Life Choice: Should Someone Highly Interested in AGI Research Jeopardize Their Existing Career to Pursue It?
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Option 2: Go on hiatus from the day job/career, and focus on creative pursuits and research, full-time, for some number of months (duration perhaps depending on job opportunities).
Consider your current balance of working and research.
Could you cut other activities, keep the job, and increase focus on research?
A related idea is to become more disciplined with my time, getting more out of the off days.
Discipline means arbitrarily favoring one conflicting idea over another. ‘Arbitrarily’ meaning favoring without resolving the conflict.
You don’t actually know which idea is better, if any, before you resolve the conflict. So siding with one before then is irrational.
Instead of practicing discipline, practice resolving conflicts between ideas and thus finding common preferences with yourself: ideas you wholeheartedly agree with, have no reservations about.
Veritula helps you with that.
How far out does the graph of irrational ideas go? Is the argument that: discipline, grit, drive, tenacity and more concepts in this web are all bad/irrational? This is quite a claim. Is "work" bad? Irrational? Work to me means discipline, at least in large part...
I want to understand this. Take the horrible and widespread case of: "I hate my job, and all other jobs that seem available. But I need money to live." How can the conflict be resolved? What is one to do until they resolve it? Surely it is rational to work to make money... Yet in this case, this requires forcing oneself to do something unpleasant; hence the rational thing to do in this case requires discipline.
Is the argument that: discipline, grit, drive, tenacity and more concepts in this web are all bad/irrational?
Discipline is irrational because it’s self-coercive by definition. For the others, it depends. Are you being tenacious because you’re forcing yourself to stick to some topic you don’t like? Then it’s irrational. Are you being tenacious because you have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge in that area? Rational.