For a lot of people, especially people that aren’t psychologically stable, this is very, very good advice in general around existential risk.
To be clear, I think that he has an overly pessimistic worldview on existential risk, but I genuinely respect your friend realizing that his capabilities weren’t enough to tackle it productively, and that he realized that he couldn’t be helpful enough to do good work on existential risk, so he backed away from the field as he realized his own limitations.
While I definitely should have been more polite in expressing those ideas, I do think that they’re important to convey, especially the first one, as I really, really don’t people to burn themselves out or get anxiety/depression from doing something that they don’t want to do, or even like doing.
I definitely will be nicer about expressing those ideas, but they’re so important that I do think something like the insights need to be told to a lot of people, especially those in the alignment community.
For a lot of people, especially people that aren’t psychologically stable, this is very, very good advice in general around existential risk.
To be clear, I think that he has an overly pessimistic worldview on existential risk, but I genuinely respect your friend realizing that his capabilities weren’t enough to tackle it productively, and that he realized that he couldn’t be helpful enough to do good work on existential risk, so he backed away from the field as he realized his own limitations.
man these seem like really unnecessarily judgemental ways to make this point
While I definitely should have been more polite in expressing those ideas, I do think that they’re important to convey, especially the first one, as I really, really don’t people to burn themselves out or get anxiety/depression from doing something that they don’t want to do, or even like doing.
I definitely will be nicer about expressing those ideas, but they’re so important that I do think something like the insights need to be told to a lot of people, especially those in the alignment community.