Self review: I’m very flattered by the nomination!
Reflecting back on this post, a few quick thoughts:
I put a lot of effort into getting better at teaching, especially during my undergrad (publishing notes, mentoring, running lectures, etc). In hindsight, this was an amazing use of time, and has been shockingly useful in a range of areas. It makes me much better at field-building, facilitating fellowships, and writing up thoughts. Recently I’ve been reworking the pedagogy for explaining transformer interpretability work at Anthropic, and I’ve been shocked at how relevant all of this is.
A related idea is that of the Pareto Frontier. Most people are bad at teaching, this leads to eg Research Debt in academia. I’m a pretty great teacher, but not exactly world-class. But I’m a great mathematician, and trying to become a great AI Safety researcher, and there are very, very few people who are great at both—this gives me a lot of room to explore my comparative advantage by eg writing field-building docs
I wish I’d better emphasised just how useful a skill this is
A lot centres on teaching in specific contexts. This is reasonable, since it’s what I know, but I wish I’d better clarified what would and would not generalise—I’m afraid people who see this post will bounce off as it’s not relevant to them
I wish I’d given more caveats about teaching gone wrong. My experiences teaching younger people who view me as high-status is that it’s very easy to appear over-confident. I try to caveat what I say, but I tend to present as fairly confident, and people often take me way too seriously. While the techniques I present here are v effective at teaching, they have the flipside of better inserting my knowledge into the student’s system 1 and bypassing some of their mental filters, which can be bad and eg lead to groupthink and lowered agency.
Some, such as Socratic method, are better on this front by at least giving me chances to notice if what I’m teaching is wrong
Sometimes it may be good to deliberately be a bad teacher, to teach the students agency and give them room to grow. on their own and to form their own ideas. It’s worth checking for this—I just reflexively use good teaching technique nowadays and it’s hard to suppress
Some ideas such as a knowledge graph are vague intuitions that it would have been good to operationalise more
With all that said, I’d only been blogging for 3 weeks when I wrote this post, and I wrote it in an afternoon, so I’m really happy with this as an artefact to come out of that! I am so, so happy I decided to do a month of daily blogging
Self review: I’m very flattered by the nomination!
Reflecting back on this post, a few quick thoughts:
I put a lot of effort into getting better at teaching, especially during my undergrad (publishing notes, mentoring, running lectures, etc). In hindsight, this was an amazing use of time, and has been shockingly useful in a range of areas. It makes me much better at field-building, facilitating fellowships, and writing up thoughts. Recently I’ve been reworking the pedagogy for explaining transformer interpretability work at Anthropic, and I’ve been shocked at how relevant all of this is.
A related idea is that of the Pareto Frontier. Most people are bad at teaching, this leads to eg Research Debt in academia. I’m a pretty great teacher, but not exactly world-class. But I’m a great mathematician, and trying to become a great AI Safety researcher, and there are very, very few people who are great at both—this gives me a lot of room to explore my comparative advantage by eg writing field-building docs
I wish I’d better emphasised just how useful a skill this is
A lot centres on teaching in specific contexts. This is reasonable, since it’s what I know, but I wish I’d better clarified what would and would not generalise—I’m afraid people who see this post will bounce off as it’s not relevant to them
I wish I’d given more caveats about teaching gone wrong. My experiences teaching younger people who view me as high-status is that it’s very easy to appear over-confident. I try to caveat what I say, but I tend to present as fairly confident, and people often take me way too seriously. While the techniques I present here are v effective at teaching, they have the flipside of better inserting my knowledge into the student’s system 1 and bypassing some of their mental filters, which can be bad and eg lead to groupthink and lowered agency.
Some, such as Socratic method, are better on this front by at least giving me chances to notice if what I’m teaching is wrong
Sometimes it may be good to deliberately be a bad teacher, to teach the students agency and give them room to grow. on their own and to form their own ideas. It’s worth checking for this—I just reflexively use good teaching technique nowadays and it’s hard to suppress
Some ideas such as a knowledge graph are vague intuitions that it would have been good to operationalise more
With all that said, I’d only been blogging for 3 weeks when I wrote this post, and I wrote it in an afternoon, so I’m really happy with this as an artefact to come out of that! I am so, so happy I decided to do a month of daily blogging