people overcomplicate or mythicize "agency" -- that's bad for the world, so I idiot-proofed it:
being agentic looks like:
noticing “Someone should really do this (very useful) thing”
noticing “Hmm no one’s doing it / Do I know someone else who could do this?”
“I can do something about it!”
“I go do it / I did it! click here to see my learnings.”
rinse and repeat.get your reps in.
every hour, every quarter, every chapter of your life.
someone described as “high agency” just does this at a higher frequency / intensity, or harder problem-selection.
~~~
that’s it.
stop waiting for all the traffic lights to turn green, you can just do things, get your reps in.
for example, teach someone for 3mins what it would take them 3hrs.
for example, proactively taking pictures when the event organizers are too busy, anticipating pictures are useful.
for example, noticing there’s no AGI-preparedness university group in your school and inserting yourself to start one.
for example, proactively starting a better vegan protein-bar company because most protein bars suck.
for example, noticing not enough people are communicating about risks from advanced AI so you hit record and make videos that explain AI security gaps.
this is battle-tested myself btw / there’s skin-in-the-game to my 4-step plan:
that’s how i started Caltech AI Alignment without being a caltech student.
that’s how i think about being proactively useful in running my org.
that’s how u sharpen your instinct of doing useful things / break the cycle of doing useless things.
that’s how u stop rationalising yourself out of courage to do-the-thing; stop planning to learn to ride a bike, struggle thru riding the damn bike!
that’s how u go ideally build something the world needs (go above ‘build something people want” — many wants are insignificant or useless).
also, skip reading self-help books about “how to be agentic” and just do-the-thing.
get your agency reps in.
i drove 6hrs from the bay, crashed at friend A’s couch, wrestled with Wordpress to ship a good-enough website in 6hrs, borrowed easel pad+stand and foldable table, secured friend B from UCLA as technical facilitator, called friend C with access to free college-library-printing to help print a stack of 500 b&w flyers for free, asked friend D where the highest-foot-traffic intersection at caltech is. showed up over 2 days, 4hrs each; got 1 parking fine but eh, we won.
TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
A preliminary estimate, and a request for better ones.
Summary
I believe the standard literature estimates for the number of DALYs attributable to a case of stunting are too low, largely because they don’t account for the long term effects. This means that childhood nutritional interventions that reduce the prevalence of stunting may be substantially more cost-effective than previously believed.
Epistemic status
Exploratory and back-o...
TL;DR: Kairos has raised $50 million from Coefficient Giving for two years of funding, one of the largest commitments they’ve made towards AI safety fieldbuilding to date. We’re using this to make an ambitious push for growing Kairos, broadening our portfolio of talent infrastructure projects and incubating new organizations. We’ve doubled in size in the last six mon...
