I’ve always been interested in people just becoming hyper-obsessed in pursuing a goal. One easy example is with respect to athletes. Someone like Kobe Bryant was just obsessed with becoming the best he could be. I’m interested in learning what we can from the experiences of the hyper-obsessed and what we can apply to our work in EA / Alignment.
I bought a few books on the topic, I should try to find the time to read them. I’ll try to store some lessons in this shortform, but here’s a quote from Mr. Beast’s Joe Rogan interview:
Most of my growth came from […] basically what I did was I found these other 4 lunatics and we basically talked every day for a thousand days in a row. We did nothing but just hyper-study [Youtube] and how to go viral. We’d have skype calls and some days I’d hop on the call at 7 am and hop off the call at 10 pm, and then do it again the next day.
We didn’t do anything, we had no life. We all hit a million subscribers like within a month. It’s crazy, if you envision a world where you are trying to be great at something and it’s you where you are fucking up, well you in two years might learn from 20 mistakes. But if you have others where you can learn from their mistakes, you’ve learned like 5x the amount of stuff. It helps you grow exponentially way quicker.
We’re talking about every day, all day. We had no friends outside of the group, we had no life. Nevermind 10,000 hours, we did like 50,000 hours.
As an independent researcher who is not currently at one of the hubs, I think it’s important for me to consider this point a lot. I’m hoping to hop on discord voice calls and see if I can make it a habit to make progress with other people who want to solve alignment.
I’m not saying I should aim for absolutely no life, but I’m hoping to learn what I can that‘s practically applicable to what I do.
On hyper-obession with one goal in mind
I’ve always been interested in people just becoming hyper-obsessed in pursuing a goal. One easy example is with respect to athletes. Someone like Kobe Bryant was just obsessed with becoming the best he could be. I’m interested in learning what we can from the experiences of the hyper-obsessed and what we can apply to our work in EA / Alignment.
I bought a few books on the topic, I should try to find the time to read them. I’ll try to store some lessons in this shortform, but here’s a quote from Mr. Beast’s Joe Rogan interview:
As an independent researcher who is not currently at one of the hubs, I think it’s important for me to consider this point a lot. I’m hoping to hop on discord voice calls and see if I can make it a habit to make progress with other people who want to solve alignment.
I’m not saying I should aim for absolutely no life, but I’m hoping to learn what I can that‘s practically applicable to what I do.