Awesome! For me the size of an area plays a role for how long I have a high level of motivation for it. When you’re studying a board game, there are a few activities, they are quite similar, and if you try out all of them it might be that you run out of motivation within a year. This happened to me with Othello. But computer science or EA are so wide that if you lose motivation for some subfield of decision theory, you move on to another subfield of decision theory, or to something else entirely, like history. And there are probably a lot of such subareas where there are potentially impactful investigations waiting to be done. So it makes sense to me to be optimistic about having long sustained motivation for such a big field.
My motivation did shift a few times, though. I think before 2012 it was more a “This is probably hopeless, but I have to at least try on the off-chance that I’m in a world where it’s not hopeless.” 2012–2014 it was more “Someone has to do it and no one else will.” After March 28, 2014, it was carried a lot by the sudden enormous amount of hope I got from EA. On October 28, 2015, I suddenly lost an overpowering feeling of urgency and became able to consider more long-term strategies than a decade or two. Even later, I became increasingly concerned with coordination and risk from regression to the (lower) mean.
Awesome! For me the size of an area plays a role for how long I have a high level of motivation for it. When you’re studying a board game, there are a few activities, they are quite similar, and if you try out all of them it might be that you run out of motivation within a year. This happened to me with Othello. But computer science or EA are so wide that if you lose motivation for some subfield of decision theory, you move on to another subfield of decision theory, or to something else entirely, like history. And there are probably a lot of such subareas where there are potentially impactful investigations waiting to be done. So it makes sense to me to be optimistic about having long sustained motivation for such a big field.
My motivation did shift a few times, though. I think before 2012 it was more a “This is probably hopeless, but I have to at least try on the off-chance that I’m in a world where it’s not hopeless.” 2012–2014 it was more “Someone has to do it and no one else will.” After March 28, 2014, it was carried a lot by the sudden enormous amount of hope I got from EA. On October 28, 2015, I suddenly lost an overpowering feeling of urgency and became able to consider more long-term strategies than a decade or two. Even later, I became increasingly concerned with coordination and risk from regression to the (lower) mean.