”. And basically all of the time, the answer is “well, probably not”. This makes you disinclined to further explore the neighboring idea space.
However, even really useful ideas / research angles start out being somewhat unpromising and full of hurdles and problems and need a lot of refinement. If you allow yourself to just explore idea space for fun, you might overcome these problems and stumble on something truly promising. But if you had been in an “obsessing about maximizing impact” mindset you would have given up too soon because, in this mindset, spending hours or even days without having any impact feels too terrible to keep going.