I thought about this and wrote down some life events/decisions that probably contributed to becoming who I am today.
Immigrating to the US at age 10 knowing no English. Social skills deteriorated while learning language, which along with lack of cultural knowledge made it hard to make friends during teenage and college years, which gave me a lot of free time that I filled by reading fiction and non-fiction, programming, and developing intellectual interests.
Was heavily indoctrinated with Communist propaganda while in China, but leaving meant I then had no viable moral/philosophical/political foundations. Parents were too busy building careers as new immigrants and didn’t try to teach me values/traditions. So I had a lot of questions that I didn’t have ready answers to, which perhaps contributed to my intense interest in philosophy (ETA: and economics and game theory).
Had an initial career in cryptography, but found it a struggle to compete with other researchers on purely math/technical skills. Realized that my comparative advantage was in more conceptual work. Crypto also taught me to be skeptical of my own and other people’s ideas.
Had a bad initial experience with academic research (received nonsensical peer review when submitting a paper to a conference) so avoided going that route. Tried various ways to become financially independent, and managed to “retire” in my late 20s to do independent research as a hobby.
A lot of these can’t really be imitated by others (e.g., I can’t recommend people avoid making friends in order to have more free time for intellectual
interests). But here are some practical advice I can think of:
It may be worth keeping an eye out for opportunities to “get rich quick” so you can do self-supported independent research. (Which allows you to research topics that don’t have legible justifications or are otherwise hard to get funding for, and pivot quickly as the landscape and your comparative advantage both change over time.)
ETA: Oh, here’s a recent LW post where I talked about how I arrived at my current set of research interests, which may also be of interest to you.
Why aren’t there more people like him, and what is he doing or planning to do about that?
Related question: How does one become someone like Carl Shulman (or Wei Dai, for that matter)?
I thought about this and wrote down some life events/decisions that probably contributed to becoming who I am today.
Immigrating to the US at age 10 knowing no English. Social skills deteriorated while learning language, which along with lack of cultural knowledge made it hard to make friends during teenage and college years, which gave me a lot of free time that I filled by reading fiction and non-fiction, programming, and developing intellectual interests.
Was heavily indoctrinated with Communist propaganda while in China, but leaving meant I then had no viable moral/philosophical/political foundations. Parents were too busy building careers as new immigrants and didn’t try to teach me values/traditions. So I had a lot of questions that I didn’t have ready answers to, which perhaps contributed to my intense interest in philosophy (ETA: and economics and game theory).
Had an initial career in cryptography, but found it a struggle to compete with other researchers on purely math/technical skills. Realized that my comparative advantage was in more conceptual work. Crypto also taught me to be skeptical of my own and other people’s ideas.
Had a bad initial experience with academic research (received nonsensical peer review when submitting a paper to a conference) so avoided going that route. Tried various ways to become financially independent, and managed to “retire” in my late 20s to do independent research as a hobby.
A lot of these can’t really be imitated by others (e.g., I can’t recommend people avoid making friends in order to have more free time for intellectual interests). But here are some practical advice I can think of:
Try to rethink what your comparative advantage really is.
I think humanity really needs to make faster philosophical progress, so try your hand at that even if you think of yourself as more of a technical person. Same may be true for solving social/coordination problems. (But see next item.)
Somehow develop a healthy dose of self-skepticism so that you don’t end up wasting people’s time and attention arguing for ideas that aren’t actually very good.
It may be worth keeping an eye out for opportunities to “get rich quick” so you can do self-supported independent research. (Which allows you to research topics that don’t have legible justifications or are otherwise hard to get funding for, and pivot quickly as the landscape and your comparative advantage both change over time.)
ETA: Oh, here’s a recent LW post where I talked about how I arrived at my current set of research interests, which may also be of interest to you.