Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
In other words, how do you decide between what you want to work on and what should be worked on?
I've been stuck with trying to figure what to do with the rest of my life. I can't decide whether I should be working on what I want to work on (Energy, AI) or whether I should work on what I believe should be worked on (Healthcare).
It's a short life, so I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any future regrets. Because I can't decide on this, I end up not getting anything done. Time continues to march on, while I'm still stuck with not knowing what to do.
Has anyone had any experience with this before? If yes, then what and how did you make your decision? What was the outcome? Is there a middle ground or silver lining, where you managed to work on both cases?
459 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] thread1. How about AI for Healthcare?
2. I don't believe you can do great work in an area you're not personally excited about. So, if the thought of spending the next 30 years working in the healthcare sector is not exciting to you at the moment, then, chances are that if you were to pick this path, you'd be OK at it at best, and that's not good enough to make any difference on a larger scale.
Medicine is the killer app for AI, and yet not nearly enough people are working on it. I suspect it has something to do with the relative difficulty in accessing data (although this is changing), and the relatively lower pay compared to working at Google, Facebook et al. But in my opinion, if you're the sort of person who's searching for meaning and opportunity, this is the place to be.
Full disclosure: I work in AI for healthcare.
I won't work on things I fundamentally disagree with but what's important to me is life outside of work. I try to maximise my income and the availability of non-work time.
As a contractor this is what I get to do, make a packet and take a few months off here and there.
People with a drive to achieve in a particular area may be after a different sort of satisfaction in life I guess.
It really isn't. I have a great life, and I also get to work on some interesting stuff because I'm good at what I do. I help my clients to deliver, and get satisfaction from that.
> If you had unlimited money, how would you spend your time?
Travelling and seeing the world with other people, in luxury.
If I had more choice I'd choose things that interest and fascinate me anyways and serve some good. This would be (socially beneficial) science and empowering information tools for the web.
¹ https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
² Need a product manager for a cool product? Please let me know.
- big player fin-tec: it only makes numbers grow for rich people
- selling dreams: preying on peoples hopes, knowing they probably won't come true
- broken product: not selling value
- long contract times: just shady
- e-commerce: Coercion in to buying stuff they wouldn't have bough otherwise or simply funneling the money to our clients instead of others. No benefit for society either way. It doesn't even have to be cigarettes, could be butter or anything.
Also, that's not really how regrets work. You will be comparing the path you took to what you imagine to be the roads not taken. It's very dependent on your own unique experiences and outlook, and very hard to safeguard against. Your way of evaluating your life will change over time, so optimising for your current values gives no guarantees. Best thing to work on is stoicism and self forgiveness in my opinion.
Thinking of alternative paths you could have taken might be a fun exercise or could yeild insights to make better future choices, but if you chose the best you could, there is no sense in regretting a choice, even when that choice hurt.
I think of this concept as similar to the excluded middle in logic. In hindsight, a decision is apparently either good or bad depending on the outcome. But it’s impossible to know the outcome with certainty the vast majority of the time. So a decision needs to be judged in the context of the information known at the time of decision - which does not include the information about the decisions outcome.
The value of a decision before uncovering its value is similar to the value of a lottery ticket before the draw. Before the drawing a lottery tickets value is nonzero-the aggregate value of the expected payout. But after the draw the lottery ticket is worth its realized value. When the pre-lotto expected value of the ticket meets or exceeds the cost of the lottery ticket the purchase of the ticket is rational. After the draw, the monetary value of the ticket is whatever the ticket won or did not win. Most likely the value of the ticket is 0$. That doesn’t make the purchase of the ticket irrational before the draw.
By analogy with machine learning, instead of throwing lots of effort at a non-convex problem, you might instead choose a convex problem instead: e.g. what daily process allows you to achieve high problem solving output? what expertise can you acquire and put to use regularly, which is sustainable (no burnout, pays rent, etc)?
You're going to make the biggest contribution if you work in the area where you're relatively better... and being excited about a field makes a hell of a difference in terms of your ability to contribute to that field vs. a field which you think is important but not all that personally interesting.
Regarding personal happiness, consider that how you work is much more important than what you work on.
From their homepage: "You have 80,000 hours in your career. Make the right career choices, and you can help solve the world’s most pressing problems, as well as have a more rewarding, interesting life. We’re here to give you the information you need to find that fulfilling, high-impact career. Our advice is all free, tailored for talented graduates & young professionals, and based on five years of research alongside academics at Oxford."
