Streetlight, Torchlight and Nightvision

Note: We at PrincInt are launching a program teaching “Discernment” or “Taste” and generally spend a lot of our time in workshops and otherwise trying to teach academics how to think about AI such that their research ends up being useful. I had used a metaphor (building on Wentworth’s postmortem ) multiple times to explain what we do and why, and thought that it could be useful more broadly. All views are my own, and strategy takes do not represent everyone at PrincInt etc. AI writing level 0 (no non-trivial use) When I first joined the field, I told 80,000 hours that I have a background in Economics, almost a decade as a professor, and connections from my time in China. They said something like “all of that is useless - you have 10 years running NGOs, we need Ops people, do that”. At the time, they were right! In 2021-22 there was little going on in either Economics or China, but if I was joining now it would be completely different - I’d have orgs to join, or if I tried fundraising for something in those fields, it would now be much easier. I would not have to explain why China is important, or that Economics has something interesting to say, the path has been threaded, and light