From: Eliezer Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Oct 23 2004 - 10:14:59 MDT
Ben Goertzel wrote:
>
> In fact, knowing you moderately well as I do, I think that getting a PhD and
> becoming an academic would be a reasonably good choice for you.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd love to live on a college campus, ideally
within easy walking distance of the main technical library. I'd hate to
actually *work* there.
> Getting the PhD would be fairly easy for you,
I am skeptical.
> and once you had it, you could get a job as a professor,
I am highly skeptical.
> guaranteeing you a lifetime income,
Getting tenure isn't difficult or anything, is it?
> with fairly minimal duties
Join the Army, learn to repair trucks. (And kill people, but that almost
never happens.)
> beyond doing and publishing your research. And, perhaps more
> importantly, you having a PhD would make it significantly easier for SIAI to
> raise money for your research.
>
> Personally, I benefited a lot from the research-time I obtained via being an
> academic for 8 years; and in my business pursuits now, I'm taken more
> seriously than I would be otherwise because I have a PhD.
>
> There's something to be said for boldly forging your own path in life, but
> there's also some value to playing the games of the society you're embedded
> within.
There's also something to be said for thinking outside the box. Much
faster to recruit an existing PhD as spokesperson than take the long
circuitous uncertain route.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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