With the urgency entailed by extinction risks etc., “just chilling” during dead time can (for many of us) feel undoable.
I’ve been reading attitudes like this a lot in the existential risk prevention subculture for pretty much as long as I’ve been aware of it and it’s basically made me write the whole thing off as something that’s for people who are wired very differently than I am, or just generally a bad scene.
I think my reaction is some mix of a starting intuition of this always-on 24⁄7 thing being unsustainable for pretty much everyone, but a thing that’s being postured about a lot, and that the people who fully buy into it and go ahead to burn out and get chronic depression for their trouble are selected for having neither personal understanding nor live cultural folkways informing them what long-term sustainable ways of life look like. It then sounds like a bad idea to get involved with something where your social environment will consist of people like this.
Actually, this is heavily criticized by almost anyone sensible in the field: see for example this post by Nate Soares, director of MIRI.
This also tends to be the opinion/take of people who never did work like research, which require to create something. I never met or heard of a single productive researcher that didn’t actually spend a lot of their time not explicitly doing research but chilling to get some idea/stew on some concept, and every professor I met complains that they don’t have enough time to do research, which also includes taking walks in the park with your research faintly on your mind.
I’ve been reading attitudes like this a lot in the existential risk prevention subculture for pretty much as long as I’ve been aware of it and it’s basically made me write the whole thing off as something that’s for people who are wired very differently than I am, or just generally a bad scene.
I think my reaction is some mix of a starting intuition of this always-on 24⁄7 thing being unsustainable for pretty much everyone, but a thing that’s being postured about a lot, and that the people who fully buy into it and go ahead to burn out and get chronic depression for their trouble are selected for having neither personal understanding nor live cultural folkways informing them what long-term sustainable ways of life look like. It then sounds like a bad idea to get involved with something where your social environment will consist of people like this.
Actually, this is heavily criticized by almost anyone sensible in the field: see for example this post by Nate Soares, director of MIRI.
This also tends to be the opinion/take of people who never did work like research, which require to create something. I never met or heard of a single productive researcher that didn’t actually spend a lot of their time not explicitly doing research but chilling to get some idea/stew on some concept, and every professor I met complains that they don’t have enough time to do research, which also includes taking walks in the park with your research faintly on your mind.
The link is broken. Did you mean to link to this post?
My bad, I corrected the link. No, that was another post, but the one you linked is also good.