My understanding is that Level 1 is supposed to happen in parallel with the others, but this might be clearer by separating it outside the numbered system entirely, like Level 0 or Level −1 or something.
As for why it’s included as the first step, I think the reasoning is that if someone knows nothing about AI safety, their first question is going to be “Should I actually care about this problem”, and to answer that question they do need to do a little bit of AI safety specific reading.
I agree this could be made clearer—one of the first bits of advice I got when I started asking around about this stuff was “Technical ML ability is harder and takes longer to learn than AI safety knowledge does, so spend most of your time on this as opposed to AI safety” and I remember this being a very unintuitive insight.
My understanding is that Level 1 is supposed to happen in parallel with the others, but this might be clearer by separating it outside the numbered system entirely, like Level 0 or Level −1 or something.
As for why it’s included as the first step, I think the reasoning is that if someone knows nothing about AI safety, their first question is going to be “Should I actually care about this problem”, and to answer that question they do need to do a little bit of AI safety specific reading.
I agree this could be made clearer—one of the first bits of advice I got when I started asking around about this stuff was “Technical ML ability is harder and takes longer to learn than AI safety knowledge does, so spend most of your time on this as opposed to AI safety” and I remember this being a very unintuitive insight.