A reading list for generalists

Dylan Bowman

I, along with many others in AI safety, believe there is a shortage of generalists in the community and that there exist many projects and efforts that by default will not happen unless they are owned by a strong generalist^[1]^[2]^[3]. As someone who is a reasonably good generalist, I decided to assemble a reading list of the essays and blog posts that have personally helped me the most. I would love others to comment with pieces they think should be on this list.

The crux of this reading list is the idea that if you’re working hard as a generalist on a project you care a lot about, then by rigorously applying the lessons from these documents you will improve more quickly than you otherwise would.

By the numbers:

I’ve attached 18 documents to start this reading list.
The authors cited more than once are Paul Graham (5), Ben Kuhn (4), Ethan Perez (2), and Greg Brockman (2). Sam Altman and Eliezer Yudkowsky also have their fingerprints over a lot of the content.
The items are 15 blog posts, 1 blog comment, 1 interview transcript in blog post form, and 1 book.

Dispositional

What characteristics should you try to adopt?

Paul Graham: "What We Look for in Founders" (link), "Relentlessly Resourceful" (link)
Eliezer Yudkowsky: "Shut Up and Do the Impossible!" (link)
Ben Kuhn: "Be impatient" (link)
Cate Hall: "How to be more agentic" (link)

Strategy

How do you make good decisions with the information you have, and how can you get the additional information you need?

Anna Salamon: "Humans are not automatically strategic" (link)
- If I were to recommend one single item from this list it would be this one because 1) it’s good to understand the ways in which otherwise-intelligent people are unstrategic, and 2) it’s good to understand the ways in which you are not automatically strategic. I have gotten a ton of mileage in my short career thus far simply by being more strategic. The defining trait of the most effective coworker I’ve ever had is that he is unrelentingly strategic.
Holden Karnofsky: "Learning By Writing" (link)
Ethan Perez with Mikita Balesni and Henry Sleight: "How I select alignment research projects" (link)
Paul Graham: "Do Things that Don’t Scale" (link)
- In particular, do things that give you maximal information.
Ben Kuhn: "Impact, agency, and taste" (link)
Richard Ngo: comment on "Against Almost Every Theory of Impact of Interpretability" (link)
- The original post is great but domain-specific. Ngo’s response shows the more general principle that winning whack-a-mole doesn’t conclusively discredit forward-chainy approaches.

Project leadership

How do you get projects done when your boots are on the ground?

Ben Kuhn: "How I've run major projects" (link)
Ben Kuhn: "Categories of leadership on technical teams" (link)
Greg Brockman: "#define CTO" (link), "#define CTO OpenAI" (link)
- I think these posts are especially useful in showing the process a person with a spiky skillset can take to find their place in an organization.
Ethan Perez: "Tips for Empirical Alignment Research" (link)
- Some of the advice is domain-specific to AI safety research, but the document as a whole provides great guidance on becoming an excellent IC, in particular an excellent managed IC, across any domain. Some good bits are the ones about making your work legible to others and scoping your project timelines appropriately.

Interpersonal/organizational

How can you understand the structure of an organization and contribute positively?

Kevin Simler & Robin Hanson: The Elephant in the Brain (link)
- The Elephant in the Brain ended up being the best book for organizational psychology by virtue of being the best book for human psychology in general. I think that the first section which goes over the broader theory of signaling is the important part to read. Understanding the values and motives of the people around you can help greatly in navigating complicated settings, but of equal importance is understanding that the core lens also applies to you: you’re a silly monkey trying to signal its genetic fitness via unstated means in order to increase status and sexual marketplace value like the rest of us.
Martin Sustrik: "Accountability Sinks" (link)
Paul Graham: "Keep Your Identity Small" (link)
Paul Graham: "How to Disagree" (link)

Thanks for sharing these! The ones that I've read, I really liked, which sets a good expectation for the ones I haven't read.

From my own bookmarks, I'd like to share these:

I'm tempted to say great list, but I can't claim to have read everything on it. So, instead, I'll say thanks for sharing! I look forward to reading what I have not already.

One thing I'll say is that, as a generalist, you need to be willing to read things that don't seem related to what your current primary interest(s) may be. You cannot be constrained in that way. But, by obvious implication, the trap of the generalist is that they are not constrained. They can get lost and wander without direction. Foragers with no base to bring their found goods back to.

(I do think generalists would benefit from being constrained, and typically focusing on skills or knowledge that potentiates, scales, or elongates time-horizons, for example, is some of the most beneficial.)

I wanted to highlight this, as the most impactful books I've read on dealing with emotions/people/hard problems/anything (often, but not always) weren't directly about that topic.

I like this list as it provides generalised advice within some scoped (though broad) space. It provides variety and disparate connections, which the generalist mind craves, without entirely lacking structure or direction.

Finally, I wasn't aware of this need for generalists. I'll have a read of the links you mentioned in the opening. Hopefully this post draws some of them in. If someone has any advice on where a technically competent generalist should be pointed, feel free to let me know.

Thanks, this is a great list!

The only thing I would love to see changed: If there is LessWrong post for an entry, then you should link to that, because there are sometimes helpful comments (okay, I am not neutral here).

thanks so much for this, made a lil printable newspaper of everything with fable

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qyEd_cC-8EHFBy18MI7trYRT27_zPV-e/view?usp=share_link

in regards to agency, here's another one: https://www.highagency.com/. it's by george mack