Writing down something I’ve found myself repeating in different conversations:

If you're looking for ways to help with the whole “the world looks pretty doomed” business, here's my advice: look around for places where we're all being total idiots.

Look for places where everyone's fretting about a problem that some part of you thinks it could obviously just solve.

Look around for places where something seems incompetently run, or hopelessly inept, and where some part of you thinks you can do better.

Then do it better.

For a concrete example, consider Devansh. Devansh came to me last year and said something to the effect of, “Hey, wait, it sounds like you think Eliezer does a sort of alignment-idea-generation that nobody else does, and he's limited here by his unusually low stamina, but I can think of a bunch of medical tests that you haven't run, are you an idiot or something?" And I was like, "Yes, definitely, please run them, do you need money".

I'm not particularly hopeful there, but hell, it’s worth a shot! And, importantly, this is the sort of attitude that can lead people to actually trying things at all, rather than assuming that we live in a more adequate world where all the (seemingly) dumb obvious ideas have already been tried.

Or, this is basically my model of how Paul Christiano manages to have a research agenda that seems at least internally coherent to me. From my perspective, he's like, "I dunno, man, I'm not sure I can solve this, but I also think it's not clear I can't, and there's a bunch of obvious stuff to try, that nobody else is even really looking at, so I'm trying it". That's the sort of orientation to the world that I think can be productive.

Or the shard theory folks. I think their idea is basically unworkable, but I appreciate the mindset they are applying to the alignment problem: something like, "Wait, aren't y'all being idiots, it seems to me like I can just do X and then the thing will be aligned".

I don't think we'll be saved by the shard theory folk; not everyone audaciously trying to save the world will succeed. But if someone does save us, I think there’s a good chance that they’ll go through similar “What the hell, are you all idiots?” phases, where they autonomously pursue a path that strikes them as obviously egregiously neglected, to see if it bears fruit. (Regardless of what I think.)

Contrast ...

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