There is room for something like RAISE
Self-studying all of the technical prerequisites for technical AI safety research is hard. The most that people new to the field get is a list of textbooks. I think there is room for something like what RAISE was trying to become: some sort of community/detailed resource/support structure/etc for people studying this stuff.
Here are some more concrete ideas:
- Detailed solutions for all of the prerequisite math books, e.g. for the ones listed at [1]. I've started on one example of this at [2] (though I'm writing that blog for other reasons as well). You might wonder, why not Stack Exchange or Quora or something? I already do this.[1][2][3][4] I would say it works around half of the time, and actually this feeling of uncertainty, that I could spend time writing up my question only to be completely ignored, is one of the big reasons why I don't post more questions.
- A network of tutors or people who have already worked through a particular book, where you can ask them questions in a really low friction and high probability of getting a response way. A minimal implementation of this is to have a single tutor focusing on training/helping AI safety people, e.g. tutoring to get them quickly up to speed in some undergraduate subfield, or helping them digest "Logical Induction". this requires a kind of ADHD/"living library" mindset.
- Writing up actually good explanations for things like Solomonoff induction, belief propagation, Markov chain Monte Carlo, etc.
- Redpilling people about spaced repetition and other effective learning techniques.
- wiki pages on specific papers might also be useful
