This week I had the pleasure of going to Bluedot's "Context Week", a 4-day gathering of students, software engineers, and strategists who are all transitioning into AI safety. I learned a lot. And one thing that surprised me was how much everyone talked about writing.
LessWrong was a word mentioned in probably every topic of conversation. A lot of "I saw this on LessWrong" or "maybe I should write about this on LessWrong". At the very beginning of the week one of the facilitators asked me "you've heard of LessWrong right?" and breathed a sigh of relief when I responded positively (rather loudly might I add!)
Writing seems to be more than just communicating final thoughts or research results, but rather a way of realizing those thoughts in the first place.
This is new to me I guess. As someone very deep in the software engineering world, there's almost an upturning of noses about writers. Writers are the people who talk, not the people who do. I love to read of course, but it seems as though the content I read is actualized and fleshed-out before the writer starts to put it on paper.
But maybe this isn't true. On day 2 of Context Week we were tasked to write down our ideal future in a world of AI. I'd obviously thought about this before, but writing it down brought up a whole bunch of questions I'd never considered. My writing was more of a ramble than a coherent vision. Apologies to any of the organizers to had to read that...
Maybe the point of writing isn’t to arrive with a fully formed contribution, but rather to become the kind of person who eventually has something useful to contribute. Well, now I'm writing it, this is rather obvious.
So I'm committing to writing more. What that commitment is, I don't really know. I'll figure it out as I go.
This week I had the pleasure of going to Bluedot's "Context Week", a 4-day gathering of students, software engineers, and strategists who are all transitioning into AI safety. I learned a lot. And one thing that surprised me was how much everyone talked about writing.
LessWrong was a word mentioned in probably every topic of conversation. A lot of "I saw this on LessWrong" or "maybe I should write about this on LessWrong". At the very beginning of the week one of the facilitators asked me "you've heard of LessWrong right?" and breathed a sigh of relief when I responded positively (rather loudly might I add!)
Writing seems to be more than just communicating final thoughts or research results, but rather a way of realizing those thoughts in the first place.
This is new to me I guess. As someone very deep in the software engineering world, there's almost an upturning of noses about writers. Writers are the people who talk, not the people who do. I love to read of course, but it seems as though the content I read is actualized and fleshed-out before the writer starts to put it on paper.
But maybe this isn't true. On day 2 of Context Week we were tasked to write down our ideal future in a world of AI. I'd obviously thought about this before, but writing it down brought up a whole bunch of questions I'd never considered. My writing was more of a ramble than a coherent vision. Apologies to any of the organizers to had to read that...
Maybe the point of writing isn’t to arrive with a fully formed contribution, but rather to become the kind of person who eventually has something useful to contribute. Well, now I'm writing it, this is rather obvious.
So I'm committing to writing more. What that commitment is, I don't really know. I'll figure it out as I go.
This post is the first.