AI Safety Acculturation is Neglected

At the local AI safety co-working space, there are ~two kinds of regulars. There's the kind of regular who's been thinking seriously about AI safety and alignment since pre-2022, who have passing to intimate familiarity with the funding ecosystem, the Sequences, and various conferences that happen at Lighthaven. Let's call them rationalists. Then there's the kind of regular who comes in with many years of impressive industry or government experience, who realized in the last few years that it is important and worthwhile to pivot their career towards making sure that this AI thing is handled competently by the people in power, and who have many valuable skills, insights, and connections that are lacking in rationalist culture. Let's call them professionals. There are, of course, many people who are somewhere in between - bright undergrads born this millennium who have been involved in EA since stumbling upon 80k hours in high school, professionals who previously identified as EA but drifted out of the scene a few years ago, founders who have idly read some Scott Alexander. But let's call it a dichotomy for now. There's a large culture gap between the rationalists and the professionals. Robust mutual understanding seems important if we want to work together on this project of not having AI blow up our civilization, and it is only by working together that there is a chance that we might succeed. Unfortunately, there seems to be an underlying assumption that all you really need to do is stick the two groups in the same room for long enough and the acculturation will happen by default. This seems wrong to me; my experience so far is that there are many unspoken assumptions that are held by the two groups that sort of never come up in conversation, except in weird awkward eruptions when a fundamental assumption is violated. When that happens, the risk is that it pulls the two groups further apart, instead of closer together. Some examples from recent events and discussions: A recent facilitated discussion where we were encouraged to process our emotions around AI safety, and some people said things like "I feel existential terror at the thought that maybe everyone I love and also our entire species is entirely wiped out in ten years' time" and other people said things like "I am feeling extremely inspired by the amount of driven and intelligent people in the room". I assume that both parties were kind of baffledly thinking "c'mon, dude, read the room" at the other party. A high-effort, small-group serious policy discussion of AI 2040 where most of the room simply could not take the idea of space property rights seriously because it seems like some sort of demented SF libertarian fever dream Me feeling very anxious when I contemplate sharing this piece in the co-working slack, because it's a moderate violation of professional norms that might result in the groups further feeling alienated from each other rather than the opposite But also, like, timelines, so it seems useful to ask: what might deliberate acculturation look like? Here are some ideas for how to more deliberately bridge fundamental culture gaps: Beyond speed friending, perhaps a regular AMA/interview type session, where you sit down a singular person in the network for an hour perhaps over lunch, and ask them questions such as: what made you care about AI safety? What's your work/research history like, what's one thing you've done that you're most proud of? What do you think is the most effective lever to change? Encouraging rationalists to hold basic sessions on concepts like "ask vs guess culture", "steelmanning", "double crux" Encouraging professionals to hold basic sessions on concepts like... hmm. This really just doesn't work at all. Rationality has a foundation of explicit, compressible concepts, while professional competence is mostly tacit and procedural, so there really isn't a straightforward analogue. The closest thing might be to get the professionals to share war stories instead, but I think sharing war stories outside of EITHER small groups or up on stage at some several hundred dollar conference is very Not Done in that culture? Maybe I should probably host a session that's just "here are all of the weird idiosyncratic things that rationalists are more likely to believe, ask me questions about them and I won't get mad". God, I really wish there was a professional counterpart to me who can host a session of "here are all of the weird things that professionals are more likely to believe, please ask questions" Establishing common knowledge that acculturation and mutual understanding is a task that needs to be worked on and will not passively happen by default, and people who have a foot in both worlds should consider if it would be useful for them to do something about this Having written this list out, I am dissatisfied with it because I'm not actually that confident that doing all those things will result in the degree of trust and