The 80000 hours podcast can be long winded but is at times also quite interesting.
https://80000hours.org/career-planning-tool/
The EA worldview takes some getting used to though.
Utility for the win! Following your dreams is fun and all, but the risk/reward ratio is just way out there.
Utility is fine. Packing shelves is fine. Do you have time to follow your passion out of work? Can you make your passion pay enough? Most people I've met who gave up on their passion seemed to want praise, fame and/or notoriety rather than the 'art' or whatever they were producing.
Somewhere in here there's the Peter principle that people rise to their highest level of incompetence... it's true in art as well as engineering/business.
My undergrad AI lecturer told us that it was widely "known" AI was soon going to be generally smarter than humans when he was an undergrad. He wasn't convinced evolutionary changes were going to get us there. It was some 15 years ago I was listening to him, probably 20 or more years before that when he was an undergrad. We still seem to be saying it's 10, 20, or some other made up number of years away.
I'm not even sure there's a significant future problem here. Not on the scale of, say, becoming a multi-planetary species or resolving issues with antibiotic resistance.
(That probably has nothing to do with the actual AI Safety problems studied today in regards to pure AIs. But damned if this isn't an important-A-F cousin of the problem.)
This means giving 10% of my income to cost-effective charities that help other individuals is entirely within my means.
Over the years, within the Effective Altruism (EA) community I have met amazing people - devoting their lives to solving important, neglected problems, people who give 50% of their income to help others, and more. I'm consistently inspired by them to do more - and it makes life a thrill.
But it was very anti-climax and frustrating for me when they announced that their problem was to help other people find their problem. Too... comfortable solution I guess, I don't know. Not judging their choice here, just stating that as an expectator, from an entertainment point of view, it was frustrating.
This is something I care quite deeply about so it is the "problem I decided to solve", as OP puts it. I think what we do in professional life will most likely not involve solving meaningful problems, since most industry is not focused on such things (and can't, because it is often the cause). For me, I try to work on political and especially labour issues outside of work, since that seems to me to be the most likely way to achieve significant improvements in society.
The fact that 80000 hours has seemingly never discussed ideas involving labour unions or grassroots political activism but rather focuses on think tanks and other elitist top-down approaches is pretty telling of their neoliberal bent.
Now, if you think you can pull a Nelson Mandela, go for the activist approach, but most people can't, and 80,000 hours is in the business of giving advice to maximize expected utility.
This is also the reason EA gets a lot of hate from various quarters. They take picking your battles to an extreme, and essentially come right out and say that many worthy causes are not the right ones to be fighting for.
Be honest with yourself, balance your desire to do good (utilons) with your need as a human to feel good and recharge your altruism batteries by feeling connected to your good work.
So I think you're asking the right questions but you need to look at it from a slightly different angle.
I'd also agree with you that life is short... But it's also long. You can always switch fields, learn new things, reinvent yourself. There are no rules...
Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. But if your goal is to maximize your output having already accepted that your time on earth is limited, then the wise thing is to probably steer in directions that have high impact but for you feel disproportionately easy (compared to the general population).
Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved".
Archiving, for me, is a way of travelling forward in time. Think about "time capsules" and what not.
Here's what I mean by this: If you write a message on a piece of paper, and read it the next day, your message has successfully traveled forward in time by a day. But as the days pass, the message's survival chances diminish greatly.
The goal of archiving is to give information the highest chances possible to travel forward in time, as long as possible. It's hard to evaluate how good our chances are now, but 2000 years from now, if archaeologists find information on our current society, is it more likely to be the piece of paper you wrote, or an archive that was given the best chances of survival?
It's extremely rewarding and it truly is meaningful. Archive anything. Sort and order it, index it, describe it, upload it. Do it for something you work on. The odds for you to archive something that was not done by anyone else are very high.
Recently added OCR to the process, which makes retrieval a joy.
I have no logical reason for doing this, it feels like a compulsion.
Why do you do it and what tools do you use?
To travel in time :) And also because I believe human knowledge is the sum of the past it can learn from. If information gets lost, it can't be part of that. It's the same beliefs that drive me to support open source & free software.
> what tools do you use?
