After seeing this post and it's comments, I realized there may be an influx of new, roughly college-aged people joining LessWrong and the broader AI x-risk reduction community.
As a college student myself, this is a relief!
I have been regularly reading and digesting posts on here for nearly a year now, and the journey has been a bit lonely – navigating these ideas can feel detached from reality when the people around you aren’t really discussing them yet. I think it would be very helpful to have like-minded peers to talk to.
Note that this applies to anyone who is relatively new to the community, not just college students. The reason I specified that in my title is because I'm also interested in college community-building, which I think could be high leverage for a few reasons:
Very few have been exposed to the quality of thinking found on LessWrong. I discovered this forum a few years back through Bentham's Bulldog and started taking x-risk seriously only when I realized that AI was indeed becoming as transformative as many over here predicted. I know many intelligent students who could certainly contribute somewhere but have not yet engaged with perspective-shifting content, such as posts from years before the "ChatGPT moment" that now seem remarkably prescient, which they are unlikely to get from a clip on YouTube.
AI risk is likely to become a bigger, multifaceted public issue. Given the impending job displacement that seems likelier by the day, I expect that many students will soon find themselves confused and searching for a coherent source of information. Whether this translates into effective action or disorder may be a result of the community building efforts we start now. Also, as AI risk increasingly becomes a governance issue, it seems important to engage students beyond those already in CS/ML.
Will this meaningfully influence the world? I don't know, but it seems worth trying. And it may be a place to pick up the ball, because it looks like an awful number of college students are oblivious to the drastic changes that are coming.
If any of this resonates with you, I'd love to get in touch. PM me on here or message me on Discord @ne0_8 – I'm open to whatever mode of communication works best.
After seeing this post and it's comments, I realized there may be an influx of new, roughly college-aged people joining LessWrong and the broader AI x-risk reduction community.
As a college student myself, this is a relief!
I have been regularly reading and digesting posts on here for nearly a year now, and the journey has been a bit lonely – navigating these ideas can feel detached from reality when the people around you aren’t really discussing them yet. I think it would be very helpful to have like-minded peers to talk to.
Note that this applies to anyone who is relatively new to the community, not just college students. The reason I specified that in my title is because I'm also interested in college community-building, which I think could be high leverage for a few reasons:
Will this meaningfully influence the world? I don't know, but it seems worth trying. And it may be a place to pick up the ball, because it looks like an awful number of college students are oblivious to the drastic changes that are coming.
If any of this resonates with you, I'd love to get in touch. PM me on here or message me on Discord @ne0_8 – I'm open to whatever mode of communication works best.