In fact, this mindset gave me burnout earlier this year.
I relate pretty strongly to this. I think almost all junior researchers are incentivised to ‘paper grind’ for longer than is correct. I do think there are pretty strong returns to having one good paper for credibility reasons; it signals that you are capable of doing AI safety research, and thus makes it easier to apply for subsequent opportunities.
Over the past 6 months I’ve dropped the paper grind mindset and am much happier for this. Notably, were it not for short term grants where needing to visibly make progress is important, I would have made this update sooner. Another take that I have is that if you have the flexibility to do so (e.g. by already having stable funding, perhaps via being a PhD student), front-loading learning seems good. See here for a related take by Rohin. Making progress on hard problems requires understanding things deeply, in a way which making progress on easy problems that you could complete during e.g. MATS might not.
I relate pretty strongly to this. I think almost all junior researchers are incentivised to ‘paper grind’ for longer than is correct. I do think there are pretty strong returns to having one good paper for credibility reasons; it signals that you are capable of doing AI safety research, and thus makes it easier to apply for subsequent opportunities.
Over the past 6 months I’ve dropped the paper grind mindset and am much happier for this. Notably, were it not for short term grants where needing to visibly make progress is important, I would have made this update sooner. Another take that I have is that if you have the flexibility to do so (e.g. by already having stable funding, perhaps via being a PhD student), front-loading learning seems good. See here for a related take by Rohin. Making progress on hard problems requires understanding things deeply, in a way which making progress on easy problems that you could complete during e.g. MATS might not.