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There was this voice inside my head that told me that since I got Something to protect, relaxing is never ok above strict minimum, the goal is paramount, and I should just work as hard as I can all the time.
This led me to breaking down and being incapable to work on my AI governance job for a week, as I just piled up too much stress.
And then, I decided to follow what motivated me in the moment, instead of coercing myself into working on what I thought was most important, and lo and behold! my total output increased, while my time spent working decreased.
I'm so angry and sad at the inadequacy of my role models, cultural norms, rationality advice, model of the good EA who does not burn out, which still led me to smash into the wall despite their best intentions. I became so estranged from my own body and perceptions, ignoring my core motivations, feeling harder and harder to work. I dug myself such deep a hole. I'm terrified at the prospect to have to rebuild my motivation myself again.
18Upvoted!
STEM people can look at it like an engineering problem, Econ people can look at it like risk management (risk of burnout). Humanities people can think about it in terms of human genetic/trait diversity in order to find the experience that best suits the unique individual (because humanities people usually benefit the most for each marginal hour spend understanding this lens).
Succeeding at maximizing output takes some fiddling. The "of course I did it because of course I'm just that awesome, just do it" thing is a pure flex/social status grab, and it poisons random people nearby.
1Have you considered antidepressants? I recommend trying them out to see if they help. In my experience, antidepressants can have non-trivial positive effects that can be hard-to-put-into-words, except you can notice the shift in how you think and behave and relate to things, and this shift is one that you might find beneficial.
I also think that slowing down and taking care of yourself can be good -- it can help build a generalized skill of noticing the things you didn't notice before that led to the breaking point you describe.
Here's an anecdote that might be interesting to you: There's a core mental shift I made over the past few months that I haven't tried to elicit and describe to others until now, but in essence it involves a sort of understanding that the sort of self-sacrifice that usually is involved in working as hard as possible leads to globally unwanted outcomes, not just locally unwanted outcomes. (Of course, we can talk about hypothetical isolated thought experiments and my feelings might change, but I'm talking about a holistic relating to the world here.)
Here's one argument for this, although I don't think this captures the entire source of my feelings about this: When parts of someone is in conflict, and they regularly are rejecting a part of them that wants something (creature comforts) to privilege the desires of another part of them that wants another thing (work more), I expect that their effectiveness in navigating and affecting reality is lowered in comparison to one where they take the time to integrate the desires and beliefs of the parts of them that are in conflict. In extreme circumstances, it makes sense for someone to 'override' other parts (which is how I model the flight-fight-fawn-freeze response, for example), but this seems unsustainable and potentially detrimental when it comes to navigating a reality where sense-making is extremely important.
The main part of the issue was actually that I was not aware I had internal conflicts. I just mysteriously felt less emotions and motivation. That's the main thing all the articles I read of sustainable productivity did not transmit me, how to recognize it as it happens, without ever having my internal monologue saying "I don't want to work on this" or something.
What do you think antidepressants would be useful for? I don't expect to be matching any clinical criteria for depression.
1The main part of the issue was actually that I was not aware I had internal conflicts. I just mysteriously felt less emotions and motivation.
Yes, I believe that one can learn to entirely stop even considering certain potential actions as actions available to us. I don't really have a systematic solution for this right now aside from some form of Noticing practice (I believe a more refined version of this practice is called Naturalism but I don't have much experience with this form of practice).
What do you think antidepressants would be useful for?
In my experience I've gone months through a depressive episode while remaining externally functional and convincing myself (and the people around me) that I'm not going through a depressive episode. Another thing I've noticed is that with medication (whether anxiolytics, antidepressants or ADHD medication), I regularly underestimate the level at which I was 'blocked' by some mental issue that, after taking the medication, would not exist, and I would only realize it previously existed due to the (positive) changes in my behavior and cognition.
Essentially, I'm positing that you may be in a similar situation.
Yesterday, I was searching for posts by alignment researchers describing how they got into the field. I was searching specifically for personal stories rather than guides on how other people can get into the field.
I was trying to perform Intuition flooding, by reading lots of accounts, and getting intuitions on which techniques work to enter the field.
I only managed to find three which fit somewhat my target:
- Neel Nanda: How I Formed My Own Views About AI Safety
- Kevin RoWang: Lessons After a Couple Months of Trying to Do ML Research
- TurnTrout: Lessons I've Learned from Self-Teaching
- Nate Soares: The mechanics of my recent productivity
Neel Nanda's post was the central example of what I was looking for, and I was surprised to not find more. Does anyone know where I can find more posts like this ?
