AI safety is harder than most things
I recently got a visceral sense that AI safety is harder than most things when I started writing my Tao Analysis Solutions blog. After two months of near-daily blogging, I got blog comments from a smart-seeming high school student (?) and also a very nice thank you letter from a different person. In contrast, working on AI safety feels like .... there's absolutely no feedback on whether I'm doing anything useful?
I also had a similar feeling one day when I took a break from studying math and learned some microeconomics. The latter just felt so much easier.
When you've been at AI safety for too long, you're so used to just "[staring] at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead, trying to figure out what to think next"[1] that you might forget that other things aren't like this. You might start to think that, actually, you're just incompetent. So I think it's nice to sometimes take a break and do easier things.
