Leveling Up: advice & resources for junior alignment researchers

This sequence is a compilation of resources that I recommend to people who are leveling up in alignment research. I expect it to be most useful for junior alignment researchers (~0-2 years of experience).

This sequence is not a comprehensive set of resources. It’s a set of resources that was cherry-picked by me. It also mostly focuses on my own writing, with a few strong pieces by others. The pieces focus on frames, tools, “ways of thinking”, and general resources—not content knowledge (for that, see AGISF & Alignment 201).

“The hope is that you and others like you will help actually solve the problem, not just follow directions or read what’s already been written.”—Abram Demski

7 traps that (we think) new al­ign­ment re­searchers of­ten fall into

Qual­ities that al­ign­ment men­tors value in ju­nior researchers

Prin­ci­ples for Align­ment/​Agency Projects

Align­ment Re­search Field Guide

Worst-case think­ing in AI alignment

Re­sources that (I think) new al­ign­ment re­searchers should know about

11 heuris­tics for choos­ing (al­ign­ment) re­search projects

Naive Hy­pothe­ses on AI Alignment

Align­ment Org Cheat Sheet

An overview of some promis­ing work by ju­nior al­ign­ment researchers

(My un­der­stand­ing of) What Every­one in Tech­ni­cal Align­ment is Do­ing and Why