leaping

you can do it scared or you can just get old

The amount of things that have happened to me in the last 2 months is high enough not to be substack article compressible anymore, excuse the semi-vagueposting

I was supposed to do as written: a 39 credit semester to finish up my masters within the year. Instead I find myself 15000kms from home, deliberating on betting it all: staying another 3 weeks in the bay, to commit myself fully to Neel Nanda’s MATS sprint instead.

I am not “in” yet, I was selected from 29 out of 450+, but to get into the 3-month long, funded research phase. I need to be selected again as 8 from these 29, I will be judged on 12 days of work (the “sprint”).

It’s fundamentally a gamble, and the odds are stacked against me. If I fail, I will have to study 6 months longer. If I get in, I get to do research with my idealized mentor, and the fog lifts over the narrow path through: the elusive SF interpretability career.

I really do think I have a better shot if I do it out of the bay. Lighthaven is full of free interp wisdom, and I feel significantly more productive there. So I take the leap, I stay.

12 hours work days, bumpy roads, crashouts: midway, I decided I didn’t want to work with my sprint partner, only to later end up working together again 2 days later. I started dating someone in SF, my university email is blowing up with professors assigning me to groups for projects whose assignments I have never read and reminding me of deadlines missed.

I’m balancing so many things, so many emotions, my BART rides to Lighthaven are spent listening to breakcore, thinking about nothing but activation oracle training pipelines.

And after an arduous 12 days of working 997, on the 3rd of march, I put down my claudes and hug my sprint partner. c’est fini!

3 days later we have our interview, where we explain what we did to Neel. This is the thing we will actually get judged on, I’m on 4 hours of sleep, he’s about 6 hours late. Subjectively, I think it went terribly. We don’t even get to show our demo, Neel wants to go to sleep.¹

We get a decision on the 12th of march. The days before, my SF friends try to convince me to stay, so that when I get rejected, they can be there to tell me that it is not over yet, that I still have a shot of making it in interp.

The date is march 13th. I reflect on my 2 months in the bay. I have made friends I will cry about leaving behind, I have thrown away what is functionally an entire semester, in utter and complete violation of my plans for the future. All for something far from guaranteed.

In anticipation, I had scheduled the following event in my calendar:

Only to wake up, somehow, to this:

I fucking did it

Leaping

When I was deciding to do the sprint out of the bay, I ended up stuck in a loop of finding increasingly less relevant pros/cons. The expected value seemed to unequivocally point to the bay, but I was just scared: the bottom 50th percentile case was a pretty boring downside (6 months of extra studying). So I did what I always do. bang my head against uncertainty: “how can I be sure this will work???”.

This drove me crazy to the point I very nearly decided against staying (which I am now quite convinced was decisive in me getting in)

The only thing that got me out of flatland was my friend Jared: “you don’t know. Even your best guess is high variance, and there’s little ways to de-risk this. you just have to take the leap. That’s just what bravery is”

Even after deciding what is best for you, you require that final “yolo”, where you refuse to listen to your system 1 screaming “NO”, your bias against variance, and just take a goddamn risk for once.

I think this is generally underappreciated, even in the “you can just do things” circles. If you’re gonna be fine if you fail, and you think there’s a shot at something great, you should probably just do it.²

I recognize the obvious survivorship bias in this entire story, but I feel like growing up, I never heard stories like this that end in success³, and every time they did, they were chalked up to luck.

which is fair, right. A lot of the time a lot of luck is involved. But this sort of misses the point entirely: risk is often worth it. Inertia runs your life by default. You’re likely over-indexing on the downsides and under-indexing on the upsides, to justify your sour grapes. If you don’t want to yolo, it’s an uncomfortable belief that you can just do crazy things, which have a small-ish probability of working, and that sometimes, they really do just work. That your entire life is spent leaving potential gold on the table and denying that there’s any possible gold there.

A friend just moved to the bay after their undergrad with no other plan than hanging around until they got hired, and this just worked.⁴ The impact on their life doing this has been so positive and big that it really really skews expected value calculations, and I think even without hindsight, this was just generally a good decision.⁵

When I made the decision to stay, if you held a gun to my head and asked if I made a good or bad choice, I would have cried “this is obviously stupid, I will obviously never make it into Neel stream”. You HAVE to do it scared. So was my friend.

