Some hope for you if you're an EA with a chronic illness.
I’ve been reading the biographies of moral heroes, and I’d guess ~50% of them struggled with ongoing health issues.
Being sick sucks, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to do a ton of good
Florence Nightingale
Benjamin Franklin
William Wilberforce
Alexander Hamilton
Helen Keller
It’s not everybody, but it’s a surprising percentage of them.
I myself struggle with a chronic mystery ailment and I find it inspiring to hear about all of these people who still managed to do great things, even though their bodies were not always so cooperative.
(Also, just as an aside, the book Stop Being Your Symptoms, Start Being Yourself didn’t cure my illness, but it did reduce its effects on my life by about 85%, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s basically CBT/psychology stuff applied to chronic illness)
Crossposted to Less Wrong
‘Like most of life’s dangers, the dangers of artificial intelligence are not easily identified from the armchair.’
J Dmitri Gallow
Epistemic status
I’m not an expert in this field, and herein I make some sweeping generalisations educated guesses about the overall...
Let’s imagine it’s November 2031. We’re both still here, AI is much more capable than it is today, but governments are governing, civilisation is still (mostly) civilised, and there has been no catastrophic loss of control. It just kind of didn’t happen.
What happens to the AI safety field then?
I expect people who currently believe catastrophe could happen within two or three years will start saying five or ten years. Then 15. Then ‘who cares if we’re a few decades of...
Thanks to Bruce Friedrich, Seth Ariel Green, Tobias Leenaert, Jan Willem Bolderdijk, Martine van Haperen, Herman Rohrbach, Chris Popa and Elizabeth Alvarez for comments. Claude helped structure the text. Ideas and mistakes are my own. I currently work with ProVeg International. The prize I propose would be defined and judged by an independent committee, and its money would fund scaling the winning solution(s), not ProVeg or the winner.
TL/DR
* EA could d...
Some hope for you if you're an EA with a chronic illness.
I’ve been reading the biographies of moral heroes, and I’d guess ~50% of them struggled with ongoing health issues.
Being sick sucks, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be able to do a ton of good
It’s not everybody, but it’s a surprising percentage of them.
I myself struggle with a chronic mystery ailment and I find it inspiring to hear about all of these people who still managed to do great things, even though their bodies were not always so cooperative.
(Also, just as an aside, the book Stop Being Your Symptoms, Start Being Yourself didn’t cure my illness, but it did reduce its effects on my life by about 85%, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s basically CBT/psychology stuff applied to chronic illness)
Was there anything in the book that you found especially helpful?
Another example is Lincoln, who suffered severe depression throughout his life. Lincoln's Melancholy is a good book about it.