The correct response to Hamming's question is "Because I have a comparative advantage in working on the problem I am working on". There are many, many important problems in the world of greater and lesser degrees of importance. There are many, many people working on them, even within one field. It does not make sense for everyone to attack the same most important problem, if indeed such a single problem could even be identified. There is a point of diminishing returns. 100 chemists working on the most important problem in chemistry are not going to advance chemistry as much as 10 chemists working on the most important problem, and 90 working on a variety of other, lesser problems.
This point was first made to me by Richard Stallman who told me quite clearly that free software was not the most important problem in the world--I think he cited overpopulation as an example of a more serious problem--but software freedom was the problem he was uniquely well situated to address.
There are seven billion people in the world. I know of no problem that actually needs 7 billion minds to solve it. We are pretty much all well advised to find the biggest problem we have a comparative advantage at, and work on solving that problem. We don't all have to, indeed we shouldn't, all work on the same thing.
I'm torn regarding this argument. Aaron Swartz wrote a very nice piece which I can't find (his personal site now appears to be down) about how working entirely on things that are your current comparative advantage is fixed mindset, and what you could be doing instead is changing what your comparative advantage is. I'm glad that Aaron Swartz did this, and I worry that focusing on comparative advantage gives me an excuse not to branch out. (My current comparative advantage is in mathematics but I'm not convinced that means I should only be spending my life working on mathematics.)
I think this makes sense. We need to distinguish between something like "obvious current comparative advantage" and "less obvious potential comparative advantage." In practice, the heuristic "stick to your comparative advantage" may optimize excessively for the former at the expense of the latter.
The comparison that leapt into my mind was Chomskians talking about how politicians and the media decide which topics are even discussed. Not sure if they have a term for that. I guess what you call "Privileging the Question" is part of framing in the social sciences sense. It's handy to have a phrase for this particular thing, though.
Before going back to check the name, I just assumed the academic asking awkward questions and making people feel bad about their life-choices was Robin Hanson.
This seems related to Robin Hanson's concept of "pulling sideways",. Some questions (e.g. income tax levels or gay marriage) get privileged because the alternative answers align with pre-existing political coalitions, so they give people an opportunity to cheer for their side and against the Enemy, whereas other questions whose answers would involve "pulling sideways" are ignored.
In a way of self-fulfilling prophecies, a privileged question becomes important when it is brought to everyone's attention. It becomes the question to decide whether you are a Green or Blue. Refuse to deal with it, and all Greens will suspect that you are a Blue, and all Blues will suspect that you are a Green. Then you may feel the social consequences of having enemies but no allies.
The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now, even in politics (I'd guess that the economy is more important). Outside of politics, many LWers probably think "what can we do about existential risks?" is one of the most important questions to answer, or possibly "how do we optimize charity?"
(This is not meant as a criticism of the post:) I hope I'm not the only one who went "gaaah" here about the latter two not being questions we could be answering right now in politics :-) Not that I have much hope that this is doable, but still.
(I started out writing "not that I have any hope", but then remembered that GiveWell didn't manage to find good opportunities for funding immunizations or micronutrient supplementation -- the first of which they "consider to have the strongest evidence base of any intervention we know of" -- with a major reason being that government and multilateral funders are already taking the best opportunities. See also Eliezer's comment and Holden's reply, suggesting the reason is that there are some people in government to whom measurable, quantifiable, tangible...
Often, my mother will ask me "what do you think about [some issue that's been discussed in the media lately]?" and I'm like "how the heck should I know, and why should I even care?" It usually irritates her -- "you surely must have an opinion about that! How can you have no opinion?" (Sometimes I retort by asking for her opinion about some unanswered question about physics or something like that, but then she usually says something to the effect that her question, unlike mine, is so intrinsically important that any good citizen has a duty to form an opinion on it.)
I think this line of thinking is very important. People would benefit immensely from becoming better at deciding what questions to address with their scarce cognitive resources. However, I do not think this problem of "meta-rationality" is an easy one, and in particular I'm not sure your heuristic is a good one. The principle that a good question has a clear-cut policy implication conflicts directly with the principle of curiosity. Maybe if an individual is an high-stress, high-stakes decision-making role, he or she may want to ignore questions that are not immediately relevant to the problems at hand. But the whole idea of academia is that society benefits when some individuals have the time and the incentive to go out and answer questions of academic interest - because, of course, we don't know what we don't know and some ideas, or their consequences, may have nonobvious policy implications somewhere down the road.
