The MATS Models post contains a bunch of my models after updating on how working with Aysajan went. About half the exercises in that post are things I tested with Aysajan (prototypical examples, framing, existing evidence, all the writing stuff), and a bunch of them are made to address specific skill-bottlenecks which I noticed by working with Aysajan (especially the sort of stuff in What Are You Tracking In Your Head?).
Updates besides those:
We explicitly did not focus on alignment/AI; the idea was to get a practice loop going on other hard problems. I don’t think that loop ever really properly got going.
One contributing mistake: I gave Aysajan lots of freedom in what problems to focus on; in hindsight I think I should have assigned problems, especially early on.
I now think we did some things in the wrong order.
We covered a bunch of technical content early on (especially via framing exercises); I now think practice with prototypical examples should have come before that. I didn’t realize until pretty late that the prototypical examples skill was super-important and missing, and I think having that skill dramatically increases the returns to technical study in general.
We spent a lot of time on problem choice early on (like e.g. Hamming questions). As mentioned above, I now think I should have assigned problems early on and worked on problem choice later.
Having worked with both Aysajan and the MATS teams, I’ve updated toward both full-time attention and (small) teams mattering a lot. ~3 people working together on the same problems basically full-time in the same room results in way more focus than other setups, given the same level of attention from me.
The MATS Models post contains a bunch of my models after updating on how working with Aysajan went. About half the exercises in that post are things I tested with Aysajan (prototypical examples, framing, existing evidence, all the writing stuff), and a bunch of them are made to address specific skill-bottlenecks which I noticed by working with Aysajan (especially the sort of stuff in What Are You Tracking In Your Head?).
Updates besides those:
We explicitly did not focus on alignment/AI; the idea was to get a practice loop going on other hard problems. I don’t think that loop ever really properly got going.
One contributing mistake: I gave Aysajan lots of freedom in what problems to focus on; in hindsight I think I should have assigned problems, especially early on.
I now think we did some things in the wrong order.
We covered a bunch of technical content early on (especially via framing exercises); I now think practice with prototypical examples should have come before that. I didn’t realize until pretty late that the prototypical examples skill was super-important and missing, and I think having that skill dramatically increases the returns to technical study in general.
We spent a lot of time on problem choice early on (like e.g. Hamming questions). As mentioned above, I now think I should have assigned problems early on and worked on problem choice later.
Having worked with both Aysajan and the MATS teams, I’ve updated toward both full-time attention and (small) teams mattering a lot. ~3 people working together on the same problems basically full-time in the same room results in way more focus than other setups, given the same level of attention from me.