But JoshuaZ is right that I think the wording is ridiculous. “Save the world” is nothing but applause lights.
You’re reading way too much into that single line. I wanted to express the sentiment of “I want to be as effective as possible in doing good”, and there was a recent post covering that topic which happened to be named “how to save the world”, so I linked to it. If that post hadn’t been there, I might have said something like “I want to do something meaningful with my life”. I was also assuming “saving the world” and other similar expressions to be standard LW jargon for “doing as much good as possible”.
As for my actual goals… Ideally I’d like to help avert a negative singularity, though since I don’t have very high hopes of that actually being possible, I also give the goals of “just have fun” and “help people in the short term” considerable weight, and am undecided as to how much effort I’ll in the end spend explicitly on singularity matters. But to the degree that I do end up trying to help the singularity, the three main approaches I’ve been playing with are
Just make money and donate that to SIAI.
Help influence academia to become more aware of these issues.
Become well-known enough (via e.g. writing, politics) among normal people that I can help spread singularity-related ideas and hopefully get more people to take them seriously.
These are obviously not mutually exclusive, and indeed, one of the reasons I’m playing around with the idea of “freelance academia” is that it allows me to do some of the academic stuff without the commitment that e.g. getting a PhD would involve (as I’m not yet sure whether the academic approach is the one that I’d find the most rewarding). All three also have to varying extent an intrinsic appeal, beyond just the singularity aspect: I wouldn’t mind having a bit more money, intellectual work is rewarding by itself, and so is writing and having a lot of people care about your opinions.
As for the details of the academic career path, the “help avoid a negative singularity” aspect of that currently mainly involves helping write up the ideas about the singularity into concise, well-sourced papers that people can be pointed to. (Here is one example of such work—an improved, full-length version of that paper is in the works.) Beyond that, maybe with time I can come up with original insights of my own to contribute to the field, as well as build a reputation and give those singularity-related ideas more merit by producing well-regarded papers in non-singularity-related fields that I happen to be interested in.
You’re reading way too much into that single line. I wanted to express the sentiment of “I want to be as effective as possible in doing good”, and there was a recent post covering that topic which happened to be named “how to save the world”, so I linked to it. If that post hadn’t been there, I might have said something like “I want to do something meaningful with my life”. I was also assuming “saving the world” and other similar expressions to be standard LW jargon for “doing as much good as possible”.
As for my actual goals… Ideally I’d like to help avert a negative singularity, though since I don’t have very high hopes of that actually being possible, I also give the goals of “just have fun” and “help people in the short term” considerable weight, and am undecided as to how much effort I’ll in the end spend explicitly on singularity matters. But to the degree that I do end up trying to help the singularity, the three main approaches I’ve been playing with are
Just make money and donate that to SIAI.
Help influence academia to become more aware of these issues.
Become well-known enough (via e.g. writing, politics) among normal people that I can help spread singularity-related ideas and hopefully get more people to take them seriously.
These are obviously not mutually exclusive, and indeed, one of the reasons I’m playing around with the idea of “freelance academia” is that it allows me to do some of the academic stuff without the commitment that e.g. getting a PhD would involve (as I’m not yet sure whether the academic approach is the one that I’d find the most rewarding). All three also have to varying extent an intrinsic appeal, beyond just the singularity aspect: I wouldn’t mind having a bit more money, intellectual work is rewarding by itself, and so is writing and having a lot of people care about your opinions.
As for the details of the academic career path, the “help avoid a negative singularity” aspect of that currently mainly involves helping write up the ideas about the singularity into concise, well-sourced papers that people can be pointed to. (Here is one example of such work—an improved, full-length version of that paper is in the works.) Beyond that, maybe with time I can come up with original insights of my own to contribute to the field, as well as build a reputation and give those singularity-related ideas more merit by producing well-regarded papers in non-singularity-related fields that I happen to be interested in.