Papers as thoughts: I have thoughts that contribute to my overall understanding of things. The AI safety field has papers that contributes to its overall understanding of things. Lots of thoughts are useful without solving everything by themselves. Lots of papers are useful without solving everything by themselves. Papers can be pretty detailed thoughts, but they can and probably should tackle pretty specific things, not try to be extremely wide-reaching. The scope of your thoughts on AI safety don’t need to be limited to the scope of your paper; in fact, each individual paper is probably just one thought, you never expect to have all your thoughts go into one paper. This is a framing that makes it feel easier to come up with useful papers to contribute, and that raises the importance and value of non-paper work/thinking.
Papers as thoughts: I have thoughts that contribute to my overall understanding of things. The AI safety field has papers that contributes to its overall understanding of things. Lots of thoughts are useful without solving everything by themselves. Lots of papers are useful without solving everything by themselves. Papers can be pretty detailed thoughts, but they can and probably should tackle pretty specific things, not try to be extremely wide-reaching. The scope of your thoughts on AI safety don’t need to be limited to the scope of your paper; in fact, each individual paper is probably just one thought, you never expect to have all your thoughts go into one paper. This is a framing that makes it feel easier to come up with useful papers to contribute, and that raises the importance and value of non-paper work/thinking.