Nurse who likes to read philosophy and rationalist literature
SmokeAndMirrors
Karma: 28
Portland, USA—ACX Spring Schelling 2026
Portland – ACX Meetups Everywhere Fall 2025
Portland Oregon – ACX Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025
Oregon USA—ACX Meetups Everywhere Fall 2024
Portland – ACX Meetups Everywhere Spring 2024
Portland, Oregon, USA – ACX Meetups Everywhere Fall 2023
What did you end up choosing to study with data science? I’m in a bootcamp choosing a topic and I have been brainstorming ideas like crazy recently, and would be happy to discuss this more with you if you are interested.
Portland, Oregon, USA – ACX Meetups Everywhere Spring 2023
PEAR’s Secular Solstice
Los Angeles Rationality / Portland EAR / Bay Area Rationalists (Sunday, October 30th)
Bi-Weekly Meetup: The Heroes of Humanity (Petrov Day Discussion)
Bi-Weekly Meetup: TBD
AI Alignment Meet Up: TBD
Bi-Weekly Meetup
AI Alignment Meet Up: Curve Circuits
ACX Schelling Meetup
I see a hilarious and inspiring similarity between your story and mine.
In high school, I realized that I enjoyed reflecting on topics to achieve coherence, discussing mechanisms of superficial phenomena, and wanted everyone to be happy on a deep level. So I created a religion, because, of course, I wanted to save the world. I thought other religions were a failed attempt to incorporate modern positive psychology learnings (which had “solved happiness”) into moral theories but I wanted to use the meme potential of social phenomena like religion and music. Then I wasn’t good at making a religion ‘religious’, I didn’t like playing instruments much, and I was too arrogant to think old philosopher’s had anything interesting to say that I hadn’t thought of. So I settled for helping people as a nurse. I got stuck.10 years later, I heard of and finally read some philosophy, realized what I had been grasping at wasn’t religion, but something more like logical positivism, then I found rationality and EA. It is strange how much this community feels like everything I was trying to articulate as a youngling, but I didn’t realize economics, math, philosophy, and computer science were where my interests really lie, not religion and music. So now I’m in the rapid learning stage.
I think the only interesting insight I have here is that I’m now very weary of getting trapped in another local optimum (rationality / ea is the best, so I won’t look at other intellectual movements) and continue to be open to seeing if there is anything better. However, it sounds like you implicitly understand this groupthink wariness, so enjoy and go save the world.
This bet would’ve paid major dividends in hindsight. Is there a way to bet on OpenAI and Anthropic or other AI safety focused labs to both give them more access to capital and to make a profit? Nvidia stock has already ballooned quite a bit, and seems to be mostly duel use. Also I’m not confident about the safety credibility of many other AI companies. Although scoring each major foundation model building company for safety would be a useful project to do… (Pondering if I should do this)
I’m asking this mostly to see if anyone else has already done their homework on this question.