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There was this voice inside my head that told me that since I got Something to protect, relaxing is never ok above strict minimum, the goal is paramount, and I should just work as hard as I can all the time.
This led me to breaking down and being incapable to work on my AI governance job for a week, as I just piled up too much stress.
And then, I decided to follow what motivated me in the moment, instead of coercing myself into working on what I thought was most important, and lo and behold! my total output increased, while my time spent working decreased.
I'm so angry and sad at the inadequacy of my role models, cultural norms, rationality advice, model of the good EA who does not burn out, which still led me to smash into the wall despite their best intentions. I became so estranged from my own body and perceptions, ignoring my core motivations, feeling harder and harder to work. I dug myself such deep a hole. I'm terrified at the prospect to have to rebuild my motivation myself again.
18On the Spotify release, there is a typo in "First they came for the epsistemology".
Over the last two years, I discovered LessWrong, learned about x-risks, joined the rationalist community, joined EA, started a rationalist/EA group house, and finally left my comfy high earning crypto job last September, to start working on AI safety. During this time, I definitely felt multiple switch of taking on different kinds of responsibilities.
The first responsibility I learned, by reading HPMOR and The Sequences, was the sense that more was possible, that I could achieve greatness, become as cool as I ever wanted, but that it needed actual work, that I was not on the right path to achieve it, that I would need to take risks and that I could not count on any of my then friends to help me with it. It was at this time that I took responsibility over what my life would be like.
I joined the rationalist community somewhat quickly, and after a few months ended up creating a rationalist group house. There, I spent lots of time with people very different from those I spent time with, in no small part because they questioned my beliefs. I realized lots of the factual knowledge I got from the Internet or from school was incomplete or flat out wrong, that the procedural knowledge I got from my parents and common culture was deeply suboptimal, that strong and counterproductive emotional patterns were driving me a large chunk of the time, and that generally my epistemics were broken, which prevented solving the other problems. I realized I could not trust anyone to give me correct knowledge, to show me the right way, even on the most basic stuff. It was at this time I took responsibility over my cognitive processes and beliefs, because blind faith was not a reliable way to navigate the world.
Leaving my job for AI Safety definitely felt like jumping into the unknown. For the first time in my life, I cared about achieving a goal that was wildly above my level. I finally had something to protect, and was taking active steps each day towards getting better. It felt like taking the responsibility of shaping the future like I wanted. I realized nobody else would do it for me.
Working on AI safety full-time also led to a large increase in the amount of stress I experienced, as working harder and caring more than I ever did exposed lots of flaws that were never a problem when I was just going with the flow. I can give more details on the issues I experienced, but basically I was terrible at noticing issues and kept ignoring my emotions, nearly leading to burnout twice. I realized nobody could manage my internal states except me. It felt like taking responsibility over my motivation, my happiness, my reactions to any event. This is still a work in progress, though.
When I first read HPMOR, I expected that taking responsibility was just a single jump you had to take once. Now, it seems to be a succession of realization, where the tools I had been given proved to be insufficient, and I had to take upon myself to reforge better tools. I'm actually looking forward to the next realization now. I hope you and I have the courage to continue down this road.
1I was allergic to acarids when I was a child, and this caused me a severe asthma crisis when I was around 10. I live in France, and I got prescribed SLIT by the first allergy specialist my mother found, so I guess it's quite a common treatment there. I took it for more than 5 years, and now 8 years later I don't ever have any symptoms of allergy.
I filled in the survey! It was a fun way to relax this morning
Thank you for the pointer ! I found the article you mentioned, and then found the tag Postmortem & Retrospective which led me to three additional posts:
Yesterday, I was searching for posts by alignment researchers describing how they got into the field. I was searching specifically for personal stories rather than guides on how other people can get into the field.
I was trying to perform Intuition flooding, by reading lots of accounts, and getting intuitions on which techniques work to enter the field.
I only managed to find three which fit somewhat my target:
- Neel Nanda: How I Formed My Own Views About AI Safety
- Kevin RoWang: Lessons After a Couple Months of Trying to Do ML Research
- TurnTrout: Lessons I've Learned from Self-Teaching
- Nate Soares: The mechanics of my recent productivity
Neel Nanda's post was the central example of what I was looking for, and I was surprised to not find more. Does anyone know where I can find more posts like this ?
blog.jaibot.com does not seem to exist anymore.
I don't have the intuition that reactions will replace some comments which would have been written without this feature. What makes you think this will happen?
If reactions were tied to posting a comment, such as reactions could not decrease the number of comments, would this make you more likely to support this feature?
Incidentally, thinking about which reaction to put to this comment instead of just up or downvoting made me realize I did not understand completely what you meant, and motivated me to write a comment instead.
The main part of the issue was actually that I was not aware I had internal conflicts. I just mysteriously felt less emotions and motivation. That's the main thing all the articles I read of sustainable productivity did not transmit me, how to recognize it as it happens, without ever having my internal monologue saying "I don't want to work on this" or something.
What do you think antidepressants would be useful for? I don't expect to be matching any clinical criteria for depression.