Trenton Bricken: belief

Transcript context

…There’s one thing I've noticed when people tell stories about their careers or their successes. They ascribe it way more to contingency, but when they hear about other people's stories they're like, “of course it wasn't contingent.” You know what I mean? “If that didn't happen, something else would have happened.” I've just noticed that and it's interesting that you both think that it was especially contingent. Maybe you're right. But it’s sort of an interesting pattern. I mean, I literally met Tristan at a conference and didn't have a scheduled meeting with him or anything. I just joined a little group of people chatting, and he happened to be standing there, and I happened to mention what I was working on, and that led to more conversations. I think I probably would've applied to Anthropic at some point anyways. But I would've waited at least another year. It's still crazy to me that I can actually contribute to interpretability in a meaningful way. I think there's an important aspect of shots on goal there, so to speak. Where just choosing to go to conferences itself is putting yourself in a position where luck is more likely to happen. Conversely, in my own situation it was doing all of this work independently and trying to produce and do interesting things. That was my own way of trying to manufacture luck, so to speak, to try and do something meaningful enough that it got noticed.…

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