Positive vs. Optimal
I’ve been thinking a little lately about the difference between doing something useful, and doing the most useful thing. The latter is a lot harder, yet a lot more productive. I wonder if this is a basic area of human irrationality. I think you can classify a lot of the bad arguments that get made for things like the bailout of banks, or of car companies, as people saying “Here is why this money would help these companies”, and missing out on “But it would help the rest of the world (like, companies that are profitable) even more”.
Normally I rail against zero-sum thinking, the belief that we’re just dividing up a fixed pie. But in the short-term, the inputs to producing happiness are constrained. I only have 24 hours in the day. The GDP of the US is only so much. We’re investing those resources to produce even more resources – but the inputs at this stage are fixed. We can’t invest in every positive-sum project. When you are figuring out what to do with these constrained inputs, you need to balance your use against *every other possible use* (or more specifically, the best alternative use). (This is nerve-wracking and tortuous, but you don’t actually have to do it that well – if you just do a decent job, you’ll be doing way better than someone who just does whatever positive projects happen to catch their attention.)
I think this connects to important topics at the micro and the macro level. Personal productivity techniques like Eat That Frog or Big Rocks are based on fighting our inclination to do what seems urgent, and instead doing what is optimal. I know I have a lot of trouble getting distracted by small urgent things, rather than doing the core, important work, and it seems to be a general problem. Our intuition is a terrible task prioritizer. And much of the erroneous analysis about the benefits of regulation has to do with ignoring the invisible (the best alternative use of the resources), as Henry Hazlitt so eloquently writes. Our intuition seizes on the visible consequences, and has trouble seeing the subtle, distributed, unrealized, un-proposed alternatives.
Which suggests a technique for overcoming this, at both the personal and professional levels. Try to always present alternatives. Reify the other options – or your mind will focus on whether your proposal does net good, rather than the most good with its limited resources.
What I mean by "the most useful thing" is, by definition, the most productive - that which will advance your goals the most for the least effort. Sure, costs in determining that matter. But it's almost tautological that that's what is best to work on.
But it's not generally possible to determine what will actually advance your goals.
Imagine for a moment Queen Victoria had established an overarching goal, "produce a means of communication that will permit Us to send Our Voice to all corners of the empire", and given it to her scientists and engineers.
How much progress would they have made?
Now, consider the equations produced by J.C. Maxwell. There were no indications ahead of time that his interest in electromagneticism would produce such a powerful result - a result that was instrumental in the eventual production of the radio, a device which fits Victoria's requirements to the tee.
You can't determine what the benefits of funding basic research will be. Yet doing so was the best way to reach the hypothetical goal, not funding research into the goal directly, which almost certainly would have produced a greatly inferior method within the bounds of then-known principles.
Aiming at the target is often the worst way to hit it.
I'm surprised the claim needs defending. You're not much of a rationalist, then. All claims need defending. Some can be defended with trivial effort, some require a great deal more - but ALL require it.
It seems to me that when people start to aspire to do the most useful thing rather than just a useful thing with their limited resources without having serious hang-ups that prevent them from doing things that are too weird, they fairly reliably end up on my team sooner rather than later. I'm sure that organizational design techniques and experience motivating radical autonomy and independence from existing institutions will prove valuable in the sorts of IA efforts that FAI work and especially safe MNT development will need.
Welcome Aboard Patri!