Somebody suggested that people in LessWrong may be interested in my resume, and may be able to hire, so I updated my website on github.io to include my resume.

https://amkg.github.io/alan-resume.pdf

Absolutely and unequivocally, you need to get out of IC design and into software engineering.

As mentioned by others, you are vastly underestimating the earning potential of 1st world software engineer. Someone fresh out of college or otherwise with little experience should expect $100k/yr from a typical technology company. A senior software engineer is probably $150k or more per year. Expect 35-50% of it to go to taxes, depending on where you live. If you're in Canada those taxes go towards wonderful things like universal health care that keep down your cost of living. If you're in the USA they mostly go to foreign wars and the parasitic healthcare industrial complex and you pay for things out of pocket. :shrug:

That said, expenses for a family of 4 are going to be a lot larger. I would expect to pay $36k or more in rent per year to live in a large enough apartment in a suburb of the SF bay area commuting distance from your job and with not terrible schools. Almost certainly another $12k on groceries, and $6k on car ownership (a necessity in our poorly designed cities). In the US (not Canada), you'll need an additional $6k or so for basic family medical insurance. If I assume that you land a $120k//yr (pre-tax) salary, that leaves you with only $18k left after taxes and basic living expenses. So if you did nothing else (no preschool, no daycare, no traveling home, no lifestyle creep, no leisure activities whatsoever) you'd be able to save approximately your entire current pre-tax annual salary.

Improvement? Yes, but there were a heck of a lot of 'if's in there. And as you note you can basically do the same thing or better by living on your family's land and getting freelance / remote work, taking advantage of the cost of living differences. Many tech workers in the USA dream of doing exactly what you could very easily be doing: go live in a cheap 3rd world country while earning USA-sized freelance salaries. On the internet, no one really cares where you are living or what your daily expenses are, just that you're doing a good job.

That said, it can be daunting to start freelance work, and hard to get your rates up without the professional network that comes from having worked in 1st world tech hubs. If you were single and unattached I might recommend the move to California or Toronto or something, but I'm not sure that's a good fit to your current situation, unless moving to the USA or elsewhere was your goal anyway.

Good reasons to move: Escape the Philippine drug war, network with other rationalists, cryonics, and transhumanist people, acquire better passport,, better opportunities for your children.

Bad reasons to move: Income (you can do as good or better freelancing), grass is greener (it's not).

If you chose not to move, you can still do effective networking by attending conferences and other professional events, as well as open-source hackathons and meetups in the locales you pass through. Choose and industry that you are not going to be fighting an uphill battle to establish yourself in, and then become reasonably well known and respected in that community. Often this will allow you to get travel support for attending conferences and community events, at least to cover all or part of your flight and hotel. Long-duration remote work will probably also involve frequent 1- or 2-week travel to the company or team headquarters. Expect to travel 1-2 months of the year. In any case you can and should take advantage of whatever nearby meetups are available either in your subfield or the rationalist/lesswrong & transhumanist communities.

By the way, Is your resume available? There are actually people here who might be able to hire you.

Side note: you should be able to sign up for Alcor even if you live in the Philippines. Have you properly looked into this? There are surcharges for foreign cryopreservations, so your insurance will have to be higher, but there is precedent for this. I don't know about the Philippines, but one of the recent Alcor cases was a 4yo Thai girl.

Side note 2: having been through a CFAR workshop, I don't think it would be worth the much higher relative cost for you to attend. There are cheaper low-hanging fruit to engage with in any case. And besides, the epistemologically confirmed parts of CFAR knowledge-base can be picked up $1.50 in late fees from your local library.

You should think a lot about Singapore, and maybe also Australia or Taiwan. Your best bet depends a bit on which country has company(s) that want to hire your skill set.

I think seriously about moving to SG or Australia, and I'm a US citizen.

FWIW, I think you are reading the geopolitical situation wrong about Chinese military ambitions. If China does anything militaristic, it will get hit hard with sanctions by the international community, which will wreck its export-dependent economy. China's goal is to re-establish itself as the center of the world by dominating the global economy.

My understanding is that a USA programmer would start at the $20,000-a-year level (?), and that someone with experience can probably get twice that, and a senior one can get $100,000/year.

A pessimistic starting salary for a competent US computer programmer is $60K and senior ones can clear $200K. $100K is a typical starting salary for a computer science student who just graduated from a top university (also the median nationwide salary).

