Common mistakes in AI safety group organizing

Back in the day, I was a very active AI safety group organizer. I commonly notice people making the same mistakes across many clubs. I have written down a list of some of these mistakes hoping people will avoid them in the future:

• Reading groups often require that people read things before meetings. This is a mistake. People often don't do the readings. And the lack of common knowledge that everyone has read the reading degrades the conversation quality.
  • Instead, have longer meetings, serve food (so, lunch/dinner meeting slots), and read during the actual meeting.
• Reading groups often don't sort people into cohorts properly. Mainly, they fail at clustering people into clusters of roughly equal ML knowledge and age. Grad students don't want to discuss a paper with freshmen. People with lots of ML knowledge don't want to discuss a paper with people with no ML knowledge.
  • Instead, group people with people similar to them in ML knowledge and age.
• Reading groups often rely on digital materials instead of physical printouts. Screens are distracting and there is no common knowledge that people are paying attention.
  • Neatly print every reading ahead of time instead.
• Clubs don't gatekeep enough. There exist many people whose presence is net-negative to events. Those people should not be accepted to the club or invited to its events.
  • Instead, get signal on people through application forms and word-of-mouth. If people seem like their presence wouldn't make the club better, don't include them. Also, invest in people (through helping them upskill and expecting them to contribute to high-context conversations) such that they can become the types of people who can contribute. A lot of what it means to build a community is knowing how to gatekeep it properly.
• Organizers aren't knowledgeable enough. People can notice if you're well-read and have good takes. If you're not knowledgeable, they will take you less seriously and you will be worse at understanding the world and helping others understand it.
  • Instead, foster a culture where organizers (especially the main ones) need to be worthy of being role models for other students. They should be doing quality work and thinking about and talking about AI safety.
• Organizers don't have serious vibes. Unserious vibes drive people away and make people think that the organizers don't take the actual issues seriously.
  • AI safety is not just another thing to form a club around. It's a serious topic and people who are teaching others about it should act like it. It should feel much more like a pre-professional club (e.g. an ML reading group, or a consulting club) and less like a social club (e.g. a board game club).
• Organizers aren't close enough friends. If the organizers don't know each other well enough and don't get along well enough, the club will function much worse because of friction, and outside people will find the club less attractive.
  • Instead, treat "the organizers are friends" as one of the main goals of the club.

Thank you, group organizers, for your work on helping others contribute to the field. I hope that you will meet the current moment with the seriousness it deserves.