I guess I’m sort of living the life of an expected utility maximizer. All I do all day long, year in year out, is optimize. Every night I go to sleep having optimized more problems out of existence, or having learned about ways that fail. Some days I find more problems. I don’t believe I can ever be done with it, because I’ve chosen problems with high challenges and complex novelty.
I’ve optimized my emotional landscape: it’s barren when it’s not filled with the radiant joy of successful optimization. I don’t care how my mind or body feels. It’s all in the service of optimization. Sleep, defecate, gym, eat, study, optimize, study, optimize. Repeat forever. Adjust parameters so that I always feel at peak performance. What about entertainment? Some time off? I enjoy some comedy, music, and perhaps the occasional video at the gym. No vacations. That’s my life. All of it. I basically never meet anybody in RL, because anybody with thoughts relevant to my work doesn’t live nearby.
In case you think that I’m missing out on some essential “human experience” and wasting my life with nerdy stuff, I disagree. I think I’m living one of the best possible lives ever lived—and I’m including the whole universe. There are a few billion thoroughly human lives being lived at the moment so I think that part of the experience space is pretty well covered already and needs no help from me. The part that is not well covered is my experience space. In that space, I find thoughts never thought before. I find deeds never done before. I never could get a kick from anything else, except maybe from creating an AI—but that’s for someone else to explore (I hear it’s not too crowded in there). I have no need to even briefly visit any other experience space as long as my experience space is brimming with novel and challenging experiences.
The meaning of life, as I see it:
In everything, achieve 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999...%
I guess I’m sort of living the life of an expected utility maximizer. All I do all day long, year in year out, is optimize. Every night I go to sleep having optimized more problems out of existence, or having learned about ways that fail. Some days I find more problems. I don’t believe I can ever be done with it, because I’ve chosen problems with high challenges and complex novelty.
I’ve optimized my emotional landscape: it’s barren when it’s not filled with the radiant joy of successful optimization. I don’t care how my mind or body feels. It’s all in the service of optimization. Sleep, defecate, gym, eat, study, optimize, study, optimize. Repeat forever. Adjust parameters so that I always feel at peak performance. What about entertainment? Some time off? I enjoy some comedy, music, and perhaps the occasional video at the gym. No vacations. That’s my life. All of it. I basically never meet anybody in RL, because anybody with thoughts relevant to my work doesn’t live nearby.
In case you think that I’m missing out on some essential “human experience” and wasting my life with nerdy stuff, I disagree. I think I’m living one of the best possible lives ever lived—and I’m including the whole universe. There are a few billion thoroughly human lives being lived at the moment so I think that part of the experience space is pretty well covered already and needs no help from me. The part that is not well covered is my experience space. In that space, I find thoughts never thought before. I find deeds never done before. I never could get a kick from anything else, except maybe from creating an AI—but that’s for someone else to explore (I hear it’s not too crowded in there). I have no need to even briefly visit any other experience space as long as my experience space is brimming with novel and challenging experiences.
The meaning of life, as I see it:
In everything, achieve 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999...%