Eventually, once you’ve had a bunch of experience, you might notice a feeling of confusion or frustration: why is everyone else missing the point, or doing so badly at this? (Though note that a few top researchers commented on a draft to say that they didn’t have this experience.) For some people that involves investigating a specific topic (for me, the question “what’s the best argument that AGI will be misaligned?“); for others it’s about applying skills like conscientiousness (e.g. “why can’t others just go through all the obvious steps?”) Being excellent seldom feels like you’re excellent, because your own abilities set your baseline for what feels normal.
I relate a lot with this, this feels like one of the clearer markers internally for me of what becoming good at interpretability research felt like—there’s so much low hanging fruit! Why aren’t other people plucking it?
There’s also just some internal sense of “I kind of know what I’m doing, and have ideas for what to do next”, though this is much clearer to me when mentoring and advising other people, where I have strong opinions, than when applying it to myself, where I can sometimes pull it off but find it easily to fall into random spirals of doubt
This is interesting; I’m still looking for my own (I think?) “comparative advantage” in this area. Some mental motions are very easy, while some “trivial” tasks feel harder (or would require me to already be involved full-time, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem).
I relate a lot with this, this feels like one of the clearer markers internally for me of what becoming good at interpretability research felt like—there’s so much low hanging fruit! Why aren’t other people plucking it?
There’s also just some internal sense of “I kind of know what I’m doing, and have ideas for what to do next”, though this is much clearer to me when mentoring and advising other people, where I have strong opinions, than when applying it to myself, where I can sometimes pull it off but find it easily to fall into random spirals of doubt
This is interesting; I’m still looking for my own (I think?) “comparative advantage” in this area. Some mental motions are very easy, while some “trivial” tasks feel harder (or would require me to already be involved full-time, leading to a chicken-and-egg problem).