academia & rationality (pt. 2) - by Lydia Nottingham

L: something i’ve been worried about is whether it’s possible to be a mathematician and also have a life? by which i mean, keep up with current events and come out here to things like this and contribute to such communities. at oxford i felt alienated because i didn’t know any mathematicians who were, uh, ‘publicly situationally aware’ — that is, keeping up with what’s going on in ai and so on — or even shared more general rationality interests, like knowledge management systems and augmentative tech and applied rationality and optimization — X: i think i felt very similar as a graduate student. having a foot in two cults helps you not get captured by either one, right? i always had the sense i could escape from one into the other if i ever needed to. and in a way i think that helped me to do both more fully. L: do you know others? X: scott aaronson certainly comes to mind as someone who has situational awareness and a foot in both worlds. also terence tao and timothy gowers; they’re s

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• Malaika Aiyar