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.
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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:
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that’s how i started Caltech AI Alignment without being a caltech student.source & further reading
forum.effectivealtruism.org — original article
The bottleneck is political will, not research
Unit economics vs. the singularity
Good Benchmarks