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Travel diary, day 7
Briefly spoke with Anna about figuring out what, exactly, I should do here. She too recommended talking with Justin about getting some kind of co-writing done, with me helping Justin introduce some concreteness to his writing. In exchange, Justin might help improve my "analytical sharpness" I think the term was, though I wasn't entirely sure of what was meant by that. I was pointed to a book on critical thinking that apparently has some stuff relating to that, though Anna couldn't find the exact chapters about it. Huh. Well, I'll skim it through. She also said we should talk about that Platzer planning project more at some point, but didn't think me simply taking charge of it would be a good idea at this point. Fair enough, we'll see if anything comes out of that. In any case, Justin and I agreed to talk about things today, maybe get some of that co-writing stuff started. (Edit: Justin said he's taking a day off today, so I guess that'll have to wait.)
That still doesn't entirely answer the question of "what should I be doing here", though. I need some kind of overarching vision of the overall purpose of me being here should be, otherwise I'll feel that I'm just doing various disconnected stuff without any greater purpose.
This is kind of related to me in general not knowing what I'd want to do with my life. The free "everyone does whatever" sort of thing here is great when you've already decided on the best way you personally can contribute to avoiding existential risks, but less so when you have no idea. On the other hand, the positive thing about this is that it's kinda forcing me to decide on what I want. I've been worrying about this before, but the workload from college courses has also been filling part of my attention so I've been able to kinda drown the issue under those. Just do school work and only worry about what I actually want later on.
So, what lifepaths do seem viable? Here are the ones I've been thinking about:
POLITICS. I may have a non-neglible possibility of getting elected to the Parliament of Finland, either during the 2011 or the 2015 election. I'm estimating the chance of this to be around a couple of percent if I do nothing more than what I've been doing now, uppable to say 25% if I were to really dedicate myself to that during this autumn and the beginning of next year. This would allow me to popularize rationality and awareness of existential risks and affect country-level issues which I feel strongly about. The pay also isn't bad, so I could donate relatively large sums to x-risk prevention.
However, I have a strong suspicion I wouldn't actually like doing politics much.
ACADEMIA. There are two variants of this: try to do academic work concentrating on Singularity/AI issues, or try to do academic work concentrating more on something else. These are naturally not mutually exclusive, it being more of a question of emphasis. For the Singularity/AI issues - well, unlike some people at SIAI, I'm no genius so I'm not sure whether this is really where my comparative advantage lies. There are probably some low-hanging fruit in the form of stuff that hasn't yet been explored in depth or converted into academic papers, which I could do.
Academic work concentrating on something else would be interesting - I've got some ambitions about studying societies and large-scale human behavior from some grand interdisciplinary point of view combining cognitive science, economics, sociology, computer science et cetera. Pay in academia is often poor, however, and the work uncertain. I'm not sure I could deal with the stress of only knowing I or my team has project funding for the next six months.
INDUSTRY RESEARCH. As above, but doing something of interest for the private sector. I don't really know very much about this side of things. I'm figuring it'd have better pay and job security, but could spend less time doing genuinely interesting things and more time doing things optimized for making the biggest $$$ for The Corporation. Which might be okay or not, depending on how interesting that stuff would end up being.
WRITING. I've written three books now, the latest of which got a bunch of positive reviews, including a fourteen-paragraph one in Finland's biggest newspaper. It was also briefly on the list of most sold books in the webstore of Suomalainen kirjakauppa, the biggest bookstore chain in Finland, though I don't know how many sales they get through their webstore and how those stats were calculated. This is something I'd probably enjoy doing, though again the pay is poor and even more uncertain in academia. If I could break into the English-speaking market, the earnings potential would go up considerably. Most Finnish authors make the majority of their income via grants given out by various private foundations as well as the state, but there's again some degree of uncertainty involved in getting those.
CODE MONKEY. Catch-all term for "whatever doesn't sound too unpleasant but nets money". Currently most likely way of doing this seems to be by obtaining more programming experience and skill and then finding work in the IT sector, hence the name. The couple of instructors I've done CS programming project courses for said I have talent, and I realized that I actually liked doing practical programming projects a lot, more than many of the more theoretical courses I've had. This would also pay at least moderately well.
If I manage to pick one of these and decide I'll want to concentrate on it, I can leverage my time here to improve my chances of making it through to that field.
Considering those various options, I find that the thing that's most emotionally important for me right now is job security. Ideally I'd prefer a job I can just do and be at least moderately sure I'm doing a good job, without needing to worry about whether or not I'm doing a good enough job to pay my rent in a month or six months or whether the job'll exist at all at that point. That means that I'm currently rather strongly drawn towards the code monkey career heading, ideally at some big company that isn't likely to go out of business any time soon. It'll also allow me to do stuff falling under the other headings at the side.
