A lot is happening. How do you keep on top of things?
For example:
What’s your system for finding out about important developments?
What information sources do you find most useful?
What are some problems with your current system?
I’ll share my answers in a comment below.
Motivation: I’ve noticed many cases where AI safety professionals—including leaders in the field—find out about important facts/papers/people/orgs months or years later than they should have. I’m wondering if there are things I could do to help.
If you’d like to talk about this, send me an email or suggest a time to call.
1. My current system
I check a couple of sources most days, at random times during the afternoon or evening. I usually do this on my phone, during breaks or when I’m otherwise AFK. My phone and laptop are configured to block most of these sources during the morning (LeechBlock and AppBlock).
When I find something I want to engage with at length, I usually put it into my “Reading inbox” note in Obsidian, or into my weekly todo list if it’s above the bar.
I check my reading inbox on evenings and weekends, and also during “open” blocks that I sometimes schedule as part of my work week.
I read about 1⁄5 of the items that get into my reading inbox, either on my laptop or iPad. I read and annotate using PDF Expert, take notes in Obsidian, and use Mochi for flashcards. My reading inbox—and all my articles, highlights and notes—are synced between my laptop and my iPad.
2. Most useful sources
(~Daily)
AI News (usually just to the end of the “Twitter recap” section).
Private Slack and WhatsApp groups.
Twitter (usually just the home screen, sometimes my lists).
Marginal Revolution.
LessWrong and EA Forum (via the 30+ karma podcast feeds; I rarely check the homepages)
(~Weekly)
Newsletters: Zvi, CAIS.
Podcasts: The Cognitive Revolution, AXRP, Machine Learning Street Talk, Dwarkesh.
3. Problems
I’ve not given the top of the funnel—the checking sources bit—much thought. In particular, I’ve never sat down for an afternoon to ask questions like “why, exactly, do I try to follow AI news?”, “what are the main ways this is valuable (and disvaluable)?” and “how could I make it easy to do this better?”. There’s probably a bunch of low-hanging fruit here.
Twitter is… twitter. I currently check the “For you” home screen every day (via web browser, not the app). At least once a week I’m very glad that I checked Twitter—because I found something useful, that I plausibly wouldn’t have found otherwise. But—I wish I had an easy way to see just the best AI stuff. In the past I tried to figure something out with Twitter lists and Tweetdeck (now “X Pro”), but I’ve not found something that sticks. So I spend most of my time with the “For you” screen, training the algorithm with “not interested” reports, an aggressive follow/unfollow/block policy, and liberal use of the “mute words” function. I’m sure I can do better...
My newsletter inbox is a mess. I filter newsletters into a separate folder, so that they don’t distract me when I process my regular email. But I’m subscribed to way too many newsletters, many of which aren’t focussed on AI, so when I do open the “Newsletters” folder, it’s overwhelming. I don’t reliably read the sources which I flagged above, even though I consider them fairly essential reading (and would prefer to read them to many of the things I do, in fact, read).
I addictively over-consume podcasts, at the cost of “shower time” (diffuse/daydream mode) or higher-quality rest.
I don’t make the most of LLMs. I have various ideas for how LLMs could improve my information discovery and engagement, but on my current setup—especially on mobile—the affordances for using LLMs are poor.
I miss things that I’d really like to know about. I very rarely miss a “big story”, but I’d guess I miss several things that I’d really like to know about each week, given my particular interests.
I find out about many things I don’t need to know about.
I could go on...
I made a change to my Twitter setup recently.
Initially, I discovered the “AI Twitter Recap” section of the AI News newsletter (example). It is good, but it doesn’t actually include the tweet texts, and it isn’t quite enough to make me feel fine about skipping my Twitter home screen.
So—I made an app that extracts all the tweet URLs that are mentioned in all of my favourite newsletters, and lists them in a feed. Then I blocked x.com/home (but not other x.com URLs, so I can still read and engage with particular threads) on weekdays.
This is just repackaging the curation work that is done by my favourite newsletters. But I’m enjoying having a single place to check, that feels more like the Twitter feed I want to have. It’s helped me feel fine about blocking the normal Twitter home screen for larger fraction of the week.
This setup has various obvious issues—in particular, it’s still not sufficiently tailored to my interests. I could improve things by having an LLM classify search results from the Twitter API, but sadly the $100 / month plan only lets you read ~300 tweets / day. And then the next tier is $5000 / month...