Week 17: Motivation for working in Novel Spaces and Quantum Computation
If I am being completely honest with myself the decisions I make are often driven by wanting the approval / admiration of others. This happens both consciously and in a deeply internalized way. There are absolutely times when I am consciously aware that certain actions will improve how others perceive me. The more subtle instances are when I have crafted a story around why X is important to me. But really X is important to me because it is important to others. Doing well in school was deeply internalized as one of my values, because I was consistently shown that others admired people who did well in school.
My desire to spend my energy on projects that will have a large impact is partially driven by wanting approval. Society valorizes individuals who have large impacts. We are taught about the great women and men of history. The brilliant activists, policy makers, scientists and artists. I was consistently messaged that one way for my existence to be valuable is to achieve something that society will admire.
My initial reaction to recognizing this desire is to question how healthy it is. Doing something solely for others approval can be dangerous. I have found that when I am too focused on winning someone’s approval, I often hurt someone else. I am fixating on success in such a narrow way, that I cause harm. This desire for approval from others is not necessarily bad. Caring about others opinions’ is an important aspect of how humans build community. It allows us to develop a set of commonly accepted behavior. I am not making every decision from a blank slate but can rely on commonly accepted wisdom that has been built across many people and generations.
When investigating my desire to be approved by others, it is critical to ask who are the others. There are some others whose opinion I care more about and some others whose opinions I probably do not care that much about.
I am most concerned with the approval of the people I spend time around. Since I spent so much of my time in an academic environment I want approval from people who also attended expensive educational institutions or who work in higher paying tech / academic jobs.
Since these opinions are the ones that currently motivate me, I am attracted to working in fields that are less developed. This motivation means that I have a lot of energy / excitement when thinking about projects in less developed fields. When I was doing academic research on machine intelligence I was so energized everyday. That energy derived from feeling like there was a chance that I could actually make a meaningful contribution. It is easier to make a contribution in areas that are less developed for the following reasons.
- Often there is less background knowledge and years of studying that is needed to get to the cutting edge of the field
- The methods for doing research are less defined and having a unique approach can be really important
- The rate of progress in the field is quite rapid
Due to this interest of working in newer / less explored fields the topics I am currently most interested in are:
- Understanding intelligence (neuroscience, biological systems, synthetic biology, machine learning)
- Designing collective organizations (organizational structure and blockchain governance)
- Tools for creation (quantum Computation and creativity tools)
In the past month or so, my friend Holly and I did some background reading on quantum computation to understand if we would be interested working on problems in that space. The goal was to understand the current state of the field and identify what problems are the most promising to work on. We decided to not continue exploring this space for now because it feels like quantum computation is still relatively far away and the projects in this space do not seem like a good fit for us.
Some quick synthesis from our reading:
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Building quantum computers is really hard. Manipulating qubits without errors is really difficult. People have come up with strategies for handling errors , but they require many additional qubits. This means usable quantum computers are still relatively far away. That being said, cloud computing should make quantum computers more accessible with a quicker adoption rate than the beginning of classical computers.
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Quantum computation is often taught by comparing it to classical computation. A good teaching technique is to use knowledge people already have, but I think this approach is actually harmful for quantum computation. The use cases for quantum computers are so different than the use cases for classical computers. Many sources focused on how we can do everything with a quantum computer that you can do with a classical computer. While the proof for this is true, I feel like it leads people astray. Quantum computers have different strengths and different use cases from classical computers. We should not message them as more universal computers.
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Quantum computation does have the potential to do some really interesting tasks. Using qubits we are able to simulate systems in a way that is essentially impossible with classical computing. The first meaningful use cases of quantum computation will involve simulating real world systems. If I were going to keep spending time focusing on quantum computation, I would try to understand these use cases. These use cases are less reliant on a large number of qubits and a much more natural fit for quantum computers. Here are the papers I identified that touch on this idea
Simulating Physics with Computers
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I think we will be surprised by the ways quantum computers are used. It will take some time from people to fully understand what the use cases of quantum computers are and how they can be used most effectively since the paradigm is so different from what we are used to.
What we read / watched