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I guess my qualia are on a different list...
What is the current recommended reading order for the Sequences? I'm thinking of reading through them all and record the experience.
There are two distinct problems here that need to be discussed.
- Work-life balance. Even when you want to dedicate your life to a single goal, you still cannot devote everything you do to it, because you will burn out and your productivity will drop. So walking in the park and spending time with your boyfriend are things that should happen even if you are trying to build an FAI. In fact, they are necessary.
- Existential dread. Which is not a new thing at all, being Older Than Dirt, but is still as relevant as when the first human realized she is mortal.
It seems to me that the process can be accelerated by simply adding more alchemists, so that even as the useful amount of research from each of them decreases, the overall amount of research produced can be kept constant or increased.
Of course, "simply" adding more alchemists might not be so simple after all, being a matter of availiable resources. But perhaps the strategy of the alchemist's guild should have been to build an enormous and robust financial structure that would allow them to hire and support a huge amount of researchers later on, instead of hanging by a thread where even a slight interruption by the king could set them back centuries?