I read this post around the beginning of March this year (~6 months ago). I think reading this post was probably net-negative for my life plans. Here are some thoughts about why I think reading this post was bad for me, or at least not very good. I have not re-read the post since then, so maybe some of my ideas are dumb for obvious reasons.
I think the broad emphasis on general skill and capacity building often comes at the expense of directly pursuing your goals. In many ways, the post is like “Skill up in an aptitude because in the future this might be instrumentally useful for making the future go well.” And I think this is worse than “Identify what skills might help the future go well, then skill up in these skills, then you can cause impact.” I think the aptitudes framework is what I might say if I knew a bunch of un-exceptional people were listening to me and taking my words as gospel, but it is not what I would advise to an exceptional person who wants to change the world for the better (I would try to instill a sense of specifically aiming at the thing they want and pursuing it more directly). This distinction is important. To flesh this out, if only geniuses are reading my post, I might advise that they try high variance, high EV things which have a large chance of ending up in the tails (e.g., startups, for which most the people will fail). But I would not recommend to a broader crowd that they try startups, because more of them would fail, and then the community that I was trying to create to help the future go well is largely made up of people who took long shot bets and failed, making them not so useful, and making my community less useful when it’s crunch time (although I am currently unsure what we need at crunch time, having a bunch of people who pursued aptitudes growth is probably good). Therefore, I think I understand and somewhat endorse a safer, aptitudes based advice at a community scale, but I don’t want it to get in the way of ‘people who are willing to take greater risks and do whacky career stuff’ actually doing so.
My personal experience is that reading this post gave me the idea that I could sorta continue life as normal, but with a slight focus on developing particular aptitudes like building organizational success, research on core longtermist topics, communicating maybe. I currently think that plan was bad and, if adopted more broadly, has a very bad chance of working (i.e., AI alignment gets solved). However, I also suspect that my current path is suboptimal – I am not investing in my career capital or human capital for the long-run as much as I should be.
So I guess my overall take is something like: people should consider the aptitudes framework, but they should also think about what needs to happen in the world in order to get the thing you care about. Taking a safer, aptitudes based approach, is likely the right path for many people, but not for everybody. If you take seriously the career advice that you read, it seems pretty unlikely that this would cause you to take roughly the same actions you were planning on taking before reading – you should be suspicious of this surprising convergence.
I read this post around the beginning of March this year (~6 months ago). I think reading this post was probably net-negative for my life plans. Here are some thoughts about why I think reading this post was bad for me, or at least not very good. I have not re-read the post since then, so maybe some of my ideas are dumb for obvious reasons.
I think the broad emphasis on general skill and capacity building often comes at the expense of directly pursuing your goals. In many ways, the post is like “Skill up in an aptitude because in the future this might be instrumentally useful for making the future go well.” And I think this is worse than “Identify what skills might help the future go well, then skill up in these skills, then you can cause impact.” I think the aptitudes framework is what I might say if I knew a bunch of un-exceptional people were listening to me and taking my words as gospel, but it is not what I would advise to an exceptional person who wants to change the world for the better (I would try to instill a sense of specifically aiming at the thing they want and pursuing it more directly). This distinction is important. To flesh this out, if only geniuses are reading my post, I might advise that they try high variance, high EV things which have a large chance of ending up in the tails (e.g., startups, for which most the people will fail). But I would not recommend to a broader crowd that they try startups, because more of them would fail, and then the community that I was trying to create to help the future go well is largely made up of people who took long shot bets and failed, making them not so useful, and making my community less useful when it’s crunch time (although I am currently unsure what we need at crunch time, having a bunch of people who pursued aptitudes growth is probably good). Therefore, I think I understand and somewhat endorse a safer, aptitudes based advice at a community scale, but I don’t want it to get in the way of ‘people who are willing to take greater risks and do whacky career stuff’ actually doing so.
My personal experience is that reading this post gave me the idea that I could sorta continue life as normal, but with a slight focus on developing particular aptitudes like building organizational success, research on core longtermist topics, communicating maybe. I currently think that plan was bad and, if adopted more broadly, has a very bad chance of working (i.e., AI alignment gets solved). However, I also suspect that my current path is suboptimal – I am not investing in my career capital or human capital for the long-run as much as I should be.
So I guess my overall take is something like: people should consider the aptitudes framework, but they should also think about what needs to happen in the world in order to get the thing you care about. Taking a safer, aptitudes based approach, is likely the right path for many people, but not for everybody. If you take seriously the career advice that you read, it seems pretty unlikely that this would cause you to take roughly the same actions you were planning on taking before reading – you should be suspicious of this surprising convergence.