(EDIT: I've also been playing the around with the idea of some kind of a consultancy thing, as I tend to have at least moderate talent in figuring out [1] [2] reasons for disagreement and a generic consultancy gig gives a nice excuse for studying a bit of everything in the hopes of it might be applicable.)
Considering my insecurities, it might also be a good thing if I didn't have an intellectually challenging job that had my re-evaluating my self-image all the time...
That still doesn't entirely answer the question of "what should I be doing here", though. I need some kind of overarching vision of the overall purpose of me being here should be, otherwise I'll feel that I'm just doing various disconnected stuff without any greater purpose.
This is kind of related to me in general not knowing what I'd want to do with my life. The free "everyone does whatever" sort of thing here is great when you've already decided on the best way you personally can contribute to avoiding existential risks, but less so when you have no idea. On the other hand, the positive thing about this is that it's kinda forcing me to decide on what I want. I've been worrying about this before, but the workload from college courses has also been filling part of my attention so I've been able to kinda drown the issue under those. Just do school work and only worry about what I actually want later on.
So, what lifepaths do seem viable? Here are the ones I've been thinking about:
POLITICS. I may have a non-neglible possibility of getting elected to the Parliament of Finland, either during the 2011 or the 2015 election. I'm estimating the chance of this to be around a couple of percent if I do nothing more than what I've been doing now, uppable to say 25% if I were to really dedicate myself to that during this autumn and the beginning of next year. This would allow me to popularize rationality and awareness of existential risks and affect country-level issues which I feel strongly about. The pay also isn't bad, so I could donate relatively large sums to x-risk prevention.
However, I have a strong suspicion I wouldn't actually like doing politics much.
ACADEMIA. There are two variants of this: try to do academic work concentrating on Singularity/AI issues, or try to do academic work concentrating more on something else. These are naturally not mutually exclusive, it being more of a question of emphasis. For the Singularity/AI issues - well, unlike some people at SIAI, I'm no genius so I'm not sure whether this is really where my comparative advantage lies. There are probably some low-hanging fruit in the form of stuff that hasn't yet been explored in depth or converted into academic papers, which I could do.
Academic work concentrating on something else would be interesting - I've got some ambitions about studying societies and large-scale human behavior from some grand interdisciplinary point of view combining cognitive science, economics, sociology, computer science et cetera. Pay in academia is often poor, however, and the work uncertain. I'm not sure I could deal with the stress of only knowing I or my team has project funding for the next six months.
INDUSTRY RESEARCH. As above, but doing something of interest for the private sector. I don't really know very much about this side of things. I'm figuring it'd have better pay and job security, but could spend less time doing genuinely interesting things and more time doing things optimized for making the biggest $$$ for The Corporation. Which might be okay or not, depending on how interesting that stuff would end up being.
WRITING. I've written three books now, the latest of which got a bunch of positive reviews, including a fourteen-paragraph one in Finland's biggest newspaper. It was also briefly on the list of most sold books in the webstore of Suomalainen kirjakauppa, the biggest bookstore chain in Finland, though I don't know how many sales they get through their webstore and how those stats were calculated. This is something I'd probably enjoy doing, though again the pay is poor and even more uncertain in academia. If I could break into the English-speaking market, the earnings potential would go up considerably. Most Finnish authors make the majority of their income via grants given out by various private foundations as well as the state, but there's again some degree of uncertainty involved in getting those.
CODE MONKEY. Catch-all term for "whatever doesn't sound too unpleasant but nets money". Currently most likely way of doing this seems to be by obtaining more programming experience and skill and then finding work in the IT sector, hence the name. The couple of instructors I've done CS programming project courses for said I have talent, and I realized that I actually liked doing practical programming projects a lot, more than many of the more theoretical courses I've had. This would also pay at least moderately well.
If I manage to pick one of these and decide I'll want to concentrate on it, I can leverage my time here to improve my chances of making it through to that field.
Considering those various options, I find that the thing that's most emotionally important for me right now is job security. Ideally I'd prefer a job I can just do and be at least moderately sure I'm doing a good job, without needing to worry about whether or not I'm doing a good enough job to pay my rent in a month or six months or whether the job'll exist at all at that point. That means that I'm currently rather strongly drawn towards the code monkey career heading, ideally at some big company that isn't likely to go out of business any time soon. It'll also allow me to do stuff falling under the other headings at the side.
(EDIT: I've also been playing the around with the idea of some kind of a consultancy thing, as I tend to have at least moderate talent in figuring out [1] [2] reasons for disagreement and a generic consultancy gig gives a nice excuse for studying a bit of everything in the hopes of it might be applicable.)
Considering my insecurities, it might also be a good thing if I didn't have an intellectually challenging job that had my re-evaluating my self-image all the time...