I do a lot of data-mining as part of my day to day operations, in video games mainly. These are the main things I end up archiving, so I write my own tools.
Largely, this mindset stems from a group of characters in the book "Anathem"[1] named the Lorites, characters who believe that all knowledge which can be learned has already been discovered, and recorded. While this is obviously fiction, and I disagree with the stance as an absolute, the idea that much of what can be discovered may already have been explored has saved me significant time; no longer do I find myself working on a problem only to find it has been studied and solved. Occasionally I'll find problems which have been studied, but not yet solved, and in these situations I'm pleased to have the fruit of others' data-gathering labors at my disposal as a result of the search caused by my initial assumption.
[1]: "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson, speculative fiction: http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite
Access to electricity is a massive problem and the number of people without access is actually projected to increase [1].
We need more people working on the problem and we especially need people from SSA working on it.
We are working to inspire young people and to provide them with the tools and knowledge they need to go and solve the problem of access to electricity. [2]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-popul...
[2] https://localelectricity.org/
I tend to work the other way.
Some day we will have smart homes. How would they look like and how can I work towards that vision? Or, what restricts ubiquity of wearables? In my opinion wireless charging over a considerable distance. Then I contemplate how I would do it. For example embedded in ceiling lights with infrared lasers and a positioning system. And I talk about it in case someone else also finds it an interesting idea, because I've so little time on this planet...
I seriously doubt that. People who have no aptitude in a field, even if they are dedicated, will be competing vs people who are also dedicated, but have the aptitude. I'd say maybe that "almost anyone can reach top 50% of most non-athletic fields", but definitely not top 5%.
Now consider a niche sport, say Ultimate Frisbee. I would guess that much less than 350 million people even know the rules. So invest an hour to learn the rules and play it a little with your friends. Voila, you are in the top 5%. And that is for an athletic sport.
You are probably talking about 5% of the people actively doing it like being registered in an association. In this case, 50% sounds more realistic to me.
At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area.
If anybody could do it and e.g. just 10% did it, then there would be a new 5% (the top 50% of that 10%), and the rest 50% wouldn't be in.
>Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved".
Which is a self-aggrandising way for Theils to say that he helped solve some problems that wouldn't have been solved otherwise.
Unless you have tons of means to contribute (e.g. billions) to some cause, the idea starting out as some e.g. college student that "this problem wont be solved without my help" is 99.9999% BS.
If anything, it gives him a motive to say it (virtue signal) which is not "to tell the truth".
So, the advice might very well be true and we should very well follow it. But thus far we have absolutely no arguments as to if that's the case.
Exactly, I started reading his book Zero to One and quickly dropped it into trash-bin after scanning randomly. I am not sure why it got rated so high. In my view entire advise boils down to create businesses in uncharted territories and create a monopolies around them.
Also, there’s a ton of fairly specific problems that haven’t been solved yet, so chances of someone working on it are small.
With enough specialization, everybody can become the best in one specific topic. That's the game most phd students play.
Given the rapid devaluation of Phds (never mind the big debts), it doesn't serve them very well in most areas of science...
> At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area.
I believe the GP is saying you can be in the top 5% of a chosen field, if you try, because other people are pursuing other things. So 100% of the population could be in the top 5% of something.
This is where I find deep meaning in the Cervantes quote, “The road is always better than the inn.” Accepting the outcome of the admixture of own’s controllable action and the infinitely greater uncontrollable action of the world as positive can go a long way to a kind of stoic peace and ultimately happiness with one’s worldly produce.
Also, these fields are not evil or useless like weapon design or hedge funds. They are actually useful to society, so you feel like contributing to the general good.
Don’t worry about healthcare, there are thousands of people who work on healthcare.
And, if I may, if you did work on healthcare, your very own contribution to solving this problem would most likely be very small. Unless you somehow become the Elon Musk of healthcare... which you know, may or may not happen.
Find one thing that you do want to do: something that is silently but persistently pulling you in. Ideally, something you just couldn't not do.
I'm not a religious person but I really like the tone of the "$god works in mysterious ways". You never know what your choices and path will expand into: it might be something that's related to all three energy, AI, and healthcare but you never would've guessed in the start.
You can always out-smart yourself and convince yourself to do the thing that makes sense but the sensible thing often doesn't mean something that truly fulfills you.
Because future is extremely hard to know, or even predict, all you can do is follow your light.
