= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on Positioning oneself to make a difference - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (46)
If you accept funding to do something to help the world, you're not helping the world unless you're underpaid, and the degree you're helping the world is proportional to the degree you're underpaid.
I'd advocate that you become self-funding ASAP, in a peripherally related field. This has a couple benefits. Firstly, your paid work will require you to obtain some real skills and provide some reality checks - countering ivory-tower-ish tendencies to some extent. Second, the ideas you bring to the table from your paid work will add diversity to the SIAI/LessWrong/existential risks community. Third, you will have fewer structural incentives to defend SIAI/LessWrong's continued existence.
OR, you manage to secure funding from people or sources that would otherwise have been wasted or used inefficiently.
I don't understand. Surely someone who volunteers as a grant-getter is being more benevolent than someone who accepts a wage to work as a grant-getter. Unpaid volunteering is exactly analogous to accepting a wage and then turning around and donating it, which is surely praiseworthy.
I don't disagree with either of those statements, or your overall position. Indeed, I'm actually taking your suggested approach myself. I would go as far as to say that any direct participation that I have in research in my chosen field is less benevolent than a pure focus on wealth creation (and harvesting).
I should have included disclaimers to that effect when exploring, as I was, a technical curiosity.