I like your overall ambitions! I want to note a couple of things that seemed incongruous to me/things I’d change about your default plan.
I’m 24 now, so I’m hoping to start my career trajectory at 32 (8 years forms a natural/compelling Schelling point
This seems like very much the wrong mindset. You’re starting this trajectory now. In order to do great intellectual work, you should be aiming directly at the things you want to understand, and the topics you want to make progress on, as early as you can. A better alternative would be taking the mindset that your career will end in 8 years, and thinking about what you’d need to produce great work by that time. (This is deliberately provocative, and shouldn’t be taken fully literally, but I think points in the right direction, especially given that you’re aiming to do research where the credentials from a PhD that’s successful by mainstream standards don’t matter very much, like agent foundations research and more general high-level strategic thinking).
Pick a new important topic each month (or 2 −3 months)
Again, I’d suggest taking quite a different strategy here. In order to do really well at this, I think you don’t want the mindset of shallowly exploring other people’s work (although of course it’s useful to have that as background knowledge). I think you want to have the mindset of identifying the things which seem most important to you, pushing forward the frontier of knowledge on those topics, following threads which arise from doing so, and learning whatever you need as you go along. What it looks like to be successful here is noticing a bunch of ways in which other people seem like they’re missing stuff/overlooking things, digging into those, and finding new ways to understand these topics. (That’s true even if your only goal is to popularise existing ideas—in order to be able to popularise them really well, you want the level of knowledge such that, if there were big gaps in those ideas, then you’d notice them.) This is related to the previous point: don’t spend all this time preparing to do the thing—just do it!
I think that I am unusually positioned to be able to become such a person.
I think that doing well at this research is sufficiently heavy-tailed that it’s very hard to reason your way into thinking you’ll be great at it in advance. You’ll get far far more feedback on this point by starting to do the work now, getting a bunch of feedback, and iterating fast.
I like your overall ambitions! I want to note a couple of things that seemed incongruous to me/things I’d change about your default plan.
This seems like very much the wrong mindset. You’re starting this trajectory now. In order to do great intellectual work, you should be aiming directly at the things you want to understand, and the topics you want to make progress on, as early as you can. A better alternative would be taking the mindset that your career will end in 8 years, and thinking about what you’d need to produce great work by that time. (This is deliberately provocative, and shouldn’t be taken fully literally, but I think points in the right direction, especially given that you’re aiming to do research where the credentials from a PhD that’s successful by mainstream standards don’t matter very much, like agent foundations research and more general high-level strategic thinking).
Again, I’d suggest taking quite a different strategy here. In order to do really well at this, I think you don’t want the mindset of shallowly exploring other people’s work (although of course it’s useful to have that as background knowledge). I think you want to have the mindset of identifying the things which seem most important to you, pushing forward the frontier of knowledge on those topics, following threads which arise from doing so, and learning whatever you need as you go along. What it looks like to be successful here is noticing a bunch of ways in which other people seem like they’re missing stuff/overlooking things, digging into those, and finding new ways to understand these topics. (That’s true even if your only goal is to popularise existing ideas—in order to be able to popularise them really well, you want the level of knowledge such that, if there were big gaps in those ideas, then you’d notice them.) This is related to the previous point: don’t spend all this time preparing to do the thing—just do it!
I think that doing well at this research is sufficiently heavy-tailed that it’s very hard to reason your way into thinking you’ll be great at it in advance. You’ll get far far more feedback on this point by starting to do the work now, getting a bunch of feedback, and iterating fast.
Good luck!