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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My thoughts on direct work (and joining LessWrong), published by RobertM on August 16, 2022 on LessWrong. Epistemic status: mostly a description of my personal timeline, and some of my models (without detailed justification). If you just want the second, skip the Timeline section. My name is Robert. By trade, I'm a software engineer. For my entire life, I've lived in Los Angeles. Timeline I've been reading LessWrong (and some of the associated blog-o-sphere) since I was in college, having found it through HPMOR in ~2011. When I read Eliezer's writing on AI risk, it more or less instantly clicked into place for me as obviously true (though my understanding at the time was even more lacking than it is now, in terms of having a good gears-level model). This was before the DL revolution had penetrated my bubble. My timelines, as much as I had any, were not that short - maybe 50-100 years, though I don't think I wrote it down, and won't swear my recollection is accurate. Nonetheless, I was motivated enough to seek an internship with MIRI after I graduated, near the end of 2013 (though I think the larger part of my motivation was to have something on my resume). That should not update you upwards on my knowledge or competence; I accomplished very little besides some reworking of the program to mail paperback copies of HPMOR to e.g. math olympiad winners and hedge fund employees. Between September and November, I read the transcripts of discussions Eliezer had with Richard, Paul, etc. I updated in the direction of shorter timelines. This update did not propagate into my actions. In February I posted a question about whether there were any organizations tackling AI alignment, which were also hiring remotely. Up until this point, I had been working as a software engineer for a tech company (not in the AI/ML space), donating a small percentage of my income to MIRI, lacking better ideas for mitigating x-risk. I did receive a few answers, and some of the listed organizations were new to me. For reasons I'll discuss shortly, I did not apply to any of them. On April 1st, Eliezer posted Death with Dignity. My system 1 caught up to my system 2 on what shorter timelines meant. That weekend, I talked to my family about leaving LA. On April 3rd I pinged Ruby to see if he'd be open to a chat about Lightcone's interview process. Over the next month I had a couple more calls with Ruby, found an opportunity to drop by the Lightcone offices to talk to habryka (since I was traveling to the Bay anyways), and went through a couple tech screens. In May I flew back to up Berkeley to go through the final stage of the interview - an on-site work trial. The trial must've gone ok; I started at Lightcone on July 5th. My primary focus will be LessWrong and the associated infrastructure. Why LessWrong? A problem I've been thinking about lately is: imagine you want to reduce AI risk, but you aren't a researcher and are limited in how well you can evaluate the usefulness of the research direction and output of AI alignment organizations. With some exceptions, those organizations describe neither what they consider to be the core problems of AI alignment, nor their theory of change. How, then, do you figure out where your efforts are best directed? You can defer to another's judgement, if you know someone with an opinion on the question and have evidence of their ability to reason about difficult questions in domains you're more familiar with. Unfortunately, this heuristic encourages information cascades, but purely on a personal level it might be better than throwing darts. Absent that, or another good way to discriminate between options, the temptation is to kick the problem up a level and do "meta" work. This has some problems: The indirection this adds to the theory of change introduces additional deg...