I like your overall ambitions! I want to note a couple of things that seemed incongruous to me/things I'd change about your default plan.
I'm 24 now, so I'm hoping to start my career trajectory at 32 (8 years forms a natural/compelling Schelling point
This seems like very much the wrong mindset. You're starting this trajectory now. In order to do great intellectual work, you should be aiming directly at the things you want to understand, and the topics you want to make progress on, as early as you can. A better alternative would be taking the mindset that your career will end in 8 years, and thinking about what you'd need to produce great work by that time. (This is deliberately provocative, and shouldn't be taken fully literally, but I think points in the right direction, especially given that you're aiming to do research where the credentials from a PhD that's successful by mainstream standards don't matter very much, like agent foundations research and more general high-level strategic thinking).
Pick a new important topic each month (or 2 -3 months)
Again, I'd suggest taking quite a different strategy here. In order to do really well at this, I think you don't want the mindset of shallowly exploring other people's work (although of course it's useful to have that as background knowledge). I think you want to have the mindset of identifying the things which seem most important to you, pushing forward the frontier of knowledge on those topics, following threads which arise from doing so, and learning whatever you need as you go along. What it looks like to be successful here is noticing a bunch of ways in which other people seem like they're missing stuff/overlooking things, digging into those, and finding new ways to understand these topics. (That's true even if your only goal is to popularise existing ideas - in order to be able to popularise them really well, you want the level of knowledge such that, if there were big gaps in those ideas, then you'd notice them.) This is related to the previous point: don't spend all this time preparing to do the thing - just do it!
I think that I am unusually positioned to be able to become such a person.
I think that doing well at this research is sufficiently heavy-tailed that it's very hard to reason your way into thinking you'll be great at it in advance. You'll get far far more feedback on this point by starting to do the work now, getting a bunch of feedback, and iterating fast.
Good luck!
Aging/longevity is likely one of the top problems facing humanity especially when it seems possible to solve aging within your lifetime, so would add that to the list of topics to study. Also the rise of social media and in general the increase in the instant pleasure industry is having a huge impact on humanity so a topic worth exploring.
Conditional on intellectual ability alone, maybe I'm only 1 in 20 (or 1 in a 100 [I haven't taken an official IQ test, but I'd bet at 4:1 odds that I was above the 95th percentile but below the 99.9th percentile]). But I have more useful traits than just my raw intelligence. Considering other factors like parental socioeconomic status, epistemics, general and technical knowledge, rationality, etc. I think the class of people who are pareto better than me is probably something like 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 10 million.
That seems unlikely to me. Given that IQ is heritable, it tends to correlate with parental socioeconomic status. The others correlate as well. A 1 in 20 or even 1 in 100 IQ would put you below the average on LessWrong when we still had a census that was gathering IQ data.
(Maybe I was just being too conservative. Those are lower bounds I was confident betting on.)
I scored higher than the LW/SSC median on the IQ test that was linked (a Mensa Denmark one IIRC) in one of the surveys (SSC I think, I joined LW in 2017).
As I understand it, the online IQ test correlated with actual scores.
I may have been underestimating:
I don't honestly believe that I'm below the LW median. At least, I won't willingly take such a bet.
(I haven't taken an official test yet, boasting about IQ is gauche and doubly so for imaginary IQ, I'm conservative when betting, etc.)
FWIW, I originally wrote this for the EA Forum (whose norms around this I'm less familiar with, so I defaulted to conservativeness in bragging about intelligence) and didn't edit it for LessWrong. Maybe I'd have been less hesitant to boast if I was directing it at a LW audience.
To me claiming to be 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 10 million overall seems like a pretty boasty claim with a higher boastiness than claiming 140 IQ or something on that order.
Actually, I think your comment about strong positive correlation between those traits is something that I may have insufficiently appreciated enough when writing the post.
I'll just strip that segment out I think.
Rough and unpolished. I might refine it later.
I want to optimise something like: "expected positive impact on a brighter world". Probably, the best way I can do this is through direct work and not via earning to give. I think I have substantial intellectual endowment (more on that later), and like I'm quite privileged (more on that later as well). So, I should choose a career plan that maximises (expected utility) of my positive contribution to a brighter world conditional on the space of possible people I can be.
