Research is polygamous! The importance of what you do needn't be proportional to your awesomeness

There's someone who once said that the most popular/prestigious research topics, such as theoretical physics, are oversaturated with really smart people; if one person didn't make a certain discovery, someone else would have done it soon afterward, so smart people should try to go into fields that are useful but don't normally attract geniuses. I don't remember where I read it, though.

I think this is more of a selfish thing, I imagine that this person probably did not think it would be better for the world that he research D or E instead of A, B, and C, merely that it would be better for himself if he did so. Better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. See also: http://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20Society

There is such a thing as diminishing marginal returns. If there were 5 Eliezer Yudkowskys all working on FAI, the sixth Eliezer Yudkowsky ought to go off and direct their efforts to CFAR instead (this is a calculation specifically for copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky, and not precise).

On the whole I agree.

Nitpick: I think this post would have been better if you'd used "most capable researcher" rather than "most awesome person". One can be awesome without being a skilled researcher, or a skilled researcher without being in general awesome. I think the term is too much of a mushy applause-light to do much serious analytical work in any case.

I entirely agree with this point, but suspect that actually following this advice would make people uncomfortable.

Since different occupations/goals have some amount of status associated with them (nonprofits, skilled trades, professions) many people seem to take statements about what you're working on to be status claims in addition to their denotational content.

As a result, working on something "outside of your league" will often sound to a person like you're claiming more status than they would necessarily give you.

Please don't, but if you need to read a shorter summary of Vassar's text: http://lesswrong.com/lw/gdz/michael_vassars_edge_contribution_summary/

Also there is a text by Paul Graham which gives very interesting advice in the same direction:

In his famous essay You and Your Research (which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what they're working on), Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions: What are the most important problems in your field?

Are you working on one of them?

Why not?

Hamming was at Bell Labs when he started asking such questions. In principle anyone there ought to have been able to work on the most important problems in their field. Perhaps not everyone can make an equally dramatic mark on the world; I don't know; but whatever your capacities, there are projects that stretch them. So Hamming's exercise can be generalized to: What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you? Most people will shy away from this question. I shy away from it myself; I see it there on the page and quickly move on to the next sentence. Hamming used to go around actually asking people this, and it didn't make him popular. But it's a question anyone ambitious should face.

The trouble is, you may end up hooking a very big fish with this bait. To do good work, you need to do more than find good projects. Once you've found them, you have to get yourself to work on them, and that can be hard. The bigger the problem, the harder it is to get yourself to work on it.

Of course, the main reason people find it difficult to work on a particular problem is that they don't enjoy it. When you're young, especially, you often find yourself working on stuff you don't really like-- because it seems impressive, for example, or because you've been assigned to work on it. Most grad students are stuck working on big problems they don't really like, and grad school is thus synonymous with procrastination.

But even when you like what you're working on, it's easier to get yourself to work on small problems than big ones. Why? Why is it so hard to work on big problems? One reason is that you may not get any reward in the forseeable future. If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real.

Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won't be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)

But the trouble with big problems can't be just that they promise no immediate reward and might cause you to waste a lot of time. If that were all, they'd be no worse than going to visit your in-laws. There's more to it than that. Big problems are terrifying. There's an almost physical pain in facing them. It's like having a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination. All your initial ideas get sucked out immediately, and you don't have any more, and yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking.

You can't look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely. But you have to adjust the angle just right: you have to be facing the big problem directly enough that you catch some of the excitement radiating from it, but not so much that it paralyzes you. You can tighten the angle once you get going, just as a sailboat can sail closer to the wind once it gets underway.

If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It's not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way.

When I read this:

9) To want to be the best in something has absolutely no precedence over doing something that matters.

I immediately thought of this.

On a more serious note, I have the impression that while some people (with conservative values?) do agree that doing something that matters is more important than anything else (although "something that matters" is usually something not very interesting), most creatively intelligent people go through their lives trying to optimize fun. And while it's certainly fun to hang out with people smarter than you and learn from them, it's much less fun to work with them.

So I thought it would be good to spell out 10 times in different ways for the unconscious bots in my mind that didn't get it yet

How on earth do I actually download that file without selling my soul via my cell phone bill?

"Monogamous research" makes a lot of sense for narrowly defined and relatively brute force research, but much less for vague fields. For example, within X-risk, we may need someone to write a popular book summary. For this it makes a lot of sense for a few experts to do this while the less knowledgable work on other things for the time being.

The fields you mention are of course much more vague though. My guess is that X-risk can be "polygamous-optimal", but perhaps only so far that it can be broken up into "monogamous" pieces.

All of this is true in a world where people do research because it's fun and they want to do so. Which is a good assumption if you're sitting on a few million dollars. Unfortunately, that's not the case for most of the people doing research.

That is, research topics are polygamous, but research funds aren't.

Also, for the same reason, choosing to write mediocre papers is a better choice to look productive than attempting to have really cool insights and results and failing doing so: it's hard to tell apart people who failed at stuff from people who did nothing if you are the one to pay them.

You left off the most important point. If you think a topic is important and that someone smarter than you is already working on it, it would seem like your best move is to try and help.

One argument in favor of leaving RALI A to HLA 1 and going off to fund your own puppy cuteness augmentation program is that you might not want to make a redundant effort. But I think the risk depends on how much progress has been made on the topic in question. If the big fish already have a pretty solid direction, ask someone who knows more about it than you do where the gaps are and go work on that. If you think you might get a response, go ahead and ask the big fish what needs working on. Fortune favors the bold.

This reminds me of a work of fiction I'm (intermittently) working on, which features a number of colonial overseers in a vast galactic empire, who're so overwhelmingly dimwitted that the main character speculates that it's as if the colonial power is assigning people with abilities in accordance with the importance of their posts, so the really unimportant colonies receive overseers who're commensurately incompetent.