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> when I graduated CMU, in a speech the head of the CS department told us [paraphrased] to work on things that matter and to be a force for good in the world.

> I never felt like I've accomplished that. I also don't know what I would work on if I did have the means to chase some deep work without worrying about money.

Oh hey, I remember something like that when I graduated too, CMU 2015, and I remember walking away thinking the same thing: "well, how the hell am I supposed to do that?"

Turns out I had a lot of work to do. I spent the next 6 years reading philosophy and psychoanalysis to try and figure out my own shit and understand the world better, which I felt I had learned almost none of at CMU (that said, there's some benefit to being a blank slate, in that I can follow my intuition rather than imitating my professors, but lack of mentorship makes it hard to get started). Being able to support myself through development work was significant in giving me the stability and flexibility to pursue that sort of research in my free time.

This was a big influence for me quitting my job at big corporate and joining a small startup founded by a friend (at the cost of a big salary hit), and eventually I want to move on from that and work on more self-directed activities that even more closely relate my (still developing!) philosophical views and my abilities. But it took a very long time for me to "find myself" and what I believed, even on a very basic level. I had no idea of any of that after graduating, besides some gut feelings about the current moment in political discourse (which themselves took several years to understand fully).

I always wonder about a lot of my peers, who didn't seem to take the same path, and instead continue working their jobs without thinking too hard. Will they find themselves 20 years down the road unsatisfied with where they ended up? Or will they not think too hard about it, and enjoy their day to day lives without much tension, besides the occasional political event? It sometimes seems more a matter of temperament than anything. But it is weird to see the "best and brightest" end up working for a company like Palantir because "we're all nerds here!", without taking any sort of stance on the value of their work.

Interesting... after reading a bunch of all kinds of philosophy, my outlook in life ended up being roughly, eh, 45% Camus, 25% Rand, 15% Epictetus and 15% Stirner. The best thing about reading the philosophy for me was precisely that I lost any lingering doubts I had about meaning of life, (intellectual, non-visceral) fear of death, and w.r.t. work in particular, any "moral" outlook whatsoever. The latter was rather disappointing, cause that was a lot of reading to do to arrive at "I think morality is EVEN MORE irrelevant than I thought before" ;)

Huh. My own goal in philosophy was to explore various doubts, things that didn't quite make sense, and it ended up opening a huge space of new ideas for me as I started to peel back the layers of ideas I took for granted. I feel less confident know in knowing "what's true" or "what's right" but much more confident in my ability to understand and think through various arguments and ideas. Notions like "the meaning of life" and "morality" took on new shades of meaning for me, or perhaps became ideas that I could no longer consider "as wholes" but that demand understanding in terms of their parts, i.e. to be studied formally rather than in terms of content.

I also went in attempting to resolve my emotional difficulties and become more open to the world and to others, which led me deep into psychoanalytic theory. A lot of the results there involved a lessening sense of shame about my own experiences, which made me more open to sharing with and receiving from others.

Anyway, I guess to some extent one gets out of philosophy what they go into it seeking.

I think there's competing issues here, there's an aspect of "I want to prove myself" by creating something really good and unique that I can be proud of. There's also the "do good" aspect of potentially creating something that's a "force for good". Doing either one of those is hard, doing both at the same time is probably very very hard. You both need to chase down a good idea but also execute it well.

If you want to do good for the world, honestly finding a charity that would benefit from your cash and making a donation would do that. But that won't scratch your nagging itch to make something you can be proud of.

For that, perhaps saving up enough money to allow you to quit or take a sabbatical if one is possible to work on the thing you want to is a better idea. Would it be better for your career? Perhaps not, but it might scratch that itch and that might be better for you as a person.

Honestly, its easier than it seems on the outside. You want to work for something that is doing good, and you want to do do good work that is actually relevant for fear of working on the wrong problem without realizing it until you've sunk so much time. It sounds to me like grad school and academia would be a perfect environment for you then and I recommend you apply if you are interested.

In grad school you will recieve a stipend which will help bills a bit. You will research different departments and see what the field is going and apply where you are interested. You will end up working for a professor trying to achieve one of the aims on their already funded grant from the federal government. The aim might actually be painted in quite broad strokes or have some methods to get you started at least, and you are free to go off the reservation and work on this aim how you think it should be worked on. Your professor, if they are any good, will nurture your efforts and help provide theoretical insights, supply you with relevant literature if you need help with that, and connect you with other researchers that have the talents you need to form beautiful collaborations. You will publish papers and feel good when some of them are cited by other researchers. You could even continue and do a stint as a post doc with another research group and develop more skills, and eventually find yourself interviewing for faculty positions if you want to pen the grant to the federal government yourself, and train another generation as you've been trained.