Near term (within the next 30 years), I want to pursue a career trajectory as an AI safety researcher and a "radical transhumanist thinkfluencer". For the AI safety research part, I'm currently learning abstract maths (currently category theory) [maybe I'll write another post motivating that, but I basically want to try my hand at Agent Foundations style research and I think I have the intellectual endowment for this to have considerable positive value in expectation]. I'll be starting a CS Masters at the end of September (if my student VISA is granted), I'll probably take a gap year (for some intensive learning project probably) then pursue a PhD in CS/AI/computational neuroscience (not mathematics. I'm under the impression I can autodidact any mathematics I find myself compelled to learn).
I'm 24 now, so I'm hoping to start my career trajectory at 32 (8 years forms a natural/compelling Schelling point [At 24 I'm a quite different person from the person I was at 16. And he is in turn a remarkably different person from the person I was at 8. I can thus expect to be a pretty different person at 32. "Who is the person I want to be at 32? What do I need to do to become that person?").
I quit my job as a web developer at the end of July. I don't plan to return to software development (I found it frustrating, and I think it's neither my absolute nor comparative advantage).
To disambiguate what I mean by "radical transhumanist thinkfluencer" a bit, I want to help sell the following ideas:
I'd like to convince people positioned to have a large positive influence the world or to attain the leverage to have such an influence.
I've discovered that I basically can't effectively study maths for more than 4 - 6 hours a day (I've somewhat slacked on this over the past month or two, but I've not abandoned the project of studying maths [it may even be the case that the reason I'm slacking is that 3 - 4 hours is too much for my natural mental stamina for doing maths]).
My mental stamina for learning non maths stuff seems to draw from a mostly different reserve and be 2x - 3x larger (I may have done 8+ hours of audiobooks/podcasts over the past couple of days? This wasn't due to a deliberate target; I just basically listen to music all my waking hours and I've decided to swap out my music with informational audio [at least until I exhaust my mental stamina]).
So, I have a lot of time I can use for learning but can't fung for learning more maths, so I might as well use it to try and build intellectual capital for becoming a radical transhumanist thinkfluencer.
Thus, I decided to start a new project. I want to build a comprehensive, rich and coherent world model of human civilisation (and of the world in which we inhabit).
I'm quite economically privileged (relative to others in my age range in my country). My parents are pretty well off (and can afford to fund me to study a Masters program at a Russell Group university). I can somewhat afford to leech off them more? It is not the case that I need to start a career anytime soon to survive. Leeching of them would be distasteful and annoying, but the costs seem to be worth it.
I'm very epistemically privileged. I've been in the rationalist community since 2017. I've absorbed basically very good epistemic memes, and I know what to do to get even better epistemics. I think I can become someone with exceptional epistemics.
I am intellectually privileged. I have high quantitative and verbal aptitude. I was excellent at mathematics in high school (I let my aptitude rust in the 8 years since, but I've started learning mathematics again, and think I basically have the ability to learn any mathematics that I put my mind to. This is mostly relevant for the agent foundations style AI safety research I want to do, but the quantitative aptitude will also be useful for making sense of the world.).
I expect that I can become a prolific writer. I have been a prolific writer at various points in the past (I just don't think such writing was valuable and so won't link it here. It's probably worth it to learn enough so that such writing would become very valuable).
I think there's a chronic undersupply of people with:
And are prolific writers
I believe such people provide considerable value to the world (and specifically to the project of improving the world).
I think that I am unusually positioned to be able to become such a person. The main thing that might prevent me from becoming such a person is burnout/losing motivation, but like posting about it here makes me more likely to follow through on this (I don't want to disappoint people who believe in me, and their encouragement provides the motivation to push forwards [I do have intrinsic motivation but supplementing it with extrinsic motivation seems good?]).
This is a non-exhaustive list of topics I'd hope to cover at some point for the purpose of becoming a thinkfluencer. Things I'd be learning primarily to do AI safety research won't be covered here.
Other mathematics/computer science/statistics I'll be learning for other reasons also won't be covered here (I have a pretty extensive list and I think I already know what I need to learn here).
I expect to spend more time on these topics in general, because quantitative fields require more effort from me. But I doubt I'll spend more than 3 months on any of them.
I'd appreciate feedback on my general plans/approach and on particular topics that you think I should add to my list (or remove from it).