From memory, he also said something like, for most people, going into AI straight away instead of just becoming really good at something you could be really good at is probably a mistake: having said this, not sure if his views have changed given we had a bunch of really quick developments in AI that made a bunch of people think AI timelines were way shorter.
I actually love that you didn’t just cite random EA stuff only. I think citing more outside sources for things is really good for keeping effective altruism and the rest of the world’s discourse on how to make the world better more connected (both for making it easier for newcomers by having more material grounded in language that more people understand and presented in ways that are way more familiar, but also for the object-level advantages of just keeping our epistemics cleaner because we’re a little bit less in our echo chamber).
I just also thought it was worth pointing out that people in the EA community that people respect a lot seem to completely agree with you too (power of social-proof from people within our in-group is totally a thing that makes citing stuff from outside the community receive too little social reinforcement IMO).
Holden Karnofsky also basically says “be so good they can’t ignore you” in the 80k podcast episode interviewing him on his career thoughts (as the tile of the episode suggests, the advice was basically “build aptitudes and kick ass”).
From memory, he also said something like, for most people, going into AI straight away instead of just becoming really good at something you could be really good at is probably a mistake: having said this, not sure if his views have changed given we had a bunch of really quick developments in AI that made a bunch of people think AI timelines were way shorter.
I actually love that you didn’t just cite random EA stuff only. I think citing more outside sources for things is really good for keeping effective altruism and the rest of the world’s discourse on how to make the world better more connected (both for making it easier for newcomers by having more material grounded in language that more people understand and presented in ways that are way more familiar, but also for the object-level advantages of just keeping our epistemics cleaner because we’re a little bit less in our echo chamber).
I just also thought it was worth pointing out that people in the EA community that people respect a lot seem to completely agree with you too (power of social-proof from people within our in-group is totally a thing that makes citing stuff from outside the community receive too little social reinforcement IMO).