Created: April 29, 2020
Modified: January 24, 2022
Modified: January 24, 2022
mission statement
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 It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid.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.- (originally from 2020-04-29)
- On another note, last night I tried to dictate (on Otter) my sense of my life goals. I came up with a very abstract 'mission statement': understand the cognitive structure of the world and exploit it to help humanity make better decisions. By 'exploit' I don't mean anything nefarious, necessarily, just understanding the leverage points and how small changes at those points can have big effects.
- This statement is very abstract. It could be used to justify AI research, or Bayesian modeling work, or evangelizing psychedelics, or becoming an economist, or working in finance, or managing organizations, or writing an influential blog. So it doesn't seem to give me much concrete guidance. But I think it's valuable because it feels right as a source of identity and ultimate purpose. It captures why I've always felt AI research was powerful, but it's not limited to AI research; it includes game theory and incentives and mechanisms and markets, it includes psychology and cogsci, it includes teaching and education, philosophy of mind and language, and it includes most of what SuccessfulFriend and I have always identified as common interests: computing, finance, government, rationalism, music, etc. But also, even software engineering and tech development: software defines conceptual systems and becomes a big part of how people think. And spirituality, meditation, and 'shared ideas' like the KLF.
- For all of these topics it gives me a lens by which to think about them: what is the 'hidden' structure by which information is aggregated, beliefs are formed, concepts and ways of thinking are developed, decisions are made? It captures my desire for 'magic': cognitive structure is, almost by definition, something that exists 'in the air' rather than being explicitly laid out in the physical world; seeing it involves manipulation of invisible forces.
- Thinking about cognitive structure gives me a lens by which to get excited about, and see the value of, learning and thinking in all of these spaces. The notion of structure implies a focus on leverage: where can improvements have the biggest impact? So even though it's very abstract, it feels like a valuable concept.
- This lens also lets me decide what's not important to me (ie it does involve some choicefulness). For example, just applying ML to bio projects does not, by itself, involve understanding cognitive structure or improving it at important leverage points. (which doesn't mean it can't be a fun side project; learning for learning's sake is valuable, intellectual community is valuable, and you never know where something might lead). Improving the state of computer vision or NLP algorithms is valuable only to the extent that these algorithms live at important leverage points; in many cases I'm not sure that they do.
- That said, the mission is very broad and maybe not choiceful enough. At the very least it will require much more choicefulness to ground out into concrete work.
- This mission statement is relevant to ten-year goals--how do they align with understanding and leveraging the world's cognitive structure? "Become a professor publishing ML-for-bio papers" is not inherently in pursuit of the mission. If I'm a professor, it's because I think I have a lens on how ML work can create leverage, on how better cognition inside of biological or medical processes can dramatically change outcomes, and/or on how being at a university working with students gives me leverage through the educational system.