Life Choice: Should Someone Highly Interested in AGI Research Jeopardize Their Existing Career to Pursue It?

Showing only those parts of the discussion that lead to #3855.

See full discussion·See most recent related ideas
  Log in or sign up to participate in this discussion.
With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.

Discussions can branch out indefinitely. Zoom out for the bird’s-eye view.
Tyler Mills’s avatar

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).

Battle tested
Zakery Mizell’s avatar

Consider your current balance of working and research.

Could you cut other activities, keep the job, and increase focus on research?

Criticism of #3639Criticized1*
Tyler Mills’s avatar

A related idea is to become more disciplined with my time, getting more out of the off days.

Criticized1*
Dennis Hackethal’s avatar

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.

Criticism of #3820
Tyler Mills’s avatar

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.

Criticism of #3833Criticized1*
Dennis Hackethal’s avatar
Only version leading to #3855 (2 total)

How can the conflict be resolved?

By coming up with a new option that has no pending criticisms. We can’t state those in advance.

Criticized1*
Dennis Hackethal’s avatar

Superseded by #3854. This comment was generated automatically.

Criticism of #3852