Created: February 14, 2021
Modified: February 14, 2021
Modified: February 14, 2021
limits on individual impact
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- I want to change the world. What does that mean?
- Suppose I create a billion-dollar company. That's an enormous amount of value. It's many people's careers and a product that benefits many people. It's incredible personal success by any measure. But compared to world GDP of 90 trillion per year, it's a drop in the bucket.
- Suppose I do groundbreaking research and become an incredibly successful academic. Maybe I'm Mike Jordan. Most of the big trends in ML---deep learning and associated tricks like adaptive optimization---have occurred independent of his work. He's done a lot, but it's hard to point to a paradigm shift.
- There are moments when an individual is, with or without knowing it, at the fulcrum of history. Winston Churchill in WW2. Alan Turing in the 1930s. Bill Gates in the 1970s. These people have the opportunity to do something enormous, and we give them credit when they do. They may or may not have been uniquely suited to the moment; many others might have done similar work if they had not.
- But most even very successful people do not live in these moments.