On Mentorship of Ideas

For the last week or so I have taken to spending about ~10 minutes per day giving direct feedback (comments, suggestions, edits) to early-career or pre-career folks interested in jumping into the AI Safety community. I’ve been doing this for a couple of reasons; one is that I’m structurally incapable of not doing it [1] . The other one is that the community is currently doing a very poor job of supporting these people, and I don’t mean monetarily (though that, too). I mean about once a day, someone posts on the BlueDot Slack or the Apart Research Discord and they have some good idea, or some brilliant idea, or some terrible idea, or just some idea, any idea, and the point is that they have gotten to the point where they are sharing the idea. This is the hard part, for them (writers). Then comes the easy part, for us (readers): where you have to read the idea and decide in about 10 seconds if it’s worth responding to or not; typically the answer is not , and not by any fault of the people posting the ideas. It’s just that there’s a lot of them. But fortunately, as a corollary, there are also a lot of people to read them. So we don’t all have to respond to every idea. In fact, I don’t respond to most of them, for a lot of reasons: some of them would require an essay-length response (in which case they should have maybe written an essay-length question; this is called a paper ). Some of require only an emoji-sized response (👍, yes, I saw this, I hear you, you exist). Some of th…