I don’t think technical safety research is a particularly impactful thing to do
I spoke of that because it’s the only thing I’ve looked into at all. I suspect the lesson is generalizable to, say, technical governance or politicking (which it sounded like you think are more useful). As an example: if you live near a college, I would consider showing up to the relevant shelling point location with a plastic chair, plastic table, and whiteboard that says something like “I think superintelligent AI will kill us all, and we need to stop development immediately—Change My Mind”. e.g. my campus has a place where people tend to show up to argue about abortion or religion or whatever (though usually one of those two...)
Most of that knowledge was not my own, it was from the VLiDACMel document, whose author actually did the research. I just implemented it in my particular case—being highly motivated to do so to fix my sleep—and then wrote up the resulting protocol, and gave some easily googleable context about the nature of sleep and related products?
This sure sounds like what someone with some special capabilities would say? Plenty of (imo unusually smart and hard working!) people I know would think “impressive, I couldn’t do that—where would I even start?”. I kinda feel that way too, I suspect that if I was in your shoes I wouldn’t have ended up thinking to do that, or doing it as well.
>depression
Yeah, it looked like you were being pretty reasonable in trying to fix that. I’d still say to keep pushing even when it feels like you’ve exhausted everything, but you probably have already heard this or already do that. I still think the approach is a good one.
(only currently replying to a couple subpoints)
I spoke of that because it’s the only thing I’ve looked into at all. I suspect the lesson is generalizable to, say, technical governance or politicking (which it sounded like you think are more useful). As an example: if you live near a college, I would consider showing up to the relevant shelling point location with a plastic chair, plastic table, and whiteboard that says something like “I think superintelligent AI will kill us all, and we need to stop development immediately—Change My Mind”. e.g. my campus has a place where people tend to show up to argue about abortion or religion or whatever (though usually one of those two...)
This sure sounds like what someone with some special capabilities would say? Plenty of (imo unusually smart and hard working!) people I know would think “impressive, I couldn’t do that—where would I even start?”. I kinda feel that way too, I suspect that if I was in your shoes I wouldn’t have ended up thinking to do that, or doing it as well.
>depression
Yeah, it looked like you were being pretty reasonable in trying to fix that. I’d still say to keep pushing even when it feels like you’ve exhausted everything, but you probably have already heard this or already do that. I still think the approach is a good one.