The waiting room strategy for people in undergrad/grad school who have <6 year median AGI timelines: treat school as “a place to be until you get into an actually impactful position”. Try as hard as possible to get into an impactful position as soon as possible. As soon as you get in, you leave school.
Upsides compared to dropping out include:
Lower social cost (appeasing family much more, which is a common constraint, and not having a gap in one’s resume)
Avoiding costs from large context switches (moving, changing social environment).
Extremely resilient individuals who expect to get an impactful position (including independent research) very quickly are probably better off directly dropping out.
I think that for people (such as myself) who think/realize timelines are likely short, I find it more truth-tracking to use terminology that actually represents my epistemic state (that timelines are likely short) rather than hedging all the time and making it seem like I’m really uncertain.
Under my own lights, I’d be giving bad advice if I were hedging about timelines when giving advice (because the advice wouldn’t be tracking the world as it is, it would be tracking a probability distribution I disagree with and thus a probability distribution that leads to bad decisions), and my aim is to give good advice.
Like, if a house was 70% likely to be set on fire, I’d say something like “The people who realize that the house is dangerous should leave the house” instead of using think.
But yeah, point taken. “Realize” could imply consensus, which I don’t mean to do.
I’ve changed the wording to be more precise now (“have <6 year median AGI timelines”)
I don’t think this applies just to AGI and school but more generally in lots of situations. If you have something better to do, do it. Otherwise keep doing what you are doing. Dropping out without something better to do just seems like a bad idea. I like this blog post: https://colah.github.io/posts/2020-05-University/
I found this tricky to parse because of two phrasing issues:
The post depends a lot on what you mean by “school” (high school versus undergrad).
I feel confused about what claim you’re making about the waiting room strategy: you say that some people shouldn’t use it, but you don’t actually claim that anyone in particular should use it. So are you just mentioning that it’s a possible strategy? Or are you implying that it should be the default strategy?
All of the above but it seems pretty hard to have an impact as a high schooler, and many impact avenues aren’t technically “positions” (e.g. influencer)
I think that everyone expect “Extremely resilient individuals who expect to get an impactful position (including independent research) very quickly” is probably better off following the strategy.
Caveat: A very relevant point to consider is how long you can take a leave of absence, since some universities allow you to do this indefinitely. Being able to pursue what you want/ need while maintaining optionality seems Pareto better.
The waiting room strategy for people in undergrad/grad school who have <6 year median AGI timelines: treat school as “a place to be until you get into an actually impactful position”. Try as hard as possible to get into an impactful position as soon as possible. As soon as you get in, you leave school.
Upsides compared to dropping out include:
Lower social cost (appeasing family much more, which is a common constraint, and not having a gap in one’s resume)
Avoiding costs from large context switches (moving, changing social environment).
Extremely resilient individuals who expect to get an impactful position (including independent research) very quickly are probably better off directly dropping out.
I dislike the implied consensus / truth. (I would have said “think” instead of “realize”.)
I think that for people (such as myself) who think/realize timelines are likely short, I find it more truth-tracking to use terminology that actually represents my epistemic state (that timelines are likely short) rather than hedging all the time and making it seem like I’m really uncertain.
Under my own lights, I’d be giving bad advice if I were hedging about timelines when giving advice (because the advice wouldn’t be tracking the world as it is, it would be tracking a probability distribution I disagree with and thus a probability distribution that leads to bad decisions), and my aim is to give good advice.
Like, if a house was 70% likely to be set on fire, I’d say something like “The people who realize that the house is dangerous should leave the house” instead of using think.
But yeah, point taken. “Realize” could imply consensus, which I don’t mean to do.
I’ve changed the wording to be more precise now (“have <6 year median AGI timelines”)
I don’t think this applies just to AGI and school but more generally in lots of situations. If you have something better to do, do it. Otherwise keep doing what you are doing. Dropping out without something better to do just seems like a bad idea. I like this blog post: https://colah.github.io/posts/2020-05-University/
I found this tricky to parse because of two phrasing issues:
The post depends a lot on what you mean by “school” (high school versus undergrad).
I feel confused about what claim you’re making about the waiting room strategy: you say that some people shouldn’t use it, but you don’t actually claim that anyone in particular should use it. So are you just mentioning that it’s a possible strategy? Or are you implying that it should be the default strategy?
All of the above but it seems pretty hard to have an impact as a high schooler, and many impact avenues aren’t technically “positions” (e.g. influencer)
I think that everyone expect “Extremely resilient individuals who expect to get an impactful position (including independent research) very quickly” is probably better off following the strategy.
Caveat: A very relevant point to consider is how long you can take a leave of absence, since some universities allow you to do this indefinitely. Being able to pursue what you want/ need while maintaining optionality seems Pareto better.