I was just watching this Andrew Huberman video titled "Train to Gain Energy & Avoid Brain Fog". The interviewee was talking about track athletes and stuff their coaches would have them do.

It made me think back to Anders Ericsson's book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. The book is popular for discussing the importance of deliberate practice, but another big takeaway from the book is the importance of receiving coaching. I think that takeaway gets overlooked. Top performers in fields like chess, music and athletics almost universally receive coaching.

And at the highest levels the performers will have a team of coaches. LeBron James is famous for spending roughly $1.5 million a year on his body.

And he’s like, “Well, he’s replicated the gym that whatever team — whether it was Miami or Cleveland — he’s replicated all the equipment they have in the team’s gym in his house. He has two trainers. Everywhere he goes, he has a trainer with him.” I’m paraphrasing what he told me, so I might not be getting all these facts right. He’s got chefs. He has all the science of how to sleep. All these different things. Masseuses. Everything he does in his life is constructed to have him play basketball and to stay on the court and to be as healthy as possible and to absorb punishment when he goes into the basket and he gets crushed by people.

This makes me think about AI safety. I feel like the top alignment researchers -- and ideally a majority of competent alignment researchers -- should have such coaching and resources available to them.

I'm not exactly sure what form this would take. Academic/technical coaches? Writing coach? Performance psychologists? A sleep specialist? Nutritionist? Meditation coach?

All of this costs money of course. I'm not arguing that this is the most efficient place to allocate our limited resources. I don't have enough of an understanding of what the other options are to make such an argument.

But I will say that providing such resources to alignment researchers seems like it should pretty meaningfully improve their productivity. And if so, we are in fact funding constrained. I recall (earlier?) conversations about funding not being a constraint, rather the real constraint is that there aren't good places to spend such money.

Also relevant is that this is perhaps an easier sell to prospective donors then something more wacky. Like, it seems like a safe bet to have a solid impact, and there's a precedent for providing expert performers with such coaching, so maybe that sort of thing is appealing to prospective donors.

Finally, I recall hearing at some point that in a field like physics, the very top researchers -- people like Einstein -- have a very disproportionate impact. If so, I'd think that it's at least pretty plausible that something similar is true in the field of AI alignment. And if it is, then it'd probably make sense to spend time 1) figuring out who the Einsteins are and then 2) investing in them and doing what we can to maximize their impact.