# How do you incentivize people to work on nodes farther down the tree? # How do you incentivize people to work on nodes farther down the tree This is extremely hard because the nature of these nodes is that it takes a long time to try things out and you could spend a large portion of your life working on it and get nowhere. *One argument that we don’t need to incentivize more people to work on root nodes is that people in the Math department are working on the root nodes.* Some of them yes, but few are working on radically new math with respect to the other mathematicians - they are still in the same incentive system, the judges are just different. *A possible hint of a solution* is to spend more work sketching what a root node would look like, how you know that you’ve accomplished it, and ideally what intermediate milestones look like (though that may be impossible.) [[Technological roadmapping can give an idea of where technological evolution can go and how to get there]] Another solution is much more meta - we need faith. [[The Portal 30: Ross Douthat - The Rave before the Fall]] suggests that people need to believe in something beyond themselves. (Related: ### Relevant * [[neumannOneProcess2020]] * [[There are scientific and technological problems that make other technology advances irrelevant by altering the environment]] * [[§Tech Tree Model of Heuretics]]