I think status is in fact a significant motivation even for me, and ev — Wei Dai

"I typically find myself wanting to verify every single fact or idea that I hadnt heard of before, and say either "hold on, I need to think about that for a few minutes" or "let me check that on Google/Wikipedia". In actual conversation Id suppress this because I suspect the other person will quickly find it extremely annoying. I just think to myself "Ill try to remember what hes saying and check it out later", but of course I dont have such a good memory."

"Yes, but I tend not to advertise too much that people should be less certain about their altruism, since its hard to see how that could be good for me regardless of what my values are or ought to be. I make an exception of this for people who might be in a position to build [a friendly artificial intelligence], since if theyre too confident about altruism then theyre likely to be too confident about many other philosophical problems, but even then I dont stress it too much."

"Heres my own horror story with academic publishing. I was an intern at an industry research lab, and came up with a relatively simple improvement to a widely used cryptographic primitive. I spent a month or two writing it up (along with relevant security arguments) as well as I could using academic language and conventions, etc., with the help of a mentor who worked there and who used to be a professor. Submitted to a top crypto conference and weeks later got back a rejection with comments indicating that all of the reviewers completely failed to understand the main idea. The comments were so short that I had no way to tell how to improve the paper and just got the impression that the reviewers werent interested in the idea and made little effort to try to understand it. My mentor acted totally unsurprised and just said something like, "lets talk about where to submit it next." Thats the end of the story because I decide if thats how academia works I wanted to have nothing to do with it when theres, from my perspective, an obviously better way to do things, i.e., writing up the idea informally, posting it to a mailing list and getting immediate useful feedback/discussions from people who actually understand and are interested in the idea."

"I do have some early role models. I recall wanting to be a real-life version of the fictional "Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo" (from Vernor Vinges novel A Fire Upon the Deep) who in the story is known for consistently writing the clearest and most insightful posts on the Net. And then there was Hal Finney who probably came closest to an actual real-life version of Sandor at the Zoo, and Tim May who besides inspiring me with his vision of cryptoanarchy was also a role model for doing early retirement from the tech industry and working on his own interests/causes."

"Heres my experience. I applied to just MIT and my state university (University of Washington). I got on MITs waiting list but was ultimately not accepted, so went to UW. I would certainly have gone to MIT had I been accepted, but my thinking now is that if I did that, I would not have had enough free time in college to write Crypto++ and think about anonymous protocols, Tegmarks multiverse, anthropic reasoning, etc., and these spare-time efforts have probably done more for my "career" than the MIT name or what I might have learned there."

"This [the feeling that writing reviews of posts is work] is partly why I havent done any reviews, despite feeling a vague moral obligation to do so. Another reason is that I wasnt super engaged with [LessWrong] throughout most of 2018 and few of the nominated posts jumped out at me (as something that I have a strong opinion about) from a skim of the titles, and the ones that did jump out at me I think I already commented on back when they were first posted and dont feel motivated to review them now. Maybe thats because I dont like to pass judgment (I dont think Ive written a review for anything before) and when I first commented it was in the spirit of "here are some tentative thoughts Im bringing up for discussion"."