Life Choice: Should Someone Highly Interested in AGI Research Jeopardize Their Existing Career to Pursue It?
Showing only #3638 and its comments.
See full discussionLog in or sign up to participate in this discussion.
With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Option 1: Continue working the day job and balancing the other pursuits on the side.
This brings us back to our conversation about discipline. Maybe we can recapitulate here, or maybe best done elsewhere. Lots of things are excruciating, like homework and exams; should I not have done them? Exercise as well. There seem to be problems which can only be solved by maintaining other problems..!
Should suffering be avoided? Not if it's useful..? I'm still conflicted about this.
Just because lots of things are excruciating doesn’t mean life necessarily involves those things. Life doesn’t have to be difficult in this way.
You can find a passion, have fun 100% of the time, and never coerce yourself. (That’s an ideal we can fall short of – if we ‘only’ have fun 90% of the time, that’s still infinitely better than dooming ourselves to a life we hate.)
Should suffering be avoided? Not if it's useful..?
Self-coercion should be avoided, yes. When we coerce ourself, we are not creating knowledge and instead arbitrarily favoring one idea over another. If a part of you disagrees that something is useful, then don’t do it!
You can always find a common preference with yourself. Problems are soluble. Do not act on ideas that have pending criticisms.
You’re young. Now’s the time to take (educated, calculated) risks. Even if quitting turns out to be a mistake, you have all the time in the world to correct the mistake and recover. You can always find some day job somewhere. But you may not always be able to pursue your passion.
I find this point irrefutable, aside from the risk being educated or calculated... Maybe it is those things...
What I would ultimately love to do is pivot into AGI research as a career, but when is pursuing that educated risk-taking vs fantasy?
Why does it have to be a career? You could try it for a year or six months or whatever. If you don’t like it, you switch to something else. That’d be fine.
It would be fantasy/reckless if, for example, you were in your mid 40s, had a family to take care of, and had no savings.
How much time and energy do you really have for research while working? 1hr daily? 2 hours daily? 4 hours daily?
Leaving your job allows for the possibility of consistent high quality research daily.
Yes, very little time and energy for research while working, a handful of hours a week. The intermittence carries its own cost, I also find.
Another reason to quit is that you work at night. I believe you told me you don’t personally mind this, but continued interruption of your circadian rhythm is bound to impact your health.
Leaving the job means more time for research. It also means more time to find a much better job that allows you the energy for research.
Leaving gives space for better balance.
Have you thought about quiet quitting?
Could you also come up with the reasons you dislike your job? Is it because of co-workers, managers or the work you actually do? In either case, the calculation in the calculated risk of quitting your job might be mentally checking out from it, but reaping the good thing about it, which is the financial stability.
Tyler explained what he dislikes about his job in the ‘About’ section of the discussion, which is quoted in the bounty terms:
Many of the tasks I am assigned seem eminently automatable, and performing them is excruciating for me (though I recognize my good fortune overall). Even when there are micro-problems which require creativity to solve, I still find the process painful, given that they are other people's problems rather than my own. It is the same pain of school: creativity forced to work toward answers to questions not asked.
You need to mark your submission as a criticism if you want it to be eligible for a payout from the bounty.