I was recently pleasantly surprised to discover the extent to which my short-term goals are aligned with my long-term goals. It’s a nice reminder that I’m working on the things I want to be working on.
For an upcoming PhD lab meeting, I was asked to make a slide describing what success means to me on three different timescales, ~1, 5, and 15 years each. Setting aside the possibility of AGI within… any of those timescales, here’s what I wrote:
What Is Success For Me?
This Year: Excellent conference papers, blog posts about research results and AGI safety strategy, progress with Aether, connections (in the AIS community), research taste development, improvement at experiment velocity (incl. general coding and knowledge of tools) and writing. Influence AGI companies, governments, and/or the AIS field in ways that later improve outcomes from AGI/ASI.
Short Term (PhD): Similar to the above :). I’m simultaneously aiming for direct impact, career capital, and reducing uncertainty about longer-term paths.
Long Term: More of the above :). Open to industry (research scientist?), nonprofit, continuing to run Aether, starting other projects, academia, and even doing other useful things than ML research (like AGI strategy, grantmaking, policy, philosophy?, etc.).
I can thank 80,000 Hours for the “direct impact, career capital, and reducing uncertainty” framing; I think it has done me a lot of good. I think 80k also helped me realize that the best way to do all three is to just directly try the first steps on one of your possible longer-term career paths, starting with cheaper tests and diving deeper into things that are going well. That certainly helped create the alignment I now see between my short and long term goals.
I was recently pleasantly surprised to discover the extent to which my short-term goals are aligned with my long-term goals. It’s a nice reminder that I’m working on the things I want to be working on.
For an upcoming PhD lab meeting, I was asked to make a slide describing what success means to me on three different timescales, ~1, 5, and 15 years each. Setting aside the possibility of AGI within… any of those timescales, here’s what I wrote:
What Is Success For Me?
This Year: Excellent conference papers, blog posts about research results and AGI safety strategy, progress with Aether, connections (in the AIS community), research taste development, improvement at experiment velocity (incl. general coding and knowledge of tools) and writing. Influence AGI companies, governments, and/or the AIS field in ways that later improve outcomes from AGI/ASI.
Short Term (PhD): Similar to the above :). I’m simultaneously aiming for direct impact, career capital, and reducing uncertainty about longer-term paths.
Long Term: More of the above :). Open to industry (research scientist?), nonprofit, continuing to run Aether, starting other projects, academia, and even doing other useful things than ML research (like AGI strategy, grantmaking, policy, philosophy?, etc.).
I can thank 80,000 Hours for the “direct impact, career capital, and reducing uncertainty” framing; I think it has done me a lot of good. I think 80k also helped me realize that the best way to do all three is to just directly try the first steps on one of your possible longer-term career paths, starting with cheaper tests and diving deeper into things that are going well. That certainly helped create the alignment I now see between my short and long term goals.