“More people should write basic AI safety explainers” by Linch

I think people continue to underrate the value of writing the clearest, most basic, simplest possible case for important parts of AI safety. For example, before I wrote my own explainer for the simplest possible case for AI doom, I noticed that all existing explainers, of which there aren't many, had multiple of the six problems below: They have too many extraneous details They appeal to overly complex analogies They seem to spend much of their time responding to insider debates and come across as shadow-boxing objections. They have "meta" stuff prominently in the text. Often they "sound like science fiction." I think this plausibly was correct historically but in the year 2026 they don't need to be. Often they reference too much insider jargon and language. I set out to improve on the SOTA. I did not fully succeed, but I think it was moderately better. Since then, there have been other, probably better, explainers (Yay!). But actually this is true not just for the basic case but many other parts as well. For example, before I wrote my explainer on recurrent neuralese (which has since been superseded by Scott's better explainer), the top Google search [...] The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 12th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLdgq9uAxDHzqXdjj/more-people-should-write-basic-ai-safety-explainers --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.