Sholto Douglas: belief

Transcript context

…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. Given what you said, you framed this in the context that they were trying to run this experiment.…

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