The Biggest Innovations Are Adaptive
People pursue goals. And depending on context, such goals may promote the adaptiveness of those people and their cultures to a larger or smaller degree. Each human goal is the result of cultural evolution, and thus at some point implicitly represented a bet by a culture that this goal could help that culture to be more adaptive. But even if a goal was once adaptive, it might, for a while, live on past the point at which it is actually adaptive for that culture.
Besides helping them to accumulate land, capital, population, attention, and prestige, the main way that your actions can help your descendants is by helping them to accumulate innovations. And each innovation has some scope, outside of which it is much less helpful.
For example, if you find an abstraction mainly improves only functional programming, that will help your descendants who use functional programming, but not so much others. If your innovation improves only rotary engines, but not other engines, it will no longer be helpful after the use of rotary engines ends.
The more general is your innovation, and the larger its scope, the more helpful it will be. The more that descendants should celebrate your innovation, and the prouder you should be of it. So try to innovate with larger scopes, that will last longer and be more widely useful.
An innovation that is tied to a specific goal, and helps to achieve it, but not so much to achieve other goals, is limited in scope. The value of that innovation will go away when that goal goes away. Yes, to the extent that you strongly hold that goal as your goal, you may be more strongly motivated to find innovations to promote it, relative to innovations that promote adaption more generally. But know that you are choosing a more limited scope.
Cultural evolution endowed you with habits and goals in order to try to make your culture and its elements more adaptive. And none of your goals can be promoted very far into the future unless there are creatures in that future who hold them, and can thus promote them there. And that won’t happen unless those creature are sufficiently adaptive. So to pursue any goal into the future, you need to be adaptive enough, relative to its competition.
But in addition realize that innovations tied to goals other than adaptiveness have, as a result, a more narrow scope. All else equal, they will influence the future less, and be celebrated less by it. And they will less help your descendants pursue all the goals that you share with them.
“The value of that innovation will go away when that goal goes away.”
Hmmm…
You seem deliberately to be avoiding the compounding effects of the growth of wealth.
Yes, ceteris paribus, what you write is true. But ceteris is rarely paribus.
I’m just restating the Cowen Stubborn Attachments thesis, really. The best thing we can do for our descendants is sustainably grow what makes us all wealthy.
So a “rocket booster” that only adds value for 50 years, but makes society fantastically more productive and wealthy during those 50 years, likely is much more valuable over the next, say, 500 years than something which delivers less value the first 50 but continues to add non-zero value “forever”.
This is not to deny the value of “adaptiveness”, since I fully agree that adaptiveness is necessary for delivering “sustainable”.
I don't think I agree with this (or at least I don't fully understand). The best innovation is adaptive - yes. But goals are just a mechanism. It is quite feasible to create an innovation in pursuit of a narrow goal that turns out to have wide application. It is also possible to innovate without any goal to pursue.