to those whom much is given, much is expected

I feel an obligation to try to do big things with my life, because I've had access to rare opportunities. If ten thousand randomly selected people live mediocre lives, it's fine. If everyone with an elite CS PhD decides to live a mediocre life, that's a catastrophe.

For purely competitive reasons, I want to be able to do big and important things; I want to level up. I want to be at least as successful as my friends. I am not okay with resigning myself to being mediocre. This competitive motivation can be taken too far. Ultimately it's the welfare of the world that matters, not my own personal achievements. But I do believe I have a special obligation to try, and that thinking this way can be a healthy guide to purpose.

I really have acquired some quite rare resources:

• Baseline: I was born in America to well-off, intellectual parents who cared (and still care) about me. I was good at math and computers.
• Knowledge of the elite: in going to Williams, I learned some technical content (probably not as much as kids who go to Berkeley/MIT/etc), but also:
  • I met the east-coast elite, the people at the top of the world: the kids of billionaires, people who will go on to be leaders in business or government: all the inner rings. I saw their flaws and viscerally understand that many are not deep thinkers.
  • There was an emphasis on foundational thinking, less applied and more theoretical than at most schools. We thought about the 'big questions' (see: the big questions of AI), many of which people at Berkeley and in industry (perhaps rightly) see as likely to be wastes of time.
  • I met intellectual people: SuccessfulFriend, ExBoyfriend, Nick, etc.
• Grad school. The inner rungs of CS academia. PhdAdvisor, Mike, Berkeley profs in general. Turing award winners. I saw the deep learning revolution as it happened. I know the limits of the academic elite, since I've experienced them totally missing the point (before deep learning).
• SuccessfulFriend's immigrant perspective. It's very different from standard American perspectives, and very right in many ways. Unfortunately I can't keep it as my own: speech becomes less free.

If you're in the professional class, your very existence is a claim on other people's lives and resources. People are working to grow your food, deliver your mail, take away your trash, clean your house, give you medical care, fly you to your ski vacations, etc. Sure "you're paying them money", but that's just another way of saying that you're exercising a claim on society's resources. The only real justification for giving educated people outsized claims on society's resources is to enable us to use that intellectual capital to make everyone's lives better.

When I talk to a poor person, what can I honestly tell them justifies my lifestyle? Why, from first principles, should I have more resources than they do? It has to be that it's worth society's effort, in the aggregate, to make me more comfortable, happy, and productive, because I'm ultimately doing important work and my being more effective at that work is good for everyone. If that's not true, then I'm ultimately just a parasite.

• One can take risks, and fail, without being a parasite. Society gives us a cushion partly so that we will be able to take risks. I do need to actually take the risks though.

I feel an obligation, not just to do 'acceptable' work within the system, but to be a spark that brings new things into the world, and changes the system (come alive).