When I started the program, I didn’t know anything about the singularity or rationality or friendly AI or even much chemistry or biology! So I am doing some very hard and difficult introspecting about what I must do next to fulfill Horace Mann’s eternal proverb, “be ashamed to die until you have scored a victory for humanity.” Somehow, my calculations keep showing that the subject of my PhD, constructing a p-adic L-function for a class of automorphic representations in a particular reductive group called Gsp4, is not the way to go! I only need $15-20k a year to subsist and work on SIAI issues, but humorously enough my biggest concern is a job. Having a PhD in pure math makes me overqualified for almost everything except academia, and in that setting I would not have much time for existential risk issues given the postdoc rat race. I enjoy mathematics immensely, but it’s about time I make some personal Level 3 decisions and think about whether this is where I will fulfill most utility. Sadly, my emails to SIAI for the visiting fellows program have gone unanswered, but perhaps I should try again. I could always enter a neuroscience or theoretical computer science program.
Sadly, my emails to SIAI for the visiting fellows program have gone unanswered, but perhaps I should try again.
Definitely! The folks at SIAI seem to have hyperactive spam-filters. You can also write someone ( I think Carl Shulman is the right one, but I don’t know for sure) a PM on LW.
Out of curiosity, what’s your PhD thesis about?
When I started the program, I didn’t know anything about the singularity or rationality or friendly AI or even much chemistry or biology! So I am doing some very hard and difficult introspecting about what I must do next to fulfill Horace Mann’s eternal proverb, “be ashamed to die until you have scored a victory for humanity.” Somehow, my calculations keep showing that the subject of my PhD, constructing a p-adic L-function for a class of automorphic representations in a particular reductive group called Gsp4, is not the way to go! I only need $15-20k a year to subsist and work on SIAI issues, but humorously enough my biggest concern is a job. Having a PhD in pure math makes me overqualified for almost everything except academia, and in that setting I would not have much time for existential risk issues given the postdoc rat race. I enjoy mathematics immensely, but it’s about time I make some personal Level 3 decisions and think about whether this is where I will fulfill most utility. Sadly, my emails to SIAI for the visiting fellows program have gone unanswered, but perhaps I should try again. I could always enter a neuroscience or theoretical computer science program.
Definitely! The folks at SIAI seem to have hyperactive spam-filters. You can also write someone ( I think Carl Shulman is the right one, but I don’t know for sure) a PM on LW.
And do you know the Existential Risk Reduction Career Network?