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 d

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