There is not an insignificant sense of guilt/of betraying myself from 2023 and my ambitions from before.
And I don’t want to just end up doing irrelevant TCS research that only a few researchers in a niche field will ever care about.
It’s not high impact research.
And it’s mostly just settling. I get the sense that I enjoy theoretical research, I don’t currently feel poised to contribute to the AI safety problem, I seem to have an unusually good (at least it appears so to my limited understanding) opportunity to pursue a boring TCS PhD in some niche field that few people care about.
I don’t think I’ll be miserable pursuing the boring TCS PhD or not enjoy it, or anything of the sort. It’s just not directly contributing to what I wanted to contribute to. It’s somewhat sad and it’s undignified (but it’s less undignified than the path I thought I was on at various points in the last 15 months).
There is not an insignificant sense of guilt/of betraying myself from 2023 and my ambitions from before.
And I don’t want to just end up doing irrelevant TCS research that only a few researchers in a niche field will ever care about.
It’s not high impact research.
And it’s mostly just settling. I get the sense that I enjoy theoretical research, I don’t currently feel poised to contribute to the AI safety problem, I seem to have an unusually good (at least it appears so to my limited understanding) opportunity to pursue a boring TCS PhD in some niche field that few people care about.
I don’t think I’ll be miserable pursuing the boring TCS PhD or not enjoy it, or anything of the sort. It’s just not directly contributing to what I wanted to contribute to. It’s somewhat sad and it’s undignified (but it’s less undignified than the path I thought I was on at various points in the last 15 months).