Hmm, I worry that motivation is only part of the picture. There’s also idiosyncrasy between agents in terms of ability and acceptance of outcome.
By this I mean that they would not have stuck to writing the Sequences or HPMOR or working on AGI alignment past the first few months of real difficulty,
True enough, though you can replace “would not” with “will not” or “did not”.
without assigning odds in the vicinity of 10x what I started out assigning that the project would work
This is not the counterfactual I’d assign the most weight to. “Without being Eliezer” is probably too specific, but “without having Eleizer’s history of rewarded iconoclasm” wouldn’t be a stretch. It’s extremely likely that you _ARE_ orders of magnitude more likely to succeed at these endeavors than the majority of people who say they’re interested in the topic.
Hmm, I worry that motivation is only part of the picture. There’s also idiosyncrasy between agents in terms of ability and acceptance of outcome.
True enough, though you can replace “would not” with “will not” or “did not”.
This is not the counterfactual I’d assign the most weight to. “Without being Eliezer” is probably too specific, but “without having Eleizer’s history of rewarded iconoclasm” wouldn’t be a stretch. It’s extremely likely that you _ARE_ orders of magnitude more likely to succeed at these endeavors than the majority of people who say they’re interested in the topic.