Focus on the places where you feel shocked everyone's dropping the ball

I don't operate with this mindset frequently, but thinking back to some of the highest impact things I've done I'm realizing now that I did those things because I had this attitude. So I'm inclined to think it's good advice.

This principle is especially true for relatively unexplored fields with relatively few people working on them.  If theres only like 10 people working on some sub-field of AI, then it's actually highly likely that all of them are missing something important. This is especially true when you factor in group think and homogeneity: If all 10 of them are mathematicians, then it would be completely unsurprising if they shared flawed assumptions on other fields like computer science or biology. 

Everyone being wrong on some core assumption is actually fairly common, if the assumption in question is untested and the set of "everyone" is not that large. This is one of the reasons I am unbothered by having substantially different opinions on AI risk to the majority here.  

Look around for places where something seems incompetently run, or hopelessly inept, and where some part of you thinks you can do better.

One question that comes to mind for me is how do you differentiate this situation from unilateral action on bad things? There's a part of me that wants to uninformative like "oh yeah, just do the good type of unilateral action but not the bad type of unilateral action. Easy!" 

But my guess is that reality isn't quite as unforgiving, and there are probably at least some good heuristics to reduce the risk of bad unilateral actions. But if so, what are they?

What you're saying here resonates with me, but I wonder if there are people who  might be more inclined to assume they're missing something and consequently have a different feeling about what's going on when they're in the situation you're trying to describe. In particular, I'm thinking about people prone to imposter syndrome. I don't know what their feeling in this situation would be - I'm not prone to imposter syndrome - but I think it might be different.

Thanks for the post!

See also Rob Wiblin’s “Don't pursue a career for impact — think about the world's most important, tractable and neglected problems and follow your passion.”

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