Hearing it from someone else can help with the fear.

So I implore you: consult your local rationalist wizard, critically evaluate your life, future financial situation, and determine if leaping is right for you.⁶

fears squashed

When you leap, you grow. You basically guarantee yourself a pretty big update on something. I learned so much about myself, research, communication, teamwork by doing all this.

I re-read do you want to make it or do you just want to be held? and I realized that just in general, all my greatest fears have been answered, just a mere 3 months after writing.

what if [SF] just exceedingly boring?

[what if you go to SF] and everyone is working and I don’t get to hang out with people or they are mean or annoying or I don’t fit in at all

But everyone in research is so cracked.

Yeah… I think it’s escape. From the mundane and the loneliness.

the “weavtossnatphtw”

I also just… doubt I could get in. I’m not the “““good student””” like some of my friends.

I was not sure I was going to like SF, or if it would like me back. I did not know if I was any good at research.⁷ But I correctly identified my twenties were for trying.

A taste of freedom

So… Celeste 2027 needs a bit of a revision. I’m starting Neel MATS early, meaning I’m putting my masters on hold.⁸ I am finishing 2 courses to get my undergrad, and I can take these remotely.

This is partly because I think this is best for me currently, but also because I really like the MATS work. I don’t particularly care about finishing the master: I’m fed up with studying and have been for a long long time. I can do all of this remotely, for the first time in my life I don’t actually need to be in Belgium.

I would love to go back to the bay, but visa complications loom. In the meantime, before declaring California the endgame, I’m declaring europe my oyster, there is much to see. I can go where I please, MATS gives enough to allow me to just chill in hostels in random cities. So that I will do.

Once again, the paths are endless. Dublin and London are up next, but after that, who knows? It’s intensely freeing, and a little terrifying, which is exactly how I like it.

I did not realize how much of a bottleneck making 0 money was. It puts you completely at the whims of parents, which at 23 was a truly infantilizing experience. Consider thinking about how you can make more money if you struggle with this.

For the first time I feel truly in charge. I am out of flatland, I am peering over every horizon. I can finally join my friends in believing in celeste.

This story ends 20 meters under Paris. After crawling for a solid hour through the catacombs, I enter a room full of bones. I lay down on them, I remember these were actual humans, with wants and desires. I give them a gender, a name, an occupation… I remember that I could be the first generation who doesn’t have to join them. I remember I will actually play an infinitesimal role in making this really big thing go well⁹

I can’t thank my friends in the bay enough. All Neel 9.0 MATS scholars, we couldn’t have done it without you; Euan, Lydia, Jared, my girlfriend, everyone else. I’m so happy to be doing what I’m doing with the people I’m doing it with.

The ship of theseus of Celeste 2027 didn’t sink, we’ve just spotted land early.¹⁰

I will make it, I will be held, I will have a good life.

Wind is blowing. I am on the cliff. I breathe in.

This will work.

1. (understandable, it’s 3 AM in London, this was his ~15th hour of interviews afaik)

2. obvious don’t do things that you can’t recover from, don’t do obviously dumb things

3. indeed, this is a very american story, and you have caught me at a very american time in my life

4. this friend is smart and good at what they do, but at most like 2 or 3 stdevs, not 4 or 5.

5. This requires being very competent, I thought I really wasn’t, but apparently I am.

6. I don’t think there are many that should be leaping less? I have not seen it in any case, but they probably exist.

7. like potential, I am obviously still bad

8. This is basically fine, I do not particularly care for finishing it other than doing research and if neel mats makes me legible/good enough to get a job in interp I will just take it. The approx policy is: “take cool opportunities until they stop coming for 3 months, in which case, resume masters“. This makes sense because we may be in fast takeoff land. If we are not, I can go and finish my degree.

9. I remember that this is fundamentally naughty. Illegal, but not so illegal I will not admit it on substack.com.

do you know what freedom is? no fear.

10. And I may actually get to be on the pirate ship