TLDR: Instead of scrutinizing minor errors, ask what process generated the text in front of you, and then update accordingly. Focus on headlines and source attributions.

If you work in AI safety, I think you should probably read a bit more news than you do now (though giving advice like this is perilous because surely some of you are news junkies who need to hear the opposite message).^[1]

In particular, I think you should subscribe to Techmeme and skim the headlines in the daily news roundup. Techmeme is a news aggregator that will collate the biggest tech stories of the day in a convenient email, and—crucially—they write their own headlines to tell you what's actually new in the story. They even break out the AI news into its own section most days, so you can skip over the boring updates about Salesforce or whatever.^[2]

In my experience, critical news is slow to diffuse throughout our community. For example, I think it took many days for the Axios report that the US government was planning to gut AISI to reach many people. Similarly, an understanding that pretraining scaling has slowed down took a while to take hold after it was first reported for OpenAI and then the other labs.^[3]

Reading the news will help you stay in touch with reality, for example by noticing the pace of AI product releases and the firehose of cash that venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are aiming at AI every day. It will also help you stay in touch with normies and their cares.

The faster you keep up with the news, the better you can adapt your own plans, intervene in unfolding situations, and steer the still-plastic discourse. And when we all do it, we unlock conversations about topics before they get too stale to be interesting or actionable.

Here's a bad reason not to read the news: you think journalists are unethical (Cade Metz doxxing Scott Alexander, the Guardian's hit piece on Lighthaven, etc). I tend to think these bad articles are the exception, rather than the rule, but even if you thought all journalists were crooks, you can still learn from them, the same way you still listen to [insert person you think is bad but sometimes has useful information].

A slightly better bad reason is that you don't trust the epistemics of journalists. You've experienced Gell-Mann Amnesia, so you think the news is always inaccurate. A few responses:

First, consider whether the articles you rea...

Media Literacy

Media Literacy