I suspect you could do more good for science by working a lifetime in some well-paid career and donating a hefty portion of your profit to some science-funding organization than by trying to do science yourself.
Science needs your money far more than it needs your brains.
Obviously then, the first one to solve is longevity
Some people can work just for material benefit to themselves and their families. However, eventually that juice runs out because money is just not useful beyond a point. Depression is a first world problem, generally. Why is it that people who are materially better off than most of their peers in the last century become depressed?
The key, it seems, is to find a goal that is higher than immediate selfish interests of the individual or family. This might even mean staying in your current situation but just realigning "why" you are doing it to something higher. It is very hard to find an unselfish person who is depressed, unsure about what to do or unhappy in general.
The goal makes all the difference.
So, like a good git commit message :P
Jokes aside, good point and imo the number one answer to the question. Not sure why you got a dwonvote even. If you're ok with material benefits then yeah, anything goes of course. But that only gets you so far and indeed real value seems to lie beyond that. It took me alomost half a life to realize it, but altruism really does give me much more than materialsim.
Admittedly, material benefit to myself and my family isn't the only reason I work. However, the argument that "money is just not useful beyond a point" isn't a strong one in my mind. I'm in my late forties right now and make a reasonable sum of money. I doubt I will ever get to the point where making more money won't get me more of what I want. Right now, I need to weight priorities when it comes to spending money (generator for my house vs something else). Getting to the point where I don't need to do that (for important things) would be my "more money isn't useful" point. I doubt I will ever get there.
Now, what can money buy? Only things on the physical level, that is, _sense experiences_. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches. That's it. Money can't buy love or knowledge. Maybe a library, but not knowledge :)
So even in a naive examination money has limited uses which apply at the physical/material level. It's useful to note that happiness/wellbeing is largely a state of mind and thus you might find someone who is equally or more happy than you despite not having the generator. How is this possible?
The point is that as inherent motivation money just isn't good. People who are incentivised inevitably want greater and greater compensation or they burn out. In contrast, those fired up by a higher ideal (which, of course, includes the wellbeing of the family) are motivated by an initiative to work which is not dependent upon something external.
So, make your money, and install that generator. But don't make the mistake of thinking your wellbeing/happiness is dependent upon XYZ externally.
What do you base your well-being or happiness in?
This is an oversimplification that detracts from the value of money. Your assumption that money can only buy sense experiences is incorrect. In reality, money can have a significant impact on the (emotional) and (intellectual) realms.
# Example for (emotional):
A couple with two children living together. The couple's emotional bonding is strained by feeling overwhelmed due to house chores. The strain can be significantly reduced by spending money on a nanny, ordering food when not in the mood for cooking, and other forms of domestic help.
# Example for (intellectual)
Working person with a family wants to pursue a second degree as a hobby. Unfortunately, they can't afford university.
It's true that, beyond a certain point, the returns from having more money diminish quickly. And I agree that as an inherent motivation it probably doesn't work for many people - only as a means to an end. But to say that money can only buy sense experiences is untrue.
Of course, buying more expensive things and increasing your income is still a good feeling, but after some time they become status quo and your happiness is back at the same level as it was before the pay raise (especially since there are now new, more expensive things to seek).
That’s not actually true though. There’s pretty robust research to show that happiness is correlated with log money. It’s not a function that becomes flat after a certain point, at least not as far as any research I’ve read says. Although the correlation or causation question remains: do happier people make more money, or does more money make people happier, or is there some underlying third variable that affects both? But the fact that lottery winners do end up becoming happier suggests that there is a causal element in the money->happiness direction.
Do you have a source for this? Thank you.
"It is very hard to find an unselfish person who is depressed, unsure about what to do or unhappy in general."
That depression and unhappiness are more difficult to spot in people who are selfless does not necessarily mean that those people are significantly happier and less depressed - it could only mean that they care more about how others perceive them and may, therefore, be more likely to hide their true affect.
For me, there are four questions:
- Where are my weaknesses/blind spots? You can't fix all of them, and I'll never be a good mechanic no matter how much I try, but my feeling is that you have to work on weak areas at least enough so that you are not cognitively crippled by them. After that you have to have a team to help you avoid problems.
