Easy steps could be to add a “red team” tag on the forum and point to this post to encourage people to do this.
I have at times given advice to early career EA’s mostly in AI Safety similar to this. When people have trouble coming up with something they might want to write about on the forum, I encourage them to look for the things they don’t think are true. Most people are passively reading the forum anyway but actively looking for something the reader doesn’t think is true or is unconvinced by can be a good starting point for a post. It may be that they end up convinced of the point but can still write a post making is clearer and adding the arguments they found.
Having said this, most peoples first reaction is a terrified look. Encouraging someone’s first post to be a criticism is understandably scary.
It may be hard to get both the benefit to the participants and to the orgs. Anyone not intimidated by this might already have enough experience and career capital. To give juniors the experience you might have to make it more comfortable school work where the paper is written but only read by one other person. This makes it harder to capture the career capital.
I’d expect this to be unlikely for someone to do individually and of their own accord. At the very least best to do this in small groups to create social accountability and commitment pressures. While also defusing the intimidation. Alternately part of an existing program like an EA Fellowship. Even better as it’s own program, with all the overhead that comes with that.
Easy steps could be to add a “red team” tag on the forum and point to this post to encourage people to do this.
I have at times given advice to early career EA’s mostly in AI Safety similar to this. When people have trouble coming up with something they might want to write about on the forum, I encourage them to look for the things they don’t think are true. Most people are passively reading the forum anyway but actively looking for something the reader doesn’t think is true or is unconvinced by can be a good starting point for a post. It may be that they end up convinced of the point but can still write a post making is clearer and adding the arguments they found.
Having said this, most peoples first reaction is a terrified look. Encouraging someone’s first post to be a criticism is understandably scary.
It may be hard to get both the benefit to the participants and to the orgs. Anyone not intimidated by this might already have enough experience and career capital. To give juniors the experience you might have to make it more comfortable school work where the paper is written but only read by one other person. This makes it harder to capture the career capital.
I’d expect this to be unlikely for someone to do individually and of their own accord. At the very least best to do this in small groups to create social accountability and commitment pressures. While also defusing the intimidation. Alternately part of an existing program like an EA Fellowship. Even better as it’s own program, with all the overhead that comes with that.