I propose the following heuristics, noting that in this area one should adopt a "fox-like" strategy and try to apply as many different perspectives as possible:
...Does this question have a definitive answer? Will I know I have the right answer when
Are people intellectually curious about political questions like gay marriage and gun control? That isn't my impression.
The Overton Window is a related concept, but it's at least as much about what people may not consider as it's about what's drawn to their attention.
Merely reflecting upon my own life, I can see how vastly the kinds of things I find interesting and important have changed. Some topics that used to matter so much to me are now essentially irrelevant except as whimsical amusements, while others that I had never even considered are now my top priorities.
The scary thing is just how easily and imperceptibly these sorts of shifts can happen. I've been amazed to observe how much small, seemingly trivial cues build up to have an enormous impact on the direction of one's concerns. The types of conversations I overhear, blog entries and papers and emails I read, people I interact with, and visual cues I see in my environment tend basically to determine what I think about during the day and, over the long run, what I spend my time and efforts doing. One can maintain a stated claim that "X is what I find overridingly important," but as a practical matter, it's nearly impossible to avoid the subtle influences of minor day-to-day cues that can distract from such ideals.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no such thing as Postmodernism: The Good Bits.
(If you order a big sundae and discover that the top scoop is dog shit, it makes more sense to go buy your own ice cream and make your own sundae - even knowing you're reinventing many pieces of the original sundae - than settling for the original sundae and trying to carefully spoon around the shit.)
Speaking as a fan of the stuff, I fully appreciate and frequently concur with your reasons for not wanting to touch it.
I challenge anybody to come up with a higher-density description of postmodernism than 'Fallacy Of Gray Plus Meta Everything with Leftism'. Remember that it arose out of an enviroment that was far too absolutist and ignored meta-analysis.
Great post. Similar thoughts have been expressed by some LessWrong users on Twitter, but having a nice long summary here is much better. I'd advocate promoting this one to Main.
Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media.
It's not that simple. Getting views is important but it isn't the only consideration. Journalists want to win publisher prizes. Journalists have an interest to build relationships with people who can supply them additional stories.
Owners of newscorporations have their interests. Buyers ...
Journalism is under tight deadlines. If the story is just to complex the time that the journalist needs to write the story isn't used "productively".
Data point: I knew a person who worked as a journalist for a newspaper. Each day they received from their boss a random topic to write about, and they had to write three or four articles within the day. There was no time to do any research, and there was no budget for travelling and seeing something firsthand.
That situation left only a few possible strategies: (1) Call a few relevant people by phone. Most of them will refuse to talk with you, because they have experience that in the past they told a journalist something and the journalist wrote something else using their name as a support. A few people will respond. Compile their answers into articles. (2) Know a few people willing to talk about this topic. Call them. (3) Use Google and steal information from other articles, especially the foreign ones. (4) Just invent the story, using any cliche you know. (5) Any combination of the above. For example write the story first, using the cliches you know, then call random people and try to get them agreeing with you, and then ...
It's rather against the point of the article to start talking about the above examples of privileged questions...
Even so, it's worth noting that immigration policy is a rare, important question with first-order welfare effects. Relaxing border fences creates a free lunch in the same way that donating to the Against Malaria Foundation creates a free lunch. It costs on the order of $7 million to save an additional American life, but on the order of $2500 to save a life if you're willing to consider non-Americans.
By contrast, most of politics consists of ...
It's only an aside to your main point, but "work on the most important problems you can think of" is a horrible heuristic for everybody to follow. If you want to advance human knowledge, then work on the most important problems you can think of, as weighted by your best estimate of the likely time advantage of "when I would discover a solution" over "when someone else would have discovered a solution". Unless you are one of the smartest people in the world, this weight is likely to be negligibly greater than 0 for many of th...
I think I'm missing the point of something.
Can you give examples of overpriviledged questions and what harm might come from overpriviledging them?
The general harm is that paying attention to unimportant question X means you have less time to pay attention to possibly more important question Y. Was this unclear from the text? For example:
In another comment here, Alejandro1 linked to this Robin Hanson post about policy questions that are orthogonal to vs. that map closely onto traditional liberal vs. conservative divides. The former are underprivileged and the latter are overprivileged, and the harm is that people are likely missing opportunities to implement useful policies because of this. (Perhaps Robin has prediction markets in mind as an example?)
Non-white feminists have a beef with white feminists part of which I think concerns white feminists having overprivileged certain kinds of questions, e.g. questions based on gender alone when non-white feminists think that gender, race, and class need to be understood together. The harm here is that the concerns of white feminism dominate feminist discussion and so don't leave room for the concerns of non-white feminism.
