The Importance of Depth of Knowledge in Management

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Most of the things I know about management, not that I know an enormously large number of them could kind of be taught to a substantial extent by just reading a large number of case studies. So maybe there's two different distinctions here. One is about the sort of level of depth of knowledge and the other is about just like having to know a lot of facts or a lot of terms,. Like history, it's extremely hard to discuss history unless you knows a lot of history.

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How hard is it to arrive at true beliefs about the world? How can you find enjoyment in being wrong? When presenting claims that will be scrutinized by others, is it better to hedge and pad the claims in lots of caveats and uncertainty, or to strive for a tone that matches (or perhaps even exaggerates) the intensity with which you hold your beliefs? Why should you maybe focus on drilling small skills when learning a new skill set? What counts as a "simple" question? How can you tell when you actually understand something and when you don't? What is "cargo culting"? Which features of AI are likely in the future to become existential threats? What are the hardest parts of AI research? What skills will we probably really wish we had on the eve of deploying superintelligent AIs?

Buck Shlegeris is the CTO of Redwood Research, an independent AI alignment research organization. He currently leads their interpretability research. He previously worked on research and outreach at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. His website is shlegeris.com.

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