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Jack comments on Working Mantras - Less Wrong
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Of course when you're on your deathbed, alone (save the cryonics team at your side), unknown, with no significant accomplishments to your name clinging to the slim hope of revivification a hundred years hence and you've spent every last dollar and ounce of energy on solving a problem you're just not smart enough to understand you're really gonna wish you had second guessed yourself back in the day.
... But hey, I'm an optimist.
Edit: Yikes people. I was joking. Sorry.
Well, you've pretty clearly stated the sort of terrifying insecurity that most people wouldn't say out loud and confront. But you can't actually solve a problem by musing on that, whether to be afraid of it, or to develop arguments against your fears; the whole thing is just a wasted motion from the perspective of actual problem-solving. Time spent reading a math paper will always be better spent, once it's been determined that you are going to take the problem as a goal.
If you've already decided that trying to solve a given problem is the best use of your time (and this belief is as updated as it can be) then yes continuing to worry is unhelpful. (Though worries can motivate honest assessments of how one is spending their time.) We agree.
Anyway, I just thought I was being funny.
Upvoted, but FYI, it's really hard for people to know whether or not that sort of thing is humor or malice - I was actually trying to guess that (thinking that it would be funny/rational as humor/look-into-the-dark), and ended up leaning toward malice by prior probability (guess I should have realized prior frequencies are skewed on this particular website, but I'd been reading older OBLW posts and looking at the lower-quality comments there, that may have skewed my intuitive estimate).
You've got to go further over the top to make it clear that it's humor - talk about my gasping dying breath, "If only... I'd been.. less... overconfident" or something like that. (Actually, even that might not be over-the-top enough. "If only I'd been... less confident... about my own relative meta-rationality..." would do it, that tells everyone you're an insider.)
You sound like a manipulative and troubled person, what's wrong with you? :-)
Eliezer wishes to maximize expected utility. If that means dying for a 0.001 chance of saving the world, he's willing to do that. If the dice fall unfavorably, he's willing to accept that.
Except that EY doesn't spend all his time (or even most of his time, I don't know) trying to solve impossible problems. He also blogs and helps organize conferences and stuff, right? All those other activities act as a hedge against him not accomplishing anything in FAI. Its not such a big deal to work on a problem that you never actually solve if your real career is as a writer/speaker and talking about the fact that you are working on this impossible problem is useful for that career.
Michael Vassar and others organize the Summit.
Yeah, when the Summit was first proposed in 06, I said, "This can only happen if you make absolutely sure that I never have to do any work on them."