As my Masters program draws to a close, my friends and I often chat about impact. In my circle of physicists and computer scientists, we wonder how our research in basic science and abstract theory can sustain us with meaning, past the intellectual satisfaction of their pursuit. I have no firm conclusions, but in this article I'll share some thoughts that I'm using to plan my immediate course.
First, what is impact? At its simplest, impact is value that you provide towards some purpose that you care about: your family, the community, the planet. I believe that counterfactual significance is important; that if you had not provided the value, no one would have. Of course, counterfactual significance is subjective and how we interpret it is what I call an untruth. Say I told my mom that I loved her, and that made her day better. Would that be counterfactual impact? An optimist may say yes, since if I hadn't said it to her, no one would have. A pessimist no, since if she had another son, maybe he'd ring her up with the magic words every coffee break.
Additionally, impact is estimated and not directly measured. We guess our impact based on how we think the world works. If I campaign against the agriculture industry and successfully reduce the occupancy of pig cages by a half, I would think that I've had a wonderful impact on animal suffering. And yet, without me knowing, this may lead to the same farmers doubling the concentration of their chickens, actually counteracting all my impact!
Your role provides the frame through which you see your own, or others' impact. I, as a middle class city-dweller, self-identify as one who cares about animal well-being and the environment. I think that giving animals more space would be a great thing, both to reduce emissions and reduce animal suffering. On the other hand, if I were a third-world farmer trying to raise a family, I'd probably be elated to fit twice as many pigs in the same space.
I see our choice of roles like that of friendship. When making friends, many people pass the bar, and what matters is who you commit to making memories with, and who the environment places you with. Similarly, the role you choose to identify with just needs to pass a threshold of compatibility. I would be happy making impact as a medical researcher or a scientist, trying to get cited and thus move the overall scientific discourse. I probably could not convince myself of positive impact while working at certain roles at certain tech companies.
We see impact through our models of the world. These depend on the roles that we commit to. While many avoid putting themselves into categories, I believe that commiting to some form of identity is crucial for seeing impact, and the consequent feelings of fulfilment and progress.
If the role you choose determines the direction of your impact, another natural dimension is impact size. Whereas the direction is an open-ended question of choice and commitment, the magnitude is much more falsifiable: it is probably easier to convince yourself that you chose the right discipline, than that you are shaping the frontiers of science when actually you're a complete newcomer to the field.
As a brief aside, I'd like to differentiate between output and outcome. Output is the the number of lines of code your write, or the number of reports you can draft. Impact is whether anyone uses your code or reads your reports.
The magnitude of our impact is different from our work output and our impact direction, since it it isn't directly under our control. The stoics say to disdain things outside of our power, and to master the things that are. When I took up stoicism, I took this advice to heart and tried to ignore the magnitude of impact.
However, upon reflection, the fate-loving stoics probably hadn't heard of probability, and the things that we can do to shape it. When one goes into an ecosystem that is abounding with money and/or full of irregularly impressive people, my guess is that one's expected impact would be much larger. Impressive people motivate one another (like Vienna's 20th century psychoanalysts), often defining themselves on their progress. Money (I'm playing devils advocate for capitalism) comes either from investments - expected future provided value - or value that has already been provided. Additionally, money, as power, is an impact multiplier. You could train a machine-learning model to make 8-bit pixel art on your laptop. But with a hundred million dollars of computation and the same talent, perhaps you could pivot the future of art.
At this stage of my life, I value large impact. Large impact often means progress, and progress leads to novelty as the world keeps throwing next steps at you. Additionally, the consequences of our actions are proportional to our impact, and I see this as a fundamental part of agency - one of my core values. Just so my friends reading this don't completely dismiss me, my other core values include inner peace and compassion. How I'll keep these intact as I "strive to be among the brilliant and swimming in funding" will be crucial.
Today, as a friend, partner, scientist, blogger, grocery clerk, what are the direction and magnitude of your impact? And what might they be in a couple years?