The Importance of Pain Tolerance

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I'm interested in the extent to which rationality is about pain tolerance. The core problem of rationality is that doing things that will enable you to find out whether you are in fact right is just deeply, deeply unpleasant a lot of the time. And so I have kind of a constant vigilance approach where it's okay for me to get a lot of things wrong in my life. It's really not fine for me to become too afraid of the pain of writing down my thoughts and getting criticism on them.

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How hard is it to arrive at true beliefs about the world? How can you find enjoyment in being wrong? When presenting claims that will be scrutinized by others, is it better to hedge and pad the claims in lots of caveats and uncertainty, or to strive for a tone that matches (or perhaps even exaggerates) the intensity with which you hold your beliefs? Why should you maybe focus on drilling small skills when learning a new skill set? What counts as a "simple" question? How can you tell when you actually understand something and when you don't? What is "cargo culting"? Which features of AI are likely in the future to become existential threats? What are the hardest parts of AI research? What skills will we probably really wish we had on the eve of deploying superintelligent AIs?

Buck Shlegeris is the CTO of Redwood Research, an independent AI alignment research organization. He currently leads their interpretability research. He previously worked on research and outreach at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. His website is shlegeris.com.

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