Solid advice! But forgive me, I'm gonna jump on something basically unrelated to the rest of the post:
For some reason, I need to sleep 10:30 to 12:00 hours every day or I will be tired.
Yikes! I'm not a doctor and I don't intend to pry, but if you weren't already aware, that's pretty deep into probable-pathology territory. I was doing that sort of thing before figuring out mitigations for my sleep disorder. I didn't quite appreciate how unusual my sleep issues were until very late; I could have saved myself a couple of decades of intense discomfort if I had.
I am now diagnosed with sleep apnea and type 2 narcolepsy. CPAP and a Modafinil prescription seem to help pretty well so far. You were the first iirc to point me in that direction, so thank you. Any things that helped you that I did not list?
I've got a fun suite of weird stuff going on[1], so here's a list of sometimes-very-N=1 data:
I'm probably forgetting some stuff.
"Idiopathic hypersomnia"-with-a-shrug was the sleep doctor's best guess on the sleep side, plus a weirdo kind of hypothyroidism, plus HEDs, plus something strange going on with blood sugar regulation, plus some other miscellaneous and probably autoimmune related nonsense.
I tend to take 300 mcg about 2-5 hours before my target bedtime to help with entrainment, then another 300-600 mcg closer to bedtime for the sleepiness promoting effect.
In the form of luminette glasses. I wouldn't say they have a great user experience; it's easy to get a headache and the nose doohicky broke almost immediately. That's part of why I didn't keep using them, but I may try again.
But far from sole!
While still being tired enough during the day to hallucinate on occasion.
Implementing this and maintaining sleep consistency functionally requires other interventions. Without melatonin etc., my schedule free-runs mercilessly.
Given that I was doing this independently, I can't guarantee that Proper Doctor-Supervised CPAP Usage wouldn't do something, but I doubt it. I also monitored myself overnight with a camera. I do a lot of acrobatics, but there was no sign of apneas or otherwise distressed breathing.
When I was younger, I would frequently ask my parents to drop the thermostat down at night because we lived in one of those climates where the air can kill you if you go outside at the wrong time for too long. They were willing to go down to around 73F at night. My room was east-facing, theirs was west-facing. Unbeknownst to me, there was also a gap between the floor and wall that opened directly into the attic. That space was also uninsulated. Great times.
It wasn't leaking!
The cooling is most noticeable at pressure points, so there's a very uneven effect. Parts of your body can feel uncomfortably cold while you're still sweating from the air temperature and humidity.
The "hmm my heart really isn't working right" issues were bad, but it also included some spooky brain-hijacky mental effects. Genuinely not sure I would have survived six months on it even with total awareness that it was entirely caused by the medication and would stop if I stopped taking it. I had spent some years severely depressed when I was younger, but this was the first time I viscerally understood how a person might opt out... despite being perfectly fine 48 hours earlier.
I'd say it dropped a little in efficacy in the first week or two, maybe, but not by much, and then leveled out. Does the juggling contribute to this efficacy? No idea. Caffeine and ritalin both have dopaminergic effects, so there's probably a little mutual tolerance on that mechanism, but they do have some differences.
Effect is still subtle, but creatine is one of the only supplements that has strong evidence that it does anything.
Beyond the usual health/aesthetic reasons for exercising, I also have to compensate for joint loosey-gooseyness related to doctor-suspected HEDs. Even now, I can easily pull my shoulders out of socket, and last week discovered that (with the help of some post-covid-related joint inflammation), my knees still do the thing where they slip out of alignment mid-step and when I put weight back on them, various bits of soft tissues get crushed. Much better than it used to be; when I was ~18, there were many days where walking was uncomfortable or actively painful due to a combination of ankle, knee, hip, and back pain.
Interesting note: my first ~8 years of exercise before starting cytomel, including deliberate training for the deadlift, saw me plateau at a 1 rep max on deadlift of... around 155 pounds. (I'm a bit-under-6'4" male. This is very low, like "are you sure you're even exercising" low. I was, in fact, exercising, and sometimes at an excessive level of intensity. I blacked out mid-rep once; do not recommend.)
Upon starting cytomel, my strength increased by around 30% within 3 months. Each subsequent dosage increase was followed by similar strength increases. Cytomel is not an anabolic steroid and does not have anabolic effects in healthy individuals.
I'm still no professional powerlifter, but I'm now at least above average within the actively-lifting population of my size. The fact that I "wasted" so many years of exercise was... annoying.
Going too long without food or doing a little too much exercise is a good way for me to enter a mild grinding hypoglycemic state. More severely, when I went a little too far with intense exercise, I ended up on the floor unable to move while barely holding onto consciousness.
Probably not useful but just in case here are some other medications that are prescribed for narcolepsy (i.e. stuff that makes you not tired):
Solriamfetol is supposed to be more effective than Modafinil. Possibly hard to impossible to get without a prescription. Haven't tried that yet.
Pitolisant is interesting because it has a novel mechanism of action. Possibly impossible to get even with a prescription, as it is super expensive if you don't have the right health insurance. For me, it did not work that well. Only lasted 2-4 hours, and taking multiple doses makes me not be able to sleep.
Great writeup, strong upvoted.
I'd share a similar list of N=1 data I wrote in a facebook post a few years ago but I'm currently unable to access the site due to a content blocker.
