but is relaxing and having “fun” necessarily better than intellectual stimulation and learning from challenges? And won’t experiences like that speed up self-discovery?
I think it speeds up self-discovery, at the expense of narrowing the domain within which that self-discovery takes place. So if you spend a lot of time as a teenager developing software, you certainly learn more about yourself in terms of your aptitude for developing software. But there’s an opportunity cost. I favour unguided self-discovery (a.k.a. “having fun”) for longer, because I view self-discovery during teenage years as a global optimization, for which algorithms like simulated annealing tend to find better optima with a higher temperature, albeit taking longer to do so. As a result, I do not favour cutting short ‘childhood’ so people can be ‘useful’ sooner.
Also, it may be well be that the LessWrong demographic favours intellectual stimulation as “better” than many other things, but for the general population, I don’t see evidence this is the case. I know plenty of highly satisfied people, not driven by intellectual stimulation but nonetheless doing things most would regard as valuable to society. But yes, this comes down to subjective philosophy on what is “better” in terms of one’s own utility function, and what we should be optimising for.
I’d argue that working earlier and having fun are not necessarily mutually exclusive—for example, look at university life. There are a lot of students doing research and other work, while participating in probably the strongest self-discovery of their lives. I also don’t think specialization has a significant impact on what forms of self-discovery someone can engage in—software engineering covers a broad variety of things, from working with people to problem solving to time management to creativity and pitching your work
I think it speeds up self-discovery, at the expense of narrowing the domain within which that self-discovery takes place. So if you spend a lot of time as a teenager developing software, you certainly learn more about yourself in terms of your aptitude for developing software. But there’s an opportunity cost. I favour unguided self-discovery (a.k.a. “having fun”) for longer, because I view self-discovery during teenage years as a global optimization, for which algorithms like simulated annealing tend to find better optima with a higher temperature, albeit taking longer to do so. As a result, I do not favour cutting short ‘childhood’ so people can be ‘useful’ sooner.
Also, it may be well be that the LessWrong demographic favours intellectual stimulation as “better” than many other things, but for the general population, I don’t see evidence this is the case. I know plenty of highly satisfied people, not driven by intellectual stimulation but nonetheless doing things most would regard as valuable to society. But yes, this comes down to subjective philosophy on what is “better” in terms of one’s own utility function, and what we should be optimising for.
I’d argue that working earlier and having fun are not necessarily mutually exclusive—for example, look at university life. There are a lot of students doing research and other work, while participating in probably the strongest self-discovery of their lives. I also don’t think specialization has a significant impact on what forms of self-discovery someone can engage in—software engineering covers a broad variety of things, from working with people to problem solving to time management to creativity and pitching your work