The last few jobs I got were from techs I put on my CV after spending a few weeks toying with them in my free time.
At some point I quit my job and decided to take all my savings and spend as long as I could working on open-source projects in Rust.
I’m currently in a job with triple the pay of the previous one, thanks to networking and experience I got after I quit.
So while my experience isn’t relevant to AI safety, it’s pretty relevant to the whole “screw the hamster wheel, do something fun” message.
And my advice to Alice and Bob would still be “Fuck no, stay in your Ivy League school!”
I don’t care how much of a genius you are. I think I’m a genius, and part of why I’m getting good jobs is my skills, but the other part is there’s a shiny famous school on my resume. Staying in that school gave me tons of opportunities I wouldn’t have had by working on my own projects for a few years (which is essentially what I did before joining that school).
There are measured risks and there are stupid risks. Quitting school is a stupid risk. Maybe you’re enough of a genius that you beat the odds and you succeed despite quitting school, but those were still terrible odds.
To give my personal experience:
The last few jobs I got were from techs I put on my CV after spending a few weeks toying with them in my free time.
At some point I quit my job and decided to take all my savings and spend as long as I could working on open-source projects in Rust.
I’m currently in a job with triple the pay of the previous one, thanks to networking and experience I got after I quit.
So while my experience isn’t relevant to AI safety, it’s pretty relevant to the whole “screw the hamster wheel, do something fun” message.
And my advice to Alice and Bob would still be “Fuck no, stay in your Ivy League school!”
I don’t care how much of a genius you are. I think I’m a genius, and part of why I’m getting good jobs is my skills, but the other part is there’s a shiny famous school on my resume. Staying in that school gave me tons of opportunities I wouldn’t have had by working on my own projects for a few years (which is essentially what I did before joining that school).
There are measured risks and there are stupid risks. Quitting school is a stupid risk. Maybe you’re enough of a genius that you beat the odds and you succeed despite quitting school, but those were still terrible odds.