For undergrad students in particular, the current university system coddles. The upshot is that if someone is paying for your school and would not otherwise be paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to fund an ai safety researcher, successfully graduating is sufficiently easy that its something you should probably do while you tackle the real problems, in the same vein as continuing to brush your teeth and file taxes. Plus you get access to university compute and maybe even advice from professors.
Yeah, if you are doing e.g. a lab heavy premed chemistry degree my advice may not apply to an aspiring alignment researcher. This is absolutely me moving the goalposts, but may also be true: on the other hand, if you are picking courses with purpose, in philosophy, physics, math, probability, comp sci: theres decent odds imho that they are good uses of time in proportion to the extent that they are actually demanding your time.
For undergrad students in particular, the current university system coddles. The upshot is that if someone is paying for your school and would not otherwise be paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to fund an ai safety researcher, successfully graduating is sufficiently easy that its something you should probably do while you tackle the real problems, in the same vein as continuing to brush your teeth and file taxes. Plus you get access to university compute and maybe even advice from professors.
No doubt true in many cases, but I would assume this to depend on exactly which country, university, degree etc. we were talking about?
Yeah, if you are doing e.g. a lab heavy premed chemistry degree my advice may not apply to an aspiring alignment researcher. This is absolutely me moving the goalposts, but may also be true: on the other hand, if you are picking courses with purpose, in philosophy, physics, math, probability, comp sci: theres decent odds imho that they are good uses of time in proportion to the extent that they are actually demanding your time.