I could tell you about my strengths and weaknesses. I'm creative and intelligent and able to rock the boat and do things that can create uncomfortabl… - Holden Karnofsky

I think it's somewhat of a happy coincidence so far that most breakthroughs have been good. To say, I see a breakthrough on the horizon. Is that good or bad? How can we prepare for it? That's another thing academia is really not set up to do. Academia is set up to get the breakthrough. That is a question I ask myself a lot is here's an intellectual activity. Why can't it be done in academia? These days, my answer is if it's really primarily of interest to a very cosmopolitan philanthropist trying to help the whole future, and there's no one client and it's not frontier advancing, then I think that does make it pretty plausible to me that there's no one doing it. We would love to change that, at least somewhat, by funding what we think is the most important work.

But on the other hand, there are a couple of dimensions where <nowiki>[</nowiki>Harvard<nowiki>]</nowiki> alumni have much higher opinions of themselves, and these are the things I think people have come to humblebrag about. One of them is positive contribution to society: 15% of us think we're in the top 10%, and 4% of us think we're in the top 1%. The much bigger one is happiness: only 4% of us think we're below average, over 30% of us think we're in the happiest 10%, and a whopping 10% of us think we're in the happiest one percent. So I think this is going to be a really interesting and really weird reunion, because it looks like our generation has become some sort of bragging hipster generation. Instead of bragging about money and fame like traditional people do, we're way too cool for that and instead we're all high on ourselves for being good people with the right priorities in life. I think we're going to be hearing a lot of conversations along the lines of "Yeah I'm kinda poor, but I'm doing what I believe in and I'm really happy and I think that's just what matters, but I don't know, maybe that's just me." "No man I totally feel you, and actually I think I'm even poorer and happier, I mean I literally love my spouse so much I'd kill myself if we split up."

I update negatively on people who mislead (including expressing great confidence while being wrong, and especially including avoidable mischaracterizations of others' views); people who do tangible damage (usually by misleading); and people who create little of value despite large amounts of opportunity and time investment.