I think this is a good thing to do! I reccomend looking up things like "reflections on my LTFF upskilling grant" for similar pieces from lesser known researchers / aspiring researchers.
Thank you for the pointer ! I found the article you mentioned, and then found the tag Postmortem & Retrospective which led me to three additional posts:
TIL that the expected path a new user of LW is expected to follow, according to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rEHLk9nC5TtrNoAKT/lw-2-0-strategic-overview, is to become comfortable with commenting regularly in 3-6 month, and comfortable with posting regularly in 6-9 month. I discovered the existence of shortforms. I (re)discovered the expectation that your posts should be treated as a personal blog medium style ?
As I'm typing this I'm still unsure whether I'm destroying the website with my bad shortform, even though the placeholder explicitly said... (\*right click inspect\*)
Write your thoughts here! What have you been thinking about?
Exploratory, draft-stage, rough, and rambly thoughts are all welcome on Shortform.
I'm definitely rambling ! Look ! I'm following the instructions !
I feel like a "guided tour of LW" is missing when joining the website ? Some sort if premade path to get up to speed on "what am I supposed and allowed to do as a user of LW, except reading posts ?". Could take some inspiration from Duolingo, Brilliant, or any other app trying to get a user past the initial step of interacting with the content ?
1I'm looking for websites tracking the safety of the various frontier labs. For now, I found those:
- Seoul Commitment Tracker → Whether frontier AI companies have published their "red line" risk evaluation policy, in accordance with their commitments at the Seoul AI Action Summit
- AI Lab Watch → Tracker of actions frontier AI companies have taken to improve safety
- Safer AI Risk Management Ratings → Ratings of frontier AI companies' risk management practices
Do you know of any other?
I'm currently writing a grant application to build websites specifically tracking how frontier AI Labs are fulfilling the EU Code of practice, how close are frontier models from each lab from various red lines, and how robust are the evaluation methodologies of each lab (probably as separate websites). I'd be interested to any pointer to existing work on this.
Here's a brand new assessment that was just released (July 17): https://futureoflife.org/ai-safety-index-summer-2025/
1Draft post made during Inkhaven. Interested in feedback.
Signals of Competence is the model I use to advise friends on how to build career capital.
When deciding who to hire, an organization will assess the competence of the candidates by looking at various signals that they sent in their CV, cover letter, interview or work test.
Those signals are a point on those two main dimensions:
- Reach/Breadth: how wide of a population understands the signal. Harvard degree is high. Having made a specific niche software is narrow.
- Detail/Depth: how much of a detailed picture of your competence does it paint. Degree only signals you’re in the degree-holder distribution, it’s very shallow. A portfolio shows specific things you made by yourself, it’s deeper. Having worked with someone for years gives them a detailed model of how you work and what you’re good at, it’s as deep as it gets.
Signals of Competence are of two types:
- Individual: Historically, all signals of competence were of the form “Here is an example of my work” or “I worked with you or your friend before so you trust me”. Those signals are usually detailed, but as they’re specific to you, they don’t work beyond your social circles.
- Institutional: Institutions were built to create signal of competence that are portable (e.g. degrees, certifications). The trust is no more in the specific individual, but in the institution who attests of their competence
Small and Big organizations generally care about different signals
- In big organizations, recruiters usually don’t have the technical knowledge to assess detailed signals of competence. They will rely on broad ones, like degrees. To get those, you have to max out the institutional signals, who will be understandable by an MBA without domain specific knowledge.
- In small organization, the cost of a bad hire is much higher, and the recruiter will be much more technical. There, they will want to get the most detailed signal they can, to reduce the risk you’ll tank the company. You’ll want to have specific personal connection or direct experience working on their topic.
Your CV is the collection of those signals. There are three ways you can improve how good it is:
- More detailed signals: build up a portfolio in the specific industry you want to get in, work with people who can attest of your competence and recommend you, publish in the recognized venues of the field → increase your chances to break into a specific field
- More widely legible signals: get to a top university, work in big tech, anything with wide brand recognition → increase your ability to pivot to any industry
- Push the Pareto Frontier of breath/depth: being maintainer of a famous open source project is a widely understood signal in tech which gives you lots of credibility, even though it’s not worth anything outside tech
Recruiters look for three kind of signals:
- Technical Competence: are you good at the specific thing the org is doing?
- Executive Function: are you a reliable person that will get shit done on time?
- Culture Fit: are you someone that they’ll enjoy working with or will you make them miserable?
Make sure you signal your competence in those three.
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