Fairly recently I would have strongly endorsed the following claim (e.g., wrt careers):

Conjecture: I can hack myself to feel excited about doing lots of things.

The rational is, feeling good about doing something is plausibly mostly a function of being good at that thing and acting in a way thatā€™s consistent with being excited about it. With a little bit of practice / experience, you can get good at lots of things. It probably also helps if you feel that what youā€™re doing is important.

Iā€™ve now lost some confidence in this claim. At the very least itā€™s harder than Iā€™d expected to be excited about something new, and hard to want to be.

The math is a bit confusing here. For instance, if I thought that trying to work on important things multiplied your expected positive impact on the world by 1000x compared to not trying, all else equal, but that Iā€™d be 50% less ā€œproductiveā€ working on something that I didnā€™t enjoy as much, then thatā€™d still be 500x expected value. But maybe the value from trying to do good is heavy tailed, so the numbers are off. And maybe the numbers are just made up.



I donā€™t think I have anything particularly good to say about this topic. I guess my 3 cents are:

  1. The choice between doing good things and doing fun things feels like it should be a false dichotomy.
  2. Iā€™m extremely grateful that there are some people that have chosen to do good, even if it was hard and required re-thinking their conception of self. For instance, Paul Christiano at one point in time was an MIT student who enjoyed math + TCS and was planning to do TCS research because itā€™s what he was good at. Heā€™s gone on to do a lot of really different stuff, and I suspect heā€™s personally responsible for boosting Pr(future is good) by >1%. I think a similar thing can be said about most people that are trying to make the AI situation go well ā€” they arenā€™t ā€œsaintsā€ that only desire to do good[^1]. Theyā€™re often people that had some prior intuitions about how theyā€™d spend their life, but have radically updated based on reasoning, even when emotions might discourage them to break from the status quo. Theyā€™re willing to take high personal risk actions, because they are clear about what their objective function is, and have decided to optimize it.
  3. My current plan for how I want to spend my life (locally) is as follows:
    • For the next 5-6 months Iā€™m going to upskill (including doing object-level useful work when possible, although this seems tricky on my own) for working at ARC.
    • I could hedge against the ARC plan working out. Iā€™m not planning to invest much time into this however (beyond some simple things). This decision should be suspected heavily of arising from motivated reasoning. Even so, I feel somewhat comfortable with this decision. In particular, I think that Iā€™m not even close to saturating the ā€œuseful skillsā€ that itā€™d be good to have for pursuing ARCā€™s agenda. Learning things like inference would clearly be helpful, and having more experience proposing my own research questions and pursuing them would be useful. If you do theoretical computer science and are interested in collaborating on a project, then letā€™s set up a time to brainstorm some ideas. Ideally Iā€™d like a fairly well-defined question with room to branch out with a deliverable of some nice writeup that goes on ArXiv and is maybe published.
    • My non-main-line plan is as follows:
    • EDIT: actually, Iā€™ve recently been feeling more optimistic that I might be able to do something good even if main-line plan doesnā€™t pan out. But I think itā€™s okay to figure that out once/if the need arises. And Iā€™m actually fairly optimistic about the main-line strategy.
    • Anyways, I donā€™t claim that this is a very good plan but now that itā€™s articulated it can be refined.