At what point do you consider yourself a researcher and not just a noob, or someone who wants to one day become a researcher?
[This is actually a very important question for my self narrative; for how I relate to my AI safety writing, for what standards I expect of myself (is my AI safety writing currently a hobby that I hope to later turn into a job/or should I treat it as a volunteer job?), etc. I don’t really have an answer, but I had mostly been thinking of myself as “someone who wants to one day become an AI safety researcher” (2022 shortened my timelines (suddenly I no longer had a decade to learn all the maths and CS before making useful contributions to alignment theory), and so I brought “one day” sooner, but I’m still at best “aspiring” to be one.
Learning that an actual researcher™ I respected was younger than me was a massive slap to my face/wakeup call (we discovered LW at the same age/stage in our lives, so there’s a sense in which I have a: “what was I doing with my life all this time?”/felt like I’ve fallen behind [yeah, I am status brainkilled]).]
At what point do you consider yourself a researcher and not just a noob, or someone who wants to one day become a researcher?
[This is actually a very important question for my self narrative; for how I relate to my AI safety writing, for what standards I expect of myself (is my AI safety writing currently a hobby that I hope to later turn into a job/or should I treat it as a volunteer job?), etc. I don’t really have an answer, but I had mostly been thinking of myself as “someone who wants to one day become an AI safety researcher” (2022 shortened my timelines (suddenly I no longer had a decade to learn all the maths and CS before making useful contributions to alignment theory), and so I brought “one day” sooner, but I’m still at best “aspiring” to be one.
Learning that an actual researcher™ I respected was younger than me was a massive slap to my face/wakeup call (we discovered LW at the same age/stage in our lives, so there’s a sense in which I have a: “what was I doing with my life all this time?”/felt like I’ve fallen behind [yeah, I am status brainkilled]).]