I had a similar situation up until my late 30s. A CPAP fixed some of this, and Wellbutrin (aka Buproprion) fixed the rest. Now I'm at 8-9 hours and more rested, rather than 10-14.
I have participated in SERI MATS 2.0 in John's stream. Here is some advice based on my experience.
Be Nice
The AI alignment community is pretty small. If you are an ass, everybody will know that you are an ass. The same holds to a lesser extent for being nice. When I was visiting Edinburgh to attend a talk by David Krueger, there were several people there, that I had first met at Lightcone. When I was visiting Trajan House, the same thing happened. You never know when you might be talking to a grantmaker over dinner.
Epistemic status: I did not actually behave like an ass. I expect this to be true, based on how many people I ran into that I've seen before, in different parts of the world.
Use Lunch and Dinner at Lightcone
During MATS 2.0 lunch and dinner were both served at Lightcone every day of the week. There were always many cool people around, and the conversations were unusually insightful. My favorite heuristic is to just join whatever conversation John is in. I am pretty sure that at least 15% of the value of SERI MATS came from eating lunch and dinner at Lightcone. Probably much more than that.
Epistemic status: It feels like this was very useful, but it is hard to quantify.
Take care of yourself
At the beginning of SERI MATS, there were many social events (mostly just general Berkeley EA/Rationalist events). They were all happening pretty late. For some reason, I need to sleep 10:30 to 12:00 hours every day or I will be tired. My team was meeting at 10:00 every day. For the first 3 weeks, I was basically sleep-deprived almost every day. John's workshops are pretty great, and being sleep-deprived during them destroyed probably more than 20% of the value. That being said, at least one of the socials was high-value, and it was probably worth the cost.
The worst thing was that I got used to being sleep-deprived. I sleep-deprived myself, even when there were no socials happening. I made similar mistakes with doing sports and eating healthily. Somehow it's hard to keep up all the good habits when you change your environment.
Epistemic status: It's hard to evaluate the counterfactual where I was not sleep-deprived. I estimate I could have gotten 5-35% more value by not making the mistakes I listed.
Learn to detach yourself from your ideas
Check out this comment.
Be Agentic
If something doesn't fit right, try to fix it.
Do you have a crazy idea about how to improve the office? Ask, or implement it yourself (after getting permission)! (The Lightcone ops team is very competent and cool. John had a loft bed in his office when I was there. I am not sure about the situation in the new SERI MATS offices.)
Choose how you spend your time. If you are in a conversation, notice when you would rather do something else. I recommend that you act on this feeling. Get back to work, join that other discussion that seems more interesting, or do whatever else seems higher value. I think being able to do this is great. Building up this skill is probably easier when talking to rationalists. They won't punish you for this kind of initiative.
In general, being agentic seems highly related to making sure that you thought all your high-value thoughts. I recommend sitting down for at least 5 minutes by the clock every day, and trying to come up with high-value directions to think in. The second step is then to always do what you think is best. Which is not easy.
Think about AI alignment from scratch
Reading somebodies work is different from discovering the underlying insights for yourself. Many details will be omitted in a write-up. Especially details on the research process. When I thought about AI alignment from scratch, I was thinking thoughts I had not thought of before. It seems likely that these thoughts occurred to people like Nick Bostrom, but did not make it into e.g. Superintelligence. Or at least I did not get these thoughts out of Superintelligence by just reading it.
It is easy to read someone's work and regurgitate it whenever it seems relevant. You might even be really good at this and impress other people. But that does not mean that you understood all the important details. It certainly does not mean that you understand the underlying ideas as well as the original author.
I recommend any AI alignment researcher think about the problem of how to solve the AI alignment problem from scratch. At least for a couple of hours every month. And while doing that, try hard to not propose solutions, at least initially. Force your mind to not autocomplete your thinking with solutions you have thought about in the past. Or write them down to get them out of your mind. If you are just starting out, I expect that spending more time thinking about the problem from scratch to be valuable.
Epistemic status: Intuitively this seems very important. I have only limited empirical data on this producing insight. Maybe 5 ideas in myself after thinking for a couple of hours.
Get as independent as possible
I expect the following advice will work best in John's stream. As far as I understand John's goal is to create researchers that can discover new fruitful directions on their own and make progress on them. It might be useful to people not in John's stream.
Right now we don't have a single approach that obviously will lead to a technical solution to the AI alignment problem. I expect there to be many promising directions that nobody has thought of so far. So it seems high value to get people to work on research that is orthogonal to existing research agendas. That means people that can think for themselves and can come up with their own research directions are highly valuable.
Epistemic status: I am pretty uncertain to which extent research directions are underexplored. My intuition tells me that it would be pretty bad if everybody would just work on existing agendas.
Attend the events
In my experience, the SERI MATS events (e.g. talks, and workshops), were all pretty good. I did not attend 2 or 3, and in retrospect, it seems like a mistake. I recommend you attend at least the first 10 minutes of every event, and then decide if you want to leave. We had a wide range of researchers give presentations about their work, which was good for getting a sense of what other people are working on.
Focus on social in the beginning
Spending time getting to know the other people around seems valuable. I am mainly thinking about other SERI MATS scholars and people in the Lightcone offices. Doing this, in the beginning, is probably better for obvious reasons. E.g. you will get to know who knows what, so later on you know who might be able to answer a particular question you have.
Epistemic status: I did do this, though I did not really plan it out. I am somewhat uncertain how useful this is, though I am pretty sure it is positive.