+1, I think this is a great perspective. Everything I’ve written on Less Wrong was because I decided it was better to work full time in software engineering and do academic-like stuff on the side rather than the other way around. As a result I did a bunch of work on AI safety among other things (whether it amounts to much is a separate question). I think this is a pretty important and viable career path, and I’m sort of surprised I hadn’t seen a post calling it out explicitly before, especially not one written by me since I’ve been doing the same for so long!
+1, I think this is a great perspective. Everything I’ve written on Less Wrong was because I decided it was better to work full time in software engineering and do academic-like stuff on the side rather than the other way around. As a result I did a bunch of work on AI safety among other things (whether it amounts to much is a separate question). I think this is a pretty important and viable career path, and I’m sort of surprised I hadn’t seen a post calling it out explicitly before, especially not one written by me since I’ve been doing the same for so long!