Randomized, Controlled
Posts 3
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Apply for funding ASAP. Do not burn to much of your savings. Read about Financial Independence (google FIRE / Financial Independence Retire Early) -- I heard somewhere that you have about 78, 657 hours in your career; if you have a wealth engine that can cover your basic living expenses, then you can devote a much larger fraction of that career to risky EA moves. Even if you're good at self-study, you probably a social cohort for what you're doing, especially if your goal is vague. Set yourself a hard deadline to return to the labor market by (I'd suggest less than four to six months, definitely less than 12) if you haven't made some substantive progress that someone is excited about. DO STUFF THAT ISN'T JUST EA OR TECHNICAL -- you've just opened up a massive amount of slack for yourself, take advantage of it to explore some other aspects of life. I started dancing contact improv during the year I was off, and it was BY FAR the most positive thing I've ever done for my mental and physical health and ability to access joy.
Take all this with rock salt. This is just my experiences. I did this in a very different EA scene and a very different economy.
I think this is one of the things that distinguishes EAs and rationalists from randomly selected smart people. I like to say that EAs have a taste for biting bullets.
Oh, I wasn't implying any link between worlds 335 and 281, I was just riffing off the idea of sentient and/or symbiotic fungi. I actually think by tying them together in the main body of the post it confusing things.
I am the symbiotic sentient lichen responsible for https://worldbuild.ai/W-0000000335/.
Please DM if you'd like to discuss the possibility of having one of my moieties colonize your lungs or other moist crevasses.
Location: Toronto, Canada
Remote: Yep
Willing to relocate: Maybe!
Skills: web programming (9 years), agile development, writing, illustration, resaerch
Résumé/CV/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/l-koren-25893152/ (linkedin is out of date, resume available on request)
Email: liav dot koren gmailI feel like this post makes concrete some of the tensions I was more abstractly pointing at in A Keynesian/Hayekian model of community building.
I can see "Republican" becoming its own cluster in the last couple of decades, but what cleanly distinguishes small-c conservative from libertarian? Eg, I definitely would not call Cowen a Republican, but I get the sense he might be somewhat conservative in how he thinks about development, economics and institutions.
Don't know if you want to include "podcast conversations" in your set here, but if you do:
Russ Roberts is fairly conservative, also seemed quite thoughtful and to have good epistemology, when I was listening to econtalk regularly (which hasn't been in a few years). He had a conversation with Bostrom, about AGI, which I thought went terribly (no good, bad bad bad). He also had a conversation with MacAskill, which I don't remember as well, but I have the general sense that it also didn't go super well. Maybe worth a re-listen. He's probably talked with some other major figures, if you go digging in the archives -- there have been a lot of development economists, some of whom are probably important to EA research.
>There aren't any prominent conservative EAs (or at least none that I've heard of).
I feel like Tyler Cowen is reasonably libertarian/right of centre. I don't know if he would call himself an EA, but he has an account on the forum, under his full name. I feel like he's pretty well know, at least in these circles..
yeah, in particular, maybe we're in a short timelines world and savings rates are [much??] less important. Personally, I'm stressing about savings rate less currently, both because my life has shifted in significant ways that just make things more expensive, but also because I'm taking short timelines somewhat more seriously.
Maybe one way I can summarize the update is: still avoid doing things that I would generally tend to disapprove of longer timeline worlds, but also try to enjoy life a little more.
So, I mostly still don't eat junk food. But I am going on dates and dancing and going to festivals and trying to channel joy while living in an expensive western city and thinking a lot about <15 year timelines.
It's occurred to me that maybe I should start rolling a dice at some low probability (say 2%) and let that decide for me when I should actually have dessert.