a personal note of appreciation for EAG: EAG is the best person-event fit i’ve encountered. when i first went, i was 17yo in an ffp3 mask, two days off the plane from two years in hong kong, what the HECK i’d not attended a gathering of more than 6 ppl in all that time, now 1000 people in one place. for a while all my conversations naturally entrained to the 30min format. i went really quickly prague → berlin → d.c. → rotterdam → cdmx that year. culminated in CLR/MIRI/FHI/GPI exposure. then i skipped eag bay. and didn’t go back for two years. i restarted with eag nyc this fall. i treated it like a research conf (i like research confs). now from eag bay:

today was v calm / priced-in, except the excitement & intrigue of [housemate’s] discovery, obj-lvl and epistemic. everything feels mechanistic but that. bifurcation between old and new worlds continues (prosaic alignment vs shallow/disorganised civilisational strategy); separately, v strong differences in what diff ppl elicit from me / each other; keeps recurring. lots of ppl confused why am at all dedicated to studies / need to reflect. lots of familiarity on this day, which has its limits

alignment is a conversation between developers and the broader field. all domains are conversations between decision-makers and everyone else:

“here are important considerations you might not have been taking into account. here is a normative prescription for you.”

“thanks — i had been considering that to 𝜀 extent. i will {implement it because x / not implement it because y / implement z instead}.”

these are the two roles i perceive. how does one train oneself to be the best at either? sometimes, conversations at eag center around ‘how to get a job’, whereas i feel they ought to center around ‘how to make oneself significantly better than the second-best candidate’.