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Context: I created this to share before the start of courses I facilitate to provide a bunch of additional context and frames. I emphasise to students that these posts are to be considered as bonus content—not core curriculum content—and that as such they are really just there for students who want to go deeper, before or after the course. I also provide a lot of links; this is to make it easy for students to follow up anything that catches their interest.
Some general thoughts on advice
I suspect that most advice (including most of the advice I’ve given in the past) is bad. People have very different goals, personalities, skills and opportunities and unless you know someone them really well, it’s hard to cater advice to their circumstances. What one person needs to hear, may be the absolute worst thing for another.
In traditional societies with a slow rate of change, elders are revered. What you’re going through, they’ve lived through and so learning from their experience can save you vast amounts of pain. However, modern Western societies are marked by a much more rapid rate of change and so the experience of elder’s isn’t valued to the same degree. For better or worse, people tend to be much more skeptical that what worked then will still work now. I view the rapid pace of AI progress as greatly exacerbating these kinds of epistemic challenges. I think it’s quite sensible to question how much anyone actually knows about the world we’re going into (I’m referring to both the world in general and AI safety/governance which are constantly shifting fields). Uncertainty is scary, but I see it as a fact of life, one we ultimately need to accept (counterpoint: how often does this end up becoming a form of defeatism?).
Scott Alexander takes this skepticism of advice even further. Rather than just questioning how much we can trust advice, he provocatively suggests that you may want to reverse any advise you hear. People tend choose which groups to join based on whethe