Similarly, and as an expansion of the gay marriage example, (I think) many LGBT activists think that gay marriage is less pressing than issues like bullying and job security. The harm here is, as above, that concerns about gay marriage dominate discussion of gay rights and so don't leave room for possibly more important concerns.
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What do I plan on doing with an answer to this question? With the worst privileged questions I frequently find that the answer is "nothing," sometimes with the follow-up answer "signaling?" That's a bad sign.
Do you mean by this that one should always have a non-"nothing" answer to this question, or just that the "nothing" answer frequently (though not always) indicates a privileging problem?
I think if the answer is literally "nothing" then that is bad, but "nothing" to many people could mean "nothing, I'm just curious" and then you can expand that to "I think this is an interesting question and I enjoy thinking about it on an intellectual level," which is not in fact nothing; what you're doing is satisfying your intellectual curiosity. (This might apply to a random math or physics question you ask yourself, for example.)
I think this post is covering a superset of the unhelpful questions that I pointed out here, because the ones that I mentioned are also dissolved by "What do you plan to do with the answer?" Sometimes, you do have a goal in mind, but you don't realize that the question you're asking isn't going to yield an answer that's relevant or helpful with respect to that goal (which is a mini lost purpose in the form of expended clock cycles but maybe also yelling at a tiny child.) Meanwhile, I think the signalling ones are usually when you feel like you need to formulate an opinion on something just because it's in the media even though it doesn't affect your daily life.
I think the answer "I'll be like whoaaa, because this question is interesting!" is a helpful, non-nothing answer, but something like "then I'll put it in this paper and eventually it will lead to more papers, but not much else" is indicative of larger lost purposes.
General note: you are demonstrating a pattern of posting comments that seem to depend on more shared context than actually exists, and which I suspect are consequently pretty much unintelligible to the majority of readers.
The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now, even in politics (I'd guess that the economy is more important).
I don't know about that. Probably the most important question that can be asked in politics is "how can we produce a perfect society in every which way according to the following list of criteria...."
The trick, of course, is that for most people, the "most important" questions are defined by more than just what the impact of the answer would be when we get one. Likelihood...
All the examples of privileged questions given are disguised manifestations of moral uncertainty
should gay marriage be legal?
is the struggle between a morality that favors equality, and one that has a certain set of values surrounding purity and/or respect for religious authority.
Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?
is the struggle between individual autonomy vs. harm avoidance
Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed?
is the struggle between in-group preference and lack thereof
The questions themselves are unimportant...but th...
Isn't moral strugle a part of how mindkilling feels from inside?
Also, compare these two questions:
a) Should gay marriage be legal?
b) How to optimize the society for more long-term utility for people of any sexual orientation?
Only the first one could get media attention. And it's not because the second one is less moral.
Related to: Privileging the Hypothesis
-- Paul Graham
-- Doug Henwood
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Here are some political questions that seem to commonly get discussed in US media: should gay marriage be legal? Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws? Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed?
These are all examples of what I'll call privileged questions (if there's an existing term for this, let me know): questions that someone has unjustifiably brought to your attention in the same way that a privileged hypothesis unjustifiably gets brought to your attention. The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now, even in politics (I'd guess that the economy is more important). Outside of politics, many LWers probably think "what can we do about existential risks?" is one of the most important questions to answer, or possibly "how do we optimize charity?"
Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media.
The problem with privileged questions is that you only have so much attention to spare. Attention paid to a question that has been privileged funges against attention you could be paying to better questions. Even worse, it may not feel from the inside like anything is wrong: you can apply all of the epistemic rationality in the world to answering a question like "should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?" and never once ask yourself where that question came from and whether there are better questions you could be answering instead.
I suspect this is a problem in academia too. Richard Hamming once gave a talk in which he related the following story:
Academics answer questions that have been privileged in various ways: perhaps the questions their advisor was interested in, or the questions they'll most easily be able to publish papers on. Neither of these are necessarily well-correlated with the most important questions.
So far I've found one tool that helps combat the worst privileged questions, which is to ask the following counter-question:
What do I plan on doing with an answer to this question?
With the worst privileged questions I frequently find that the answer is "nothing," sometimes with the follow-up answer "signaling?" That's a bad sign. (Edit: but "nothing" is different from "I'm just curious," say in the context of an interesting mathematical or scientific question that isn't motivated by a practical concern. Intellectual curiosity can be a useful heuristic.)
(I've also found the above counter-question generally useful for dealing with questions. For example, it's one way to notice when a question should be dissolved, and asked of someone else it's one way to help both of you clarify what they actually want to know.)