Consider reading How to pursue a career in technical AI alignment. It covers more topics and has more details, and I endorse most if not all of the advice. To quote Andrew Critch: I get a lot of emails from folks with strong math backgrounds (mostly, PhD students in math at top schools) who areRead more about FAQ: Advice for AI alignment researchers[…]

I was reading a contract pretty closely recently, and for some reason this time I actually paid attention to the mandatory arbitration clause. It actually made me angry, even though I don’t get angry much. I think this was the second time in 5+ years (the other time was when I learned about the billionsRead more about Mandatory Arbitration[…]

(You need to know programming to understand this post. If you know what linked lists are, that’s enough to get the general point, but more knowledge would be more helpful.) Within the Programming Languages community, there’s a subcommunity that thinks a lot about education, especially for introductory courses. Two main approaches are SICP approach andRead more about Teaching from Simple Abstractions[…]

Cross-posted to the EA Forum. Thanks to Ajeya Cotra and Jeff Kaufman for feedback on a draft of this post. Any remaining errors are my own. Last year, Peter Hurford wrote a post titled ‘EA risks falling into a “meta trap”. But we can avoid it.’ Ben Todd wrote a followup that clarified a fewRead more about Thoughts on the “Meta Trap”[…]

About a year and a half ago, I decided to stop consuming animal products, because of the intense suffering on factory farms. (Why focus on this problem among myriads of others? Jacy from Animal Charity Evaluators explains.) For the most part, I actually found being vegan easier than I thought it would be, though it still wasn’tRead more about Almost Vegan[…]