You could argue that you are simply risk averse, but that would require you to set some upper bound regarding bargains with uncertain payoffs
I take risks when I actually have a grasp of what they are. Right now I’m trying to organize a DC meetup group, finish up my robotics team’s season, do all of my homework for the next 2 weeks so that I can go college touring, and combining college visits with LW meetups.
After April, I plan to start capoiera, work on PyMC, actually have DC meetups, work on a scriptable real time strategy game, start contra dancing again, start writing a sequence based on Heuristics and Biases, improve my dietary and exercise habits, and visit Serbia.
All of these things I have a pretty solid grasp of what they entail, and how they impact the world.
I still want to do high-utility things, but I just choose not to live in constant dread of lost opportunity. My general strategy of acquiring utility is to help/make other people get more utility too, and multiply the effects of getting the more low hanging fruit.
Suppose that I know that a certain course of action
with the agent’s decision-making dominated by extremely small probabilities of obtaining vast resources.
The issue with long-shots like this is that I don’t know where to look for them. Seriously. And since they’re such long-shots, I’m not sure how to go about getting them. I know that trying to do so isn’t particularly likely to work.
Yet you trust your brain enough to turn down claims of massive utility.
Sorry, I said that badly. If I knew how to get massive utility, I would try to. Its just the planning is the hard part. The best that I know to do now (note: I am carving out time to think about this harder in the forseeable future) is to get money and build communities. And give some of the money to SIAI. But in the meantime, I’m not going to be agonizing over everything I could have possibly done better.
I take risks when I actually have a grasp of what they are. Right now I’m trying to organize a DC meetup group, finish up my robotics team’s season, do all of my homework for the next 2 weeks so that I can go college touring, and combining college visits with LW meetups.
After April, I plan to start capoiera, work on PyMC, actually have DC meetups, work on a scriptable real time strategy game, start contra dancing again, start writing a sequence based on Heuristics and Biases, improve my dietary and exercise habits, and visit Serbia.
All of these things I have a pretty solid grasp of what they entail, and how they impact the world.
I still want to do high-utility things, but I just choose not to live in constant dread of lost opportunity. My general strategy of acquiring utility is to help/make other people get more utility too, and multiply the effects of getting the more low hanging fruit.
The issue with long-shots like this is that I don’t know where to look for them. Seriously. And since they’re such long-shots, I’m not sure how to go about getting them. I know that trying to do so isn’t particularly likely to work.
Sorry, I said that badly. If I knew how to get massive utility, I would try to. Its just the planning is the hard part. The best that I know to do now (note: I am carving out time to think about this harder in the forseeable future) is to get money and build communities. And give some of the money to SIAI. But in the meantime, I’m not going to be agonizing over everything I could have possibly done better.