I want to run a writing group based on Holden Karnofsky’s Learning By Writing approach. The idea is to personally do in-depth investigations into questions you care about. I understand this as roughly reading less than you think you should and writing more than you think you can.
I’m not yet certain exactly how this should look. My first guess would be to have a ~1 hour group call once a week for 4 weeks. Each group member picks a question they want to work on over the 4 weeks. Meetings are spent giving feedback, debugging, discussing etc.
I think Holden’s approach is powerful because you form hypotheses early and iterate on them. This helps combat the trap of continually gathering information while not really making progress
Here’s an outline:
| Step 1 | Pick a topic |
| Step 2 | Read and/or discuss with others (a bit) |
| Step 3 | Explain and defend my current, incredibly premature hypothesis, in writing (or conversation) |
| Step 4 | Find and list weaknesses in my case |
| Step 5 | Pick a subquestion and do more reading/discussing |
| Step 6 | Revise my claim/switch sides |
| Step 7 | Repeat steps 3-6 a bunch |
| Step 8 | Get feedback on a draft from others, and use this to keep repeating steps 3-6 |
I (Jordan) am personally excited to write about AI threat models regarding existential risks. I’d love for you to join me if you’re interested in similar things, though I welcome a variety of topics. Depending on the numbers, I may encourage people to run separate groups.
If you’d like to try this with me, please fill out this form
This will be most relevant for people who have in-depth knowledge of EA, x-risk, rationality etc. already.
I really love this idea - although I don’t have time to do this right now, I want to express my support of it