The Bar for Contributing to AI Safety is Lower than You Think

[Chris_Leong]

Many people still have a model of AI safety where they assume that the bar for contributing must be really high.

I’m here to tell you that this isn’t the case.

The Value of Good Community Members

Even without conducting groundbreaking research, “good community members” play a crucial role in expanding and enriching the AI Safety space. But what constitutes a good community member?

While possessing a high degree of intelligence is undeniably beneficial, other personal attributes can compensate for raw intelligence to a certain extent. These include:

• Intellectual humility

• The ability to deeply understand other perspectives

• Dedication to continuous learning more about the field

There is undoubtedly some level of baseline intelligence below which it’ll be hard for you to be a net contributor, but that’s not as much of an issue as you might think as Less Wrong contributors tend to be quite smart anyway. The proliferation of accessible resources on AI and AI Safety has substantially lowered the barrier to entry for being able to usefully contribute to discussions and if you have a genuine interest, learning about the field won’t really feel like work.

Soft Skills

Other attributes can significantly increase your value as a community member.

• Good vibes is a major value add. No one wants to be around a jerk.

• Being able to read the room. Knowing when to speak and when to listen. Try not to be the guy who has absolutely no clue, but takes up a disproportionate amount of air time.

• When you’re listening to people, truly listening. People love spending time around people who do this

• If you’re good at providing feedback, you’ll find high demand as it’s hard to see all angles of a problem by yourself. The rapid growth of the field has created a mentorship bottleneck, making peer support increasingly vital as an alternative.

• Providing emotional support. AI Safety can be quite confronting at times, but we can help each other work through this.

Conclusion

The field of AI Safety benefits not only from groundbreaking research but also from a vibrant, supportive community of engaged individuals. By participating actively, providing feedback, and maintaining an open and curious mindset, you may contribute more significantly than you initially believed possible. There are many attributes that can make you a valuable community member other than raw intelligence and these attributes can be developed if you’re willing to work on it.

And who knows? Maybe even if you don’t feel like you have that much to offer, but you consistently read things, hang around the community read things and provide feedback on other people’s ideas, you might eventually be drawn towards pursuing an idea of your own.

(I don’t wish to imply that I have all of these attributes myself, so I expect this list to be a useful guide for how I could be a better community member myself)

[Judd Rosenblatt]

Interesting relevant finding from the alignment researcher + EA survey we ran:

We also find in both datasets—but most dramatically in the EA community sample, plotted below—that respondents vastly overestimate (≈2.5x) how much high intelligence is actually valued, and underestimate other cognitive features like having strong work ethics, abilities to collaborate, and people skills. One potentially clear interpretation of this finding is that EAs/​alignment researchers actually believe that high intelligence is necessary but not sufficient for being impactful—but perceive other EAs/​alignment researchers as thinking high intelligence is basically sufficient. The community aligning on these questions seems of very high practical importance for hiring/​grantmaking criteria and decision-making.