> I never felt like I've accomplished that. I also don't know what I would work on if I did have the means to chase some deep work without worrying about money.

One rarely considered need is for an innovative new social network to clean up (and maybe even kill off, like StackOverflow did to ExpertsExchange) the others that have made such a mess of things.

There's a movement called "effective altruism", who ask exactly this question. You don't have to agree with everything they are saying, but thinking about goodness extremely pragmatically and almost numerically does have merit I think.

Increasing computer literacy might be a really strong way you can improve things in your own community. NGOs are also notoriously tight on money, and have huge problems finding good Software Engineers, because they can't pay competitive rates.

Having worked for a while in that space, I do think it can be quite satisfying!

Want a lower risk ? Be more humble. Join some group that is doing things that matter, contribute there and you'll surely do good.

Thanks for taking the time to explain your thoughts. It's fascinating to see how others reason.

Is doing good for the world external validation? I'm not sure.

The article author argues that a lot of people create bullshit which is the opposite of valuable (time consuming and attention grabbing). Maybe your work wouldn't be valuable but it also wouldn't be a net negative.

What you do and also what you don't do (but could do) will always be good for some and bad for others (neutral for the rest). In that sense there is no "force for good", only a good for: Yourself, a specific group, the majority, etc.

Now, I have also pondered about this topic of doing altruistic work full time one day if I get the chance and it is nice to see a discussion (even just a small one) about it.

I don't really fear regretting it afterwards as the attempt also counts in my opinion, as long as you don't accidentally cause more harm than good in the process. In that sense, wouldn't you instead regret it to never have tried it if you could have?

Discussions like this are fuzzy because no one here has defined "good".

I guess part of the reason a speech encouraging people to be a "force for good" is inspiring is that it challenges each person to examine what they themself think is good.

The part about "doing something that matters" is also important. What matters?

People want to actualize themselves, to reach their potential.

People want to enable other people to reach their potential.

Making something that other people are freely willing to pay for is a very good proxy for doing good.

Counterpoint: heroin

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Heroin can deal with pain that morphine cannot. Heroin is a blessing for people dealing with terminal pain, for example.

An awful lot of evil is done in this world in the name of doing what's best for others against their will.

In some cases, people will pay you for making things that help them hurt or exploit other people. It could be argued that this constitutes making the world a worse place.

For example, you could get paid by criminals to make ransomware or by an ad company to flood users with ads or by a cryptocurrency company for building tools that facilitate money laundering and tax evasion or by a government to create a database of dissidents and protesters or by a toy company to use ML to generate fake reviews...

> people will pay you for making things that help them hurt or exploit other people

I should think that running a criminal business was outside the scope of what I was talking about.

Some of them are not at all criminal. The war machine is always looking for a few good men.

What about social media? The division, damage to politics and mental health, those are also forms of harm even though they are legal. What about fossil fuels?

> The division, damage to politics and mental health, those are also forms of harm even though they are legal.

What happens when those in power decide that your views are harmful and should be suppressed?

sounds like an excellent way to make mathematical proofs more accessible to the masses!

Potentially! But it would likely be years of effort and research to get something usable, which may end up being a dead end. It's simultaneously a tantalizing and torturous proposition.

whether the project is a success or not it seems you would get a lot out of the process. Sometimes you have an idea of what you would like to do and only by going down the path do you realize what you should be doing.

Even if the project isn't successful, it's a required part of innovating. it's a real contribution.

This is where grad school shines for this sort of stuff. You have mentorship that can steer you along toward doing something relevant and making a worthy contribution that wouldn't be a wasted exercise on your part.

If you come in off the cuff thinking "Proofs need fixed," you are probably going to end up reinventing the wheel at best since you lack any context to what has already been done in the field.

"Edit: I guess the crux of the issue is, it's hard to optimize for being a force for good because the world is big and complicated. But it's quite easy to optimize for making more money, you just go down the list of top paying employers on levels.fyi and filter the ones you don't like."

Why I am reading this as: Is more easy to make money than being force for good? Because hey, the world is big and complicated. Or "hey making the world better place is not monetary rewarding endeavor, let's move fast and break things.

Chasing big work is not related to money. It is related to creating meaning outside egoistic need of fulfilling some billionaires vision of success.

Creating big work is a personal choice. And obviously is not popular or advertised.

Can you expand on what you define as "big work"?

> Why I am reading this as: Is more easy to make money than being force for good?

That's a wholly accurate version of what I wrote. It's been quite easy to climb my salary by about double in 6 years, with potentially more rises on the horizon. I'm just about as clueless now as I was then about how to make the world a better place.