Crosspost from my blog.

This some quickly-written, better-than-nothing advice for people who want to make progress on the hard problems of technical AGI alignment.

Background assumptions

• The following advice will assume that you're aiming to help solve the core, important technical problem of desigining AGI that does stuff humans would want it to do.
  
  
  
  • This excludes everything that isn't about minds and designing minds and so on; so, excluding governance, recruiting, anything social, fieldbuilding, fundraising, whatever. (Not saying those are unimportant; just, this guide is not about that.)
  
  
  • I don't especially think you should try to do that. It's very hard, and it's more important that AGI capabilities research gets stopped. I think it's so hard that human intelligence amplification is a better investment.
  
  
  • However, many people say that they want to help with technical AI safety. If you're mainly looking to get a job, this is not the guide for you. This guide is only aimed at helping you help solve the important parts of the problem, which is a very very neglected task among people who say they want to help with technical AI safety generally.
  
  
  
  


• [...]

---

Outline:

(00:21 ) Background assumptions

(02:29 ) Dealing with deference

(04:44 ) Sacrifices

(06:28 ) True doubt

(07:27 ) Iterative babble and prune

(08:43 ) Learning to think

(09:22 ) Grappling with the size of minds

(10:05 ) Zooming

(11:05 ) Generalize a lot

(12:51 ) Notes to mentors

(13:59 ) Object level stuff

---

First published:

November 22nd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rZQjk7T6dNqD5HKMg/abstract-advice-to-researchers-tackling-the-difficult-core

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.