In each case, I was sitting around doing some unrelated thing, and then noticed “hey, an observation (covid, ukraine, ftx), seems maybe decision relevant. Let’s think about it and see if changes the space of decisions I might want to make”
In of these cases, if I hadn’t oriented, I would have been doing stuff completely unrelated to covid/ukraine/ai-regulation” (which in my case usually looked like “building LW features and/or Lightcone offices, and having some nice hobbies).
The thing that’s maybe a bit more confusing is the ChatGPT/Open-Letters thing, where I had been working on AI risk mitigation, but I’d been focused on one particular strategic frame (i.e. building infrastructure for AI researchers), because I’d previously judged “help the world-at-large orient to x-risk” wasn’t very tractable. But I’d cached the strategic-thought of “it’s too intractable to help the world orient to AI risk” and not re-examined it, and it took me ~a month or two after chatGPT came out to realize that it was changing that landscape and that I should open up a whole set of possible decisions I’d previously pruned off.
In each case, I was sitting around doing some unrelated thing, and then noticed “hey, an observation (covid, ukraine, ftx), seems maybe decision relevant. Let’s think about it and see if changes the space of decisions I might want to make”
In of these cases, if I hadn’t oriented, I would have been doing stuff completely unrelated to covid/ukraine/ai-regulation” (which in my case usually looked like “building LW features and/or Lightcone offices, and having some nice hobbies).
The thing that’s maybe a bit more confusing is the ChatGPT/Open-Letters thing, where I had been working on AI risk mitigation, but I’d been focused on one particular strategic frame (i.e. building infrastructure for AI researchers), because I’d previously judged “help the world-at-large orient to x-risk” wasn’t very tractable. But I’d cached the strategic-thought of “it’s too intractable to help the world orient to AI risk” and not re-examined it, and it took me ~a month or two after chatGPT came out to realize that it was changing that landscape and that I should open up a whole set of possible decisions I’d previously pruned off.