After practising some self-love I am now noticeably less stressed about work in general. I sleep better, have more consistent energy, enjoy having conversations about work-related stuff more (so I just talk about EA and AI risk more than I used to, which was a big win on my previous margin). I think I maybe work fewer hours than I used to because before it felt like there was a bear chasing me and if I wasn’t always working then it was going to eat me, whereas now that isn’t the case. But my working patterns feel healthy and sustainable now; before, I was going through cycles of half-burning out every 3 months or so (which was bad enough for my near-term productivity, not to mention long-term producitivity and health). I also spend relatively less time just turning the handle on my mainline tasks (vs zooming out, having random conversations that feel useful but won’t pay off immediately, reading more widely), which again I think was a win on my previous margin (maybe reduced it from ~90% to ~80% of my research hours).
I’m confused about how this happened. My model is that before there were two parts of me that strongly disagreed about whether work is good, and that these parts have now basically resolved (they agree that doing sensible amounts of work is good), because both feel understood and loved. Basically the part that didn’t think work was good just needed its needs to be understood and taken into account.
I think this model is quite different from Charlie’s main model of what happens (which is to do with memory consolidation), so I’m especially confused.
I haven’t attained persistent self-love of the sort described here.
My sense of the current general landscape of AI Safety is: various groups of people pursuing quite different research agendas, and not very many explicit and written-up arguments for why these groups think their agenda is a priority (a notable exception is Paul’s argument for working on prosaic alignment). Does this sound right? If so, why has this dynamic emerged and should we be concerned about it? If not, then I’m curious about why I developed this picture.