Agreed. Or at least, there are certain psychological factors[1] that make working on abstract alignment problems feel “safer” for some subset of people, myself very much included! On the other hand, these same factors can be “unsafe” to different people or in different contests, and there are plenty of features of other research styles that are psychologically attractive[2].
But I don’t really buy the implied add-on “this is psychologically safer for me, therefore it’s actually bad,” at least not as it applies to myself.
(e.g. lack of feedback loops can mean you don’t feel failure the same way, relatively low competition / professionalization, the real world doesn’t interrupt your research to tell you to change your mind very much)
e.g. you will naturally work with other people, you get to apply the neat math / CS you studied, you get to spend lots of money, your work fits in the normal paper format, etc.
Agreed. Or at least, there are certain psychological factors[1] that make working on abstract alignment problems feel “safer” for some subset of people, myself very much included! On the other hand, these same factors can be “unsafe” to different people or in different contests, and there are plenty of features of other research styles that are psychologically attractive[2].
But I don’t really buy the implied add-on “this is psychologically safer for me, therefore it’s actually bad,” at least not as it applies to myself.
(e.g. lack of feedback loops can mean you don’t feel failure the same way, relatively low competition / professionalization, the real world doesn’t interrupt your research to tell you to change your mind very much)
e.g. you will naturally work with other people, you get to apply the neat math / CS you studied, you get to spend lots of money, your work fits in the normal paper format, etc.