There happens to be an article in the New York Times today about the 4% rule, based on a new paper titled The 4 Percent Rule is Not Safe in a Low-Yield World. It also seems worth noting that the 4% rule assumes a payout period of 30 years, so it's not entirely applicable for the purposes of this thread.

(e.g. future might provide much better utility for your dollar so you want to save up for that better utility)

This is one of my main reasons for saving a lot and I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned it. If technological progress continues, it seems likely there will be all kinds of cool toys and useful procedures (e.g., cognitive enhancement or life extension) that one could buy in the future, not to mention investment and charitable opportunities, and I'd hate to be left out because I had already spent my money on a bigger house or flashier cars and clothes.

Have you looked into opening an investment account in the US as a non-resident (so your government won't be able to easily appropriate your money)? I'm not familiar with it myself, but a cursory Google search seems to indicate that it's possible and not too difficult. Or if the US doesn't work for some reason, some other country...

That plan worked for you, but you're very unusual.

Weren't you essentially following my plan too, i.e., working in your free time on topics being neglected by academia? (Are you still doing this, BTW, after you quit from being an SI research associate?) Are you implying that the plan isn't working for you?

You'd probably be an even bigger intellectual celebrity if you took the academic path.

I'm not sure how you figured that. If I had gone into academia I most likely would have gone into computer science and specialized in something not particularly Earth-shattering like crypto optimization (i.e., making crypto algorithms faster), or if I was lucky maybe I could have pursued my b-money idea. But I never would have had the opportunity to pursue my interests in philosophy (which seems to have a chance of making me more famous in the future when academia or posthumans discover or reinvent UDT).

Even if I had somehow gotten a job in academic philosophical research, it took me 3-4 years exploring various dead ends before getting the idea that the solution to anthropic reasoning / indexical uncertainty is in the shape of a decision theory, and then even more years to formulate it into the form you saw in my LW post. I don't know how I would have survived in academia for those years without any publishable results. Instead what probably would have happened (and what apparently happened to every professional philosopher who actually worked on the topic) is that I would have been forced to quickly come up with some sort of wrong solution just to have something to publish.

It seems less risky/way easier than trying to get the same benefits while working within academia

Right, you can get the same benefits in academia by getting tenure, but how many people manage that, and even if you do, the most productive period of your life might already be over by then.

but you won't get the external motivation/guidance/sanity-checking

This is an important consideration. The external motivation/guidance/sanity-checking provided by the relevant online non-professional communities were enough for me to be productive and not become a crank, etc., but maybe (as cousin_it suggests) I'm very unusual in that regard.

It could be that prestigious second-movers deserve the credit if they are responsible for getting people to pay attention to the previously neglected topics, and possibly we already credit first-movers more than we should (which is why I said "optimize for academic fame" instead of "positive social impact"). Which brings up a question: what determines the topics that academia pays attention to? If we had a good model for that, maybe we could use it to generate some munchkin ideas for making it pay attention to important but neglected ideas?

Dissensus is one of the few nearly-universally effective insurance policies.

Or possibly a good way to get everyone killed. For example suppose any sufficiently intelligent being can build a device to trigger a false vacuum catastrophe.

Robin Hanson thinks that strong cooperation within copy clans won't have a huge impact because there will still be a tradeoff between cooperation and specialization. But if the clan consists of copies of someone like John von Neumann, it can easily best world-class specialists in every field, just by forking a bunch of copies and having each copy take a few subjective months to read up on one field and do a bit of practicing. There is little need for such a clan to cooperate with outsiders (except maybe investors/donors for the initial capital) and I don't see what can prevent it from taking over the world as a singleton once it comes into existence.

This is for people interested in optimizing for academic fame (for a given level of talent and effort and other costs). Instead of trying to get a PhD and a job in academia (which is very costly and due to "publish or perish" forces you to work on topics that are currently popular in academia), get a job that leaves you with a lot of free time, or find a way to retire early. Use your free time to search for important problems that are being neglected by academia. When you find one, pick off some of the low-hanging fruit in that area and publish your results somewhere. Then, (A) if you're impatient for recognition, use your results to make an undeniable impact on the world (see Bitcoin for example), or (B) if you're patient, move on to another neglected topic and repeat, knowing that in a few years or decades, the neglected topic you found will likely become a hot topic and you'll be credited for being the first to investigate it.

I have a problem with calling this a "semi-open FAI problem", because even if Eliezer's proposed solution turns out to be correct, it's still a wide open problem to develop arguments that can allow us to be confident enough in it to incorporate it into an FAI design. This would be true even if nobody can see any holes in it or have any better ideas, and doubly true given that some FAI researchers consider a different approach (which assumes that there is no such thing as "reality-fluid", that everything in the multiverse just exists and as a matter of preference we do not / can not care about all parts of it in equal measure, #4 in this post) to be at least as plausible as Eliezer's current approach.