Reading Notes
- High energy physicists don’t feel the need to justify their research in the same way that quantum computing researchers do
- You can’t always predict the benefits of pure science, so it’s dangerous to justify the benefits of pure science on the basis of practical benefits
- Expected benefits may not materialize
- This leads to a loss of funding for the research
- This may lead you to miss other, unexpected benefits
- Just so story describing how a geneticist and a biochemist go about investigating biology
- Geneticist alters DNA and investigates how that affects the organism
- Biochemist investigates pathways and tries to describe mechanisms by which genetic information is translated into action
- Part of a two-part debate between geneticists and biochemists
- People ask questions like:
- Is there any purpose in living? Or is everything completely pointless?
- What am I supposed to do?
- How can I choose among the many ways to spend my life?
- Does everyone’s life have the same purpose, or does everyone have their own purpose?
- Where does purpose come from?
- 5 confused attitudes towards purpose:
- Eternalism:
- Everything has a purpose
- There is a grand cosmic plan
- Problem:
- The plan makes no sense
- Even if the plan made sense, it’s too vague - doesn’t tell us what to do in particular situations
- Nihilism
- There is no purpose
- Life is meaningless
- Problem:
- If life is meaningless, then what are we to do about the fact that people seem to crave purpose and meaning?
- Materialism:
- People have goals - those goals are their purpose
- Family, wealth, fame, hedonism
- Problem:
- Rejects altruism and creative purposes
- Purposes seem too “shallow”
- Hedonic treadmill - there’s always higher level of enjoyment that one can pursue
- Mission:
- Everyone has a unique gift
- Find your unique gift and and use it to help others [Ed: Isn’t this literally the premise of My Little Pony?]
- Problem:
- To quote Fight Club: “You are not special. You’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”
- Existentialism:
- The universe does not supply purpose, we have to find or create purpose for ourselves
- Problem:
- Creating purpose is hard
- Impossible to create purpose independently of social influences
- Guilt/shame motivation works great right up until it stops working
- If you want to be effective, remember your goals
- Accomplish your goals with a minimum of wasted effort - doing something too well can be as wasteful as not doing it well enough, since it takes away time from you accomplishing the next thing
- You don’t have enough energy or enough time to do everything perfectly - focus your energy on the things that you really care about and spend a minimum of effort on the other stuff
- Remember what your goals are; deploy your full effort towards reaching them with a minimum of wasted motion