I’m definitely feeling like I sacrificed both income and career capital by deciding to do alignment research full time. I don’t feel like I’m being ‘hurt’ by the world though, I feel like the world is hurting. In a saner world, there would be more resources devoted to this, and it is to the world’s detriment that this is not the case. I could go back to doing mainstream machine learning if I wasn’t overwhelmed by a sense of impending doom and compelled by a feeling of duty to do what I can to help. I’m going to keep trying my best, but I would be a lot more effective if I were working as part of a group. Even just things like being able to share the burden of some of the boilerplate code I need to write in order to do my experiments would speed things up a lot, or having a reviewer to help point out mistakes to me.
I’m definitely feeling like I sacrificed both income and career capital by deciding to do alignment research full time. I don’t feel like I’m being ‘hurt’ by the world though, I feel like the world is hurting. In a saner world, there would be more resources devoted to this, and it is to the world’s detriment that this is not the case. I could go back to doing mainstream machine learning if I wasn’t overwhelmed by a sense of impending doom and compelled by a feeling of duty to do what I can to help. I’m going to keep trying my best, but I would be a lot more effective if I were working as part of a group. Even just things like being able to share the burden of some of the boilerplate code I need to write in order to do my experiments would speed things up a lot, or having a reviewer to help point out mistakes to me.