Even if you’re not interested in orienting your life around helping with x-risk – if you just want to not be blindsided by radical changes that may be coming
[...]
We don’t know exactly what will happen, but I expect serious changes of some sort over the next 10 years. Even if you aren’t committing to saving the world, I think it’s in your interest just to understand what is happening, so in a decade or two you aren’t completely lost.
And even ‘understanding the situation’ is complicated enough that I think you need to be able to quit your day-job and focus full-time, in order to get oriented.
Raymond, do you or Andrew Critch have any concrete possibilities in mind for what “orienting one’s life”/”understanding the situation” might look like from a non-altruistic perspective? I’m interested in hearing concrete ideas for what one might do; the only suggestions I can recall seeing so far were mentioned in the 80,000 Hours podcast episode with Paul Christiano, to save money and invest in certain companies. Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?
The way I am imagining it, a person thinking about this from a non-altruistic perspective would then think about the problem for several years and would narrow this list down (or add new things to it) and act on some subset of them (e.g. maybe they would think about which companies to invest in and decide how much money to save, but to not implement some other idea). Is this an accurate understanding of your view?
(Off the cuff thoughts, which are very low confidence. Not attributed to Critch at all)
So, this depends quite a bit on how you think the world is shaped (which is a complex enough question that Critch made the recommendation to just think about it for weeks or months). But the three classes of answer that I can think of are:
a) in many possible worlds, the selfish and altruistic answers are just the same. The best way to survive a fast or even moderate takeoff is to ensure a positive singularity, and just pouring your efforts and money into maximizing the chance of that is really all you can do.
b) in some possible worlds (perhaps like Robin Hanson’s Age of Em), it might matter that you have skills that can go into shaping the world (such as skilled programming). Though this is realistically only an option for some people.
c) for the purposes of flourishing in the intervening years (if we’re in a slowish takeoff over the next 1-4 decades), owning stock in the right companies or institutions might help. (although some caution about worrying this over the actual takeoff period may be more of a distraction than helpful)
d) relatedly, simply getting yourself psychologically ready for the world to change dramatically may be helpful in and of itself, and/or be useful to make yourself ready to take on sudden opportunities as they arise.
Raymond, do you or Andrew Critch have any concrete possibilities in mind for what “orienting one’s life”/”understanding the situation” might look like from a non-altruistic perspective? I’m interested in hearing concrete ideas for what one might do; the only suggestions I can recall seeing so far were mentioned in the 80,000 Hours podcast episode with Paul Christiano, to save money and invest in certain companies. Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?
The way I am imagining it, a person thinking about this from a non-altruistic perspective would then think about the problem for several years and would narrow this list down (or add new things to it) and act on some subset of them (e.g. maybe they would think about which companies to invest in and decide how much money to save, but to not implement some other idea). Is this an accurate understanding of your view?
(Off the cuff thoughts, which are very low confidence. Not attributed to Critch at all)
So, this depends quite a bit on how you think the world is shaped (which is a complex enough question that Critch made the recommendation to just think about it for weeks or months). But the three classes of answer that I can think of are:
a) in many possible worlds, the selfish and altruistic answers are just the same. The best way to survive a fast or even moderate takeoff is to ensure a positive singularity, and just pouring your efforts and money into maximizing the chance of that is really all you can do.
b) in some possible worlds (perhaps like Robin Hanson’s Age of Em), it might matter that you have skills that can go into shaping the world (such as skilled programming). Though this is realistically only an option for some people.
c) for the purposes of flourishing in the intervening years (if we’re in a slowish takeoff over the next 1-4 decades), owning stock in the right companies or institutions might help. (although some caution about worrying this over the actual takeoff period may be more of a distraction than helpful)
d) relatedly, simply getting yourself psychologically ready for the world to change dramatically may be helpful in and of itself, and/or be useful to make yourself ready to take on sudden opportunities as they arise.