time to crash this party unfortunate problems: this list of topics is legitimately too big. nobody can try to cover all of it in a reasonable amount of time.
possible solutions: the general patterns of ‘skip (lazy evaluate) prerequisites and audit classes’ is good, but the best thing you can do if you want to keep up with ai research is to directly court mentors who are well-established in this field. and to trust those mentors to give you the personal guidance you individually need the most in order to make the most rapid progress you can.
this pattern is extremely valuable and more-or-less obsoletes individual recommendations in terms of literature or conceptual categories. i’m a lakoffian, and will of course tell people to read lakoff, & nietzsche, & pubmed trawls on specific topics in neurochemistry. but that’s because “ai” or “alignment” are more like ‘intelligence studies’ than any clearly divided topic area, and the central problems can be reached from linguistics, philosophy, biology, or even the computational challenges in designing videogame cheats and bots in arms races against studio developer captchas and primitive turing tests.
closing thoughts: this post is uncannily similar to a recommendation for readers to roll up their own doctoral program, more or less. and that’s not a bad thing! but it’s good to keep in mind that tackling a research problem as broad, significant, and challenging as this is best done with peers, advisors, & sources of external feedback to help the questant pointed towards useful self-development instead of futile toil.
time to crash this party
unfortunate problems:
this list of topics is legitimately too big.
nobody can try to cover all of it in a reasonable amount of time.
possible solutions:
the general patterns of ‘skip (lazy evaluate) prerequisites and audit classes’ is good, but the best thing you can do if you want to keep up with ai research is to directly court mentors who are well-established in this field.
and to trust those mentors to give you the personal guidance you individually need the most in order to make the most rapid progress you can.
this pattern is extremely valuable and more-or-less obsoletes individual recommendations in terms of literature or conceptual categories. i’m a lakoffian, and will of course tell people to read lakoff, & nietzsche, & pubmed trawls on specific topics in neurochemistry. but that’s because “ai” or “alignment” are more like ‘intelligence studies’ than any clearly divided topic area, and the central problems can be reached from linguistics, philosophy, biology, or even the computational challenges in designing videogame cheats and bots in arms races against studio developer captchas and primitive turing tests.
closing thoughts:
this post is uncannily similar to a recommendation for readers to roll up their own doctoral program, more or less.
and that’s not a bad thing!
but it’s good to keep in mind that tackling a research problem as broad, significant, and challenging as this is best done with peers, advisors, & sources of external feedback to help the questant pointed towards useful self-development instead of futile toil.