- How do I really know what people need? Sure, I could read a Forbes article about a muppet shortage. It might even move me to give to a charity. I might then see all of my friends giving to muppet charities and talking about their plight. But what the hell does that mean, aside from the fact that if I announce I'm doing something about muppets I get a lot of positive attention? Which leads me to the next question:
- Am I in this for others or for myself? The important thing here is that there are no right or wrong answers. If you never work on yourself you'll be crap at helping others, so trying to choose "helping others" option is probably the wrong one, at least long-term. Best stick to yourself for a while. (Some people do this wonderful cop-out where they say "if I'm building something the market pays for, I must be both helping others and myself!". I don't disagree with this, but I think it dodges the question, which is probably more like "what can I do on-purpose for the sole benefit of others that will actually directly help them in a way I can understand?)
- How am I sure I am exposed to enough in life to actually make a good choice? If you know nothing, run across somebody who needs a piece of bread and give it to them, you've picked a problem and solved it. If you know somebody who dumps high-quality food every night and drive a truck from their spot to a place where hundreds can eat, you've done the same thing -- but it helps more because you know more. So how are you sure you know enough to not waste your life giving out pieces of bread to 1500 people when you could have taken the same amount of energy and fed 1,000,000? That's the crux of the thing, at least for me.
I spent my early life working on my weaknesses while learning a lot of technical stuff. Then I switched off to working for the highest rates possible, traveling all over the world meeting people and solving whatever problems they had, not worrying about my own. I used the market to help guide me to people who were in some sort of distress. Then I looked for patterns and root causes.
As I was doing that, I went back and deepened my education in the liberal arts: philosophy, rhetoric, writing, understanding and appreciating various forms of art, and so on.
I am happy where I ended up. I am also content in knowing that I couldn't have short-circuited it by trying to "jump ahead" and solve world hunger at age 20. There are probably a bunch of folks out there who could do this. From observation I have found these people are 1) extremely smart, and 2) profoundly ignorant. They don't know a lot of stuff and they're happy not knowing. They just have problem X they are going to solve one way or another. I was never happy not-knowing, so I had to work it all out on my own.
ADD: Once you decide, of course, there's actually making it happen. That's an entirely-different question. You could decide the right way to cure cancer. You could know enough to come up with a cure. But that doesn't mean you can get anybody to listen or actually make a difference. (grin)
Focus your mentalities on yourself (eg do what you want, not what you think you should), and when the time comes for you to become aware of your calling, you will become aware of it, unintentionally. Some never do, and that's OK, as there is no requirement to.
Those that do, will find the path to success easier than those who premeditated it, in my opinion.
Do what you love, not what you think you should. This, with a positive attitude and a dribble of lady luck should get you through.
At least that my plan :)
EDIT: I should add, for me, it hasn't worked out yet, but remember. Positive attitude!
Consider the statistics of decision, in general and simplified. In any abstract decision, there is a 50 percent probability that the correct or constructive choice will be made. If the correct path is taken, obviously no problems will exist. If the incorrect selection is made, it will become evident. When it does, there is a 50 percent probability that the choice can be reversed and the constructive path substituted in its place.
Therefore, there is only one chance in four, at the most, that an irrevocable direction may be taken in decision making. All vital decisions in the history of man have been made on much worse odds than three to one. Some were as high as one in twenty and came out positively.
To move away from the null point of indecision, take the position that any action or decision is better than none at all, based upon the odds of three to one.
More here https://pastebin.com/1tF3gqre
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever." - Steve Jobs
You can however increase the odds of things coming on your path that you'll be passionate about:
- Pursue a wide range of interests, jobs in different industries
- Fearlessly trying lots of different stuff, for ex. go skydiving, go rock climbing, go travel if you can, go from the beaten path of life
- Socialize and stay open and curious to different people, so you hear different viewpoints and get different interests
There will always be forces beyond your control that affect your life - be they natural disasters, other people's decisions (from personal choices like whether to date you and small-scale professional like whether to hire you; to which departments to cut in a major layoff; to enormous political/social upheavals), market forces and scientific breakthroughs that you can't predict, etc. If you don't roll with the punches on those, all you'll accomplish is to make yourself angry all the time.
But there are also choices you can make - such as how to spend/invest your money; what jobs to apply to; whether to start a business, and which one; whom to try to date or ask to marry you; where to buy or rent a home, etc. that will have massive, compounding effects on your stress levels and happiness.
The entire notion of a “career” is outdated. It ended back in 1980s.