What can you do to help? In order of priority, I think the top choices for non-specialists are:
Get more money funneled into MIRI and FHI.
Memetically propagate informed worry about AI risk. Find ways to make the idea stick.
Improve your own and others’ domain-general rationality.
Try to acquire math knowledge and skills that might be in demand by FAI researchers over the next few decades.
If this sequence mix does its job, 2 is simple enough — tell people to begin by sharing the list. (Or other targeted articles and lists, depending on target audience.)
3 is a relatively easy sell, and the primary way I expect to contribute.
4 is quite difficult and risky at this stage.
1 is hard to optimize at the meta level because good signaling is hard. Our default method for beginning to combat high-level biases — write a Sequence focused on this specific issue to bring it to people’s attentions — is unusually tricky to pull off here. Something off-site and independent — a petition, signed by lots of smart people, telling everyone that AI risk is important? an impassioned personal letter by a third party, briefly and shibbolethlessly laying out the Effective Altruism case for MIRI? — might be more effective.
What can you do to help? In order of priority, I think the top choices for non-specialists are:
Get more money funneled into MIRI and FHI.
Memetically propagate informed worry about AI risk. Find ways to make the idea stick.
Improve your own and others’ domain-general rationality.
Try to acquire math knowledge and skills that might be in demand by FAI researchers over the next few decades.
If this sequence mix does its job, 2 is simple enough — tell people to begin by sharing the list. (Or other targeted articles and lists, depending on target audience.)
3 is a relatively easy sell, and the primary way I expect to contribute.
4 is quite difficult and risky at this stage.
1 is hard to optimize at the meta level because good signaling is hard. Our default method for beginning to combat high-level biases — write a Sequence focused on this specific issue to bring it to people’s attentions — is unusually tricky to pull off here. Something off-site and independent — a petition, signed by lots of smart people, telling everyone that AI risk is important? an impassioned personal letter by a third party, briefly and shibbolethlessly laying out the Effective Altruism case for MIRI? — might be more effective.