This is exactly right, and the main reason I wrote this up in the first place. I wanted this to serve as a data point for people to be able to say âOkay, things have gone a little off the rails, but things arenât yet worse than they were for Jay, so weâre still probably okay.â Note that it is good to have a plan for when you should give up on the field, tooâit should just allow for some resilience and failures baked in. My plan was loosely âIf I canât get a job in the field, and I fail to get funded twice, I will leave the fieldâ.
Also contributing to positive selection effects is that youâre more likely to see the more impressive results in the field, because theyâre more impressive. That gives your brain a skewed idea of what the median person in the field is doing. Our brain thinks âAverage piece of alignment research we seeâ is âAverage output of alignment researchersâ.
The counterargument to this is âWell, shouldnât we be aiming for better than median? Shouldnât these impressive pieces be our targets to reach?â I think so, yes, but I believe in incremental ambition as wellâif one is below-average in the field, aiming to be median first, then good, then top-tier rather than trying to immediately be top-tier seems to me a reasonable approach.
This is exactly right, and the main reason I wrote this up in the first place. I wanted this to serve as a data point for people to be able to say âOkay, things have gone a little off the rails, but things arenât yet worse than they were for Jay, so weâre still probably okay.â Note that it is good to have a plan for when you should give up on the field, tooâit should just allow for some resilience and failures baked in. My plan was loosely âIf I canât get a job in the field, and I fail to get funded twice, I will leave the fieldâ.
Also contributing to positive selection effects is that youâre more likely to see the more impressive results in the field, because theyâre more impressive. That gives your brain a skewed idea of what the median person in the field is doing. Our brain thinks âAverage piece of alignment research we seeâ is âAverage output of alignment researchersâ.
The counterargument to this is âWell, shouldnât we be aiming for better than median? Shouldnât these impressive pieces be our targets to reach?â I think so, yes, but I believe in incremental ambition as wellâif one is below-average in the field, aiming to be median first, then good, then top-tier rather than trying to immediately be top-tier seems to me a reasonable approach.