About a month ago, /u/batislu on /r/SlateStarCodex posted the question “How do you spend your “dead” time productively?”. I read this thread, and found myself relieved (because of the admonitions to chill out), but also frustrated (because of the lack of real answers to the question).
With the urgency entailed by extinction risks etc., “just chilling” during dead time can (for many of us) feel undoable. Or, at least, undoable some of the time.
Assume, for many of us, our day job / school does little to directly help, at the highest levels, with the kinds of important problems discussed here. (This is a good time to remind everyone that these opinions are both hypothetical, and solely my own (not my employer’s).)
Then the questions become:
What, if anything, can be done in the tired “between-time” after work?
Can it help with any of the following?:
Directly helping work on AI safety / global risks.
Upskilling quickly enough to contribute substantially to the previous thing.
Improving one’s health/intelligence/financial independence enough to be in a better position (in the near term, like less than a year) to help with the first thing.
Some answers of the format and specificity being looked for here:
“Join this org’s Discord and critique their ideas, if you find argument/feedback a relaxing/low-stress activity.”
“Do 1 small unit of this easily-spit-uppable low-chance-of-getting-stuck MOOC per day.”
“Find a type of exercise, like X Y or Z, that you find fun, and do that once per day.”
“Here’s a list of activities many people I know find productive and relaxing, see if any apply to you: …”
Note that the goal is not to replace all of one’s dead time with something productive (unless it’s possible to do without crashing and burning lol).
The goal is to keep moving forward at things that would realistically help solve important problems. (Then our guilt/anxiety will be assuaged enough to actually enjoy/recharge the rest of our dead time.)
There’s a particular kind of lack of self alignment that leads to even feeling like some time is “dead”, so I want to push back against that but also give you some answers.
The deal is that the seemingly dead time is time you need in order to function. Not all of us have the same bodies capable of the same things: there’ll basically always be someone more productive than you and someone lazier than you to compare yourself against. But what we can say is that there’s a variety of kinds of rest bodies need to do things not only like repair of organs but also for healthy upkeep. Your brain, for example, needs time to do things like memory consolidation, and that can’t happen if you’re spending the time cramming new information in.
That said, we can find lots of activities that don’t ask a lot of our bodies and especially of our brains. Simple chores, watching videos, listening to “boring” stories, playing video games, the list goes on.
Not every moment of everyday needs to be productive because not every moment of the day can be productive: one only need be responsible up to one’s physical limits, and beyond that the priority is recovery rather than production. “Dead” time is better framed as time actively recovering to do more stuff later.
Odd to hear rest time as time for rest. (This isn’t sarcasm, I just kinda… ignored that part for a long time).
Thank you
Maybe watching light philosophy videos? this could be useful for AI safety and also increase your ability to think and communicate clearly.