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Comment by nnd | Hacker News Reader

My biggest issue with 80,000 hours is that it's a rational, but radically uninspiring advice in the end. It is a framework for those who buy into "don't follow your passion advice", and try to maximize their utility function instead.

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A fair criticism. Personally, I've spent enough time around folks who followed their passion and seen where it got them that I'm 100% on board the utility function train.

Oh how I would LOVE to know more! Can you give examples?

Join a startup as a soon-to-be father, following your dreams, and have the thing explode in your face, then finally recover and get a job at a megacorp (a week before the baby is due)?

Utility for the win! Following your dreams is fun and all, but the risk/reward ratio is just way out there.

Getting a stable job at a big company to be able to support your family after taking a risk on a startup doesn't sound like a terrible outcome to be honest.

Sounds optimal actually, you want to take risk when allowed and stop taking that risk immediately when your life changes.

So the take-home here is take all your career risks before you take on dependents?

Yes, but probably not while your wife is pregnant.

Acting and professional sports are good examples, but consider anything with very low odds. You hear about the successes, not about those who didn't make it (the 99%). They had passion too.

The problem occurs when passion and expectations differ. An artist who expects a good, easy life, to be wealthy as a plumber etc.

Utility is fine. Packing shelves is fine. Do you have time to follow your passion out of work? Can you make your passion pay enough? Most people I've met who gave up on their passion seemed to want praise, fame and/or notoriety rather than the 'art' or whatever they were producing.

Exactly, I know so many part-time artists/musicians... even a few part time scientists. If the passion/art is really important to you, you'll find a way (there's a homeless guy I know who paints and chalks). You may not get what you want, but maybe you'll still get what you need.

Somewhere in here there's the Peter principle that people rise to their highest level of incompetence... it's true in art as well as engineering/business.

It's not binary though. It's a complex weaving dance between passion and utility for most people if you are to be both reasonably happy and well off.

I've only had a quick look. I really like the idea of the site, almost desperately so. But the lists of top things to work on that I found seemed a bit disappointing. AI safety policy made the top of one list.

My undergrad AI lecturer told us that it was widely "known" AI was soon going to be generally smarter than humans when he was an undergrad. He wasn't convinced evolutionary changes were going to get us there. It was some 15 years ago I was listening to him, probably 20 or more years before that when he was an undergrad. We still seem to be saying it's 10, 20, or some other made up number of years away.

I'm not even sure there's a significant future problem here. Not on the scale of, say, becoming a multi-planetary species or resolving issues with antibiotic resistance.

Is that not talking about general A.I. tho? And sure, many people argue that might never happen ... But we already have many specific A.I.s, and those specific A.I.s are already making lots of big decisions that affect people's lifes. Sounds like some safety policy there could be worth thinking about.

Yes. But then specific AI safety is an even smaller problem.

Disagree. It's a different problem, not necessarily smaller. It's clearly not yet a solved problem, and as some of the issues interact with many other social issues there are no easy answers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction is the usual starting point referenced here.

Its not particularly interesting though. A calculator is a kind of specilized AI that can do maths massively faster than a human can.

Well, it's not going to be interesting to everyone. But there are many people who are interested in it; Cathy O'Neil wrote a whole book about it. The main point is I'd argue that it's a big problem that needs people to look at it. (80,000 hours website was actually talking about general AI - https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world-problems/ - but I'd still argue specific A.I.s need attention too)

Fair enough, but consider that a "dumb" AI running the world on incentives that don't match human and planet welfare is already our current condition - it's called The Economy. While the overall system isn't a perfect AI just yet, any specializable part is already operating at an intelligence far past the point of (most) individual human ability, and the tools to control this system (monetary policy, democratic systems) are increasingly being eroded (untraceable/uncontrollable money systems, pay-to-win democracy). There may be some human intelligence amongst the overall system but, even if we never make a Perfect AI to rule it all, the point at which we're not able to really change the incentive/value system is coming near - if it hasn't passed already.

(That probably has nothing to do with the actual AI Safety problems studied today in regards to pure AIs. But damned if this isn't an important-A-F cousin of the problem.)

My passion is for utility

What is the difference between "following your passion" and "maximizing your utility function"? "Utility function" is simply a fancy mathematical way of saying, "that which makes you happy". Maximizing your utility function is maximizing that which makes you happy, which is pretty close to following your passion, isn't it?

I meant it mostly in a sense of maximizing financial rewards by producing goods and services rewarded by the market. This activity may or may not overlap with what you enjoy doing. A typical example would be working in finance vs making art.

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