The Bar for Contributing to AI Safety is Lower than You Think
Many people still have a model of AI safety where they assume that the bar for contributing must be really high.
I’m here to tell you that this isn’t the case.
The Value of Good Community Members
Even without conducting groundbreaking research, “good community members” play a crucial role in expanding and enriching the AI Safety space. But what constitutes a good community member?
While possessing a high degree of intelligence is undeniably beneficial, other personal attributes that can compensate for raw intelligence to a certain extent. These include:
Intellectual humility
The ability to deeply understand other perspectives
Dedication to continuous learning more about the field
There is undoubtedly some level of baseline intelligence below which it’ll be hard for you to be a net contributor, but that’s not as much of an issue as you might think as most members of the EA community are quite smart anyway. The proliferation of accessible resources on AI and AI Safety has substantially lowered the barrier to entry for being able to usefully contribute to discussions and if you have a genuine interest, learning about the field won’t really feel like work.
Soft Skills
Other attributes can significantly increase your value as a community member.
Good vibes is a major value add. No one wants to be around a jerk
Being able to read the room. Knowing when to speak and when to listen. Try not to be the guy who has absolutely no clue, but takes up a disproportionate amount of air time
When you’re listening to people, truly listening. People love spending time around people who do this
If you’re good at providing feedback, you’ll find high demand as it’s hard to see all angles of a problem by yourself. The rapid growth of the field has created a mentorship bottleneck, making peer support increasingly vital
Providing emotional support. AI Safety can be quite confronting at times, but we can help each other work through this
Conclusion
The field of AI Safety benefits not only from groundbreaking research but also from a vibrant, supportive community of engaged individuals. By participating actively, providing feedback, and maintaining an open and curious mindset, you may contribute more significantly than you initially believed possible. There are many attributes that can make you a valuable community member other than raw intelligence and these attributes can be developed if you’re willing to work on it.
And who knows? Maybe even if you don’t feel like you have that much to offer, but you consistently read things, hang around the community read things and provide feedback on other people’s ideas, you might eventually be drawn towards pursuing an idea of your own.
(I don’t wish to imply that I have all of these attributes myself, so I expect writing this list to end up being useful for me too).
The bar for contributing is low. I think the high bar you contrast this with is the bar for being hired or paid to contribute, which is indeed high in the conventional sense.
This is an important distinction because people should not equate contributing with being hired/paid as I think they often do. If you think AI risk is the most important problem, you should strive to move further on the continuum of contribution regardless of whether you cross the threshold of being hired.
Regardless of whether intelligence is or isn’t important to being a good community member (FWIW, I disagree voted because I don’t think it is), bringing it up is really unhelpful for the intended goal of this post. We know for sure that imposter syndrome is regularly discussed as an issue facing this community, and that many of the best community members don’t believe that they’re good enough to be here. This line in particular is really likely to set that feeling off:
Yeah I’m kinda confused why you’re talking at all about intelligence here Chris?
For anyone reading I’m a dumb dumb (ie 80% of readers will be smarter than me) but I seem to be having a positive impact.
@Yanni: you’re smarter than you put yourself out as, plus you really bring the vibes.
You’re also an excellent marketer, I didn’t include skills like this in my list because I was speaking specifically to some just being a general community member, although maybe I should have emphasised the ability to have impact through volunteering a bit more.
I’m trying to widen people’s understanding of how people can continue to AI safety and what attributes are helpful, but at the same time, I don’t want to be a popularity on this issue.