Stapledon: I strongly recommend you read Star Maker. Though Last and First Men, you also should, on general literary grounds.
what I do for a living: bioinformatics web databases. priimarily used as tools for drug design. Tools or making tools to save lives, in other worlds. While I could, theoretically, be affecting the world for the good more directly in many ways, I am satisfied that in doing what I can do, strictly in not-for-profit publicly accessible contexts, I am a) using a skillset I have that is not as widely available as many and b) exerting myself in ways I can continue to do long-term, as opposed to, frex, the sorts of doing helpful things that would burn me out rapidly like suicide crisis hotlines; I greatly respect people who are capable of helping others that way, but I do not have that particular kind of strength, and it seems morally preferable to apply some tactical thinking to using what strength I do have in the optimally effective manner.
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Date: 2008-05-12 05:52 pm (UTC)what I do for a living: bioinformatics web databases. priimarily used as tools for drug design. Tools or making tools to save lives, in other worlds. While I could, theoretically, be affecting the world for the good more directly in many ways, I am satisfied that in doing what I can do, strictly in not-for-profit publicly accessible contexts, I am a) using a skillset I have that is not as widely available as many and b) exerting myself in ways I can continue to do long-term, as opposed to, frex, the sorts of doing helpful things that would burn me out rapidly like suicide crisis hotlines; I greatly respect people who are capable of helping others that way, but I do not have that particular kind of strength, and it seems morally preferable to apply some tactical thinking to using what strength I do have in the optimally effective manner.