A longer quote, for context, with the relevant passage highlighted:
Crunch time
We find ourselves in a thicket of strategic complexity, surrounded by a dense
mist of uncertainty. Though many considerations have been discerned, their
details and interrelationships remain unclear and iffy—and there might be
other factors we have not even thought of yet. What are we to do in this
predicament?
Philosophy with a deadline
A colleague of mine likes to point out that a Fields Medal (the highest honor in
mathematics) indicates two things about the recipient: that he was capable of
accomplishing something important, and that he didn’t. Though harsh, the remark
hints at a truth.
Think of a “discovery” as an act that moves the arrival of information from a later
point in time to an earlier time. The discovery’s value does not equal the value of the
information discovered but rather the value of having the information available
earlier than it otherwise would have been. A scientist or a mathematician may show
great skill by being the first to find a solution that has eluded many others; yet if the
problem would soon have been solved anyway, then the work probably has not much
benefited the world. There are cases in which having a solution even slightly sooner
is immensely valuable, but this is most plausible when the solution is immediately
put to use, either being deployed for some practical end or serving as a foundation to
further theoretical work. And in the latter case, where a solution is immediately used
only in the sense of serving as a building block for further theorizing, there is great
value in obtaining a solution slightly sooner only if the further work it enables is
itself both important and urgent.1
The question, then, is not whether the result discovered by the Fields Medalist is
in itself “important” (whether instrumentally or for knowledge’s own sake). Rather,
the question is whether it was important that the medalist enabled the publication of
the result to occur at an earlier date. The value of this temporal transport should be
compared to the value that a world-class mathematical mind could have generated
by working on something else. At least in some cases, the Fields Medal might
indicate a life spent solving the wrong problem—for instance, a problem whose
allure consisted primarily in being famously difficult to solve.
Similar barbs could be directed at other fields, such as academic philosophy.
I agree that in this case Bostrom is at best misguided.
EDIT: he clarifies later:
We could postpone work on some of the eternal questions for a little
while, delegating that task to our hopefully more competent successors—in order to
focus our own attention on a more pressing challenge: increasing the chance that we
will actually have competent successors. This would be high-impact philosophy and
high-impact mathematics.
His error, in my view, is assuming the fungibility of the two.
A longer quote, for context, with the relevant passage highlighted:
I agree that in this case Bostrom is at best misguided.
EDIT: he clarifies later:
His error, in my view, is assuming the fungibility of the two.