In the US market, foreigners come work as computer programmers by getting H1B visas. The stereotypical H1B visa programmer is from India, speaks mostly intelligible English with a heavy accent, gets hired by a company that wants to save money by replacing their expensive American programmers, and exists under the thumb of their employer (if they lose their job, their visa is jeopardized). I think that the average H1B makes less money than the average American coder. It sounds to me like you'd be a significantly more attractive hire than a typical H1B--you're fluent in English, and you've made contributions to Scheme?

The cost of living in the US is much higher than the Philippines. Raising a family in Silicon Valley is notoriously expensive. Especially if you want your kids to go to a "good school" where they won't be bullied. I don't know what metro has the best job availability/cost of living/school quality tradeoff. It will probably be one of the cities that's referred to as a "startup hub", perhaps Seattle or Austin. If your wife is willing to homeschool, you don't have to worry about school quality.

You can dip your toes in Option 1 without taking a big risk. Just start applying to US software companies. They'll interview you via Skype at first, and if you seem good, the best companies will be willing to pay for your flight to the US to meet the team. To save time you probably want to line up several US interviews for a single visit so you can cut down on the number of flights. Here are some characteristics to look for in companies to apply to:

• The company has a process in place for hiring foreigners.

• The company is looking for developers with your skill set.

• The company's developer team is "clued in". Contributing to Scheme is going to be a big positive signal to the right employer. You can do things like read the company engineering blog, use BuiltWith, look up the employees on LinkedIn to figure out if the company seems clued in. Almost all companies funded by Y Combinator are clued in. If your interviewer's response to seeing Scheme on your resume is "What is Scheme?", then you're interviewing at the wrong company and you'll be offered a higher salary elsewhere.

• The company is profitable but not sexy. For example, selling software to small enterprises. (You probably don't want to work for a business that sells software to large enterprises, as these firms are generally not "clued in". See above.) Getting a job at a sexy consumer product company like Google or Facebook is difficult because those are the companies that everyone is applying to. You can interview at those companies for fun, as the last places you look at. And you don't want to apply for a startup that's not yet profitable because then you're risking your wife and kids on an unproven business. I'm not going to tell you how to find these companies--if you use the same methods everyone else uses to find companies to apply to, you'll be applying to the same places everyone else is.

Of course you'll be sending out lots of resumes because you don't have connections. Maybe experiment with writing an email cover letter very much like the post you wrote here, including the word "fucking". I've participated in hiring software developers before, and my experience is that attempts at formal cover letters inevitably come across as stuffy and inauthentic. Catch the interviewer's interest with an interesting email subject line+first few sentences and tell a good story.

Actually you might have some connections--consider reaching out to companies that are affiliated with the rationalist community, posting to the Scheme mailing list if that's considered an acceptable thing to do, etc.

Consider donating some $ to MIRI if my advice ends up proving useful.

Jonvon, there is only one human superpower. It makes us what we are. It is our ability to think. Rationality trains this superpower, like martial arts trains a human body. It is not that some people are born with the power and others are not. Everyone has a brain. Not everyone tries to train it. Not everyone realizes that intelligence is the only superpower they will ever have, and so they seek other magics, spells and sorceries, as if any magic wand could ever be as powerful or as precious or as significant as a brain.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

The core problem is that encouraging participation isn't one of the criteria.

I think you may have been led astray by the terminology into thinking that "disputation arena" means, y'know, an arena for disputation, when in fact it seems to mean a technique for discussing things. Techniques like the Delphi method are intended for groups that already exist and need to do some thinking.

I also doubt that reaching consensus is always a good thing.

Is anyone claiming it is? My understanding is that these "disputation arenas" are methods a group can use to arrive at consensus when they need to do so. (Also #1: I'd think most of them are adaptable to the case where you don't particularly need a consensus as such. Also #2: a consensus can be a complicated one with probabilities and things in, and it seems to me that agreement on such a consensus would avoid many of the perils of the usual sort of groupthink.)

Techniques like the Delphi method are intended for groups that already exist and need to do some thinking.

I don't think that's the goal layed out in the first paragarph of the post. It ends with:

This makes it not only desirable to find ways to effectively get groups of rationalists to think together, but also increasingly necessary.

Getting groups of rationalists to think together is a goal where it's important to design the system in a way that makes it easy and motivates participants to participate.

This is actually a reasonable strategy. A pre-comitment to revenge is useful, but there's no point getting revenge on nature.

yes

Somehow I think that "let's follow best practices in our cognition" isn't exactly a 'proposed solution' in the sense that one should be holding off from doing it.