# Now <div class="pills-container"> <span class="pill">Last Updated: September 25, 2025</span> <span class="pill">Location: London, UK</span> <span class="pill">Inspired by <a href="https://nownownow.com/about">Derek Sivers</a></span>. </div> ## What's keeping me busy I always seem to be doing a hundred things a once. I'm trying to avoid this [busyness trap](https://medium.com/swlh/avoiding-the-busyness-trap-15b0d77829d1) though, but I'm still learning how. - I spend most of my time (70%) doing AI safety-related work. - Participating in [ARENA 6.0](https://www.arena.education/). - Facilitating a [course on AI policy](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FbbhWto1zrlCXyGjNQ_kd4l7sgsuMz053EXfL1ODfkg/edit?usp=sharing) that dives deep into AI governance frameworks. - Helping out [Gavin Leech](https://www.gleech.org/about/) in reviewing the progress of AI safety agenda in 2025. - Designing alignment benchmark environments as a continuation of [this project](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15zlRwVakF_iYSKgeasfOgS8GdBoyuFG7b_fWkGNIpiU/edit?usp=sharing) from [AI Safety Camp](https://www.aisafety.camp/). - Helping out [AI-Plans](https://ai-plans.com/) run events and build their courses. - Contributing to the [MIT AI Risk Repository](https://airisk.mit.edu/) as a research collaborator. - Curating a [database of AI safety papers](https://aisafetypapers.com) and [hosting a weekly reading group](https://paperclipminimizer.club/) to explore those papers in depth. Feel free to join the reading group by the way, though message me first if you do. - I spend 20% of my time taking up an online course in statistics. I never got to take stats in high school (I skipped 8th grade) and college (stats was never part of our curriculum). And I am now learning R because of that. - I spend 10% of my time [building software tools to help small-business owners in the Philippines do their work better.](https://loomify.app/) ## What helped update my mental models 1. AI systems do not need to be very very smart in order to disrupt the world to an irreversible scale: [What Multipolar Failure Looks Like, and Robust Agent-Agnostic Processes (RAAPs) (Critch, 2021)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LpM3EAakwYdS6aRKf/what-multipolar-failure-looks-like-and-robust-agent-agnostic) 2. Most of the time, it's better to have a general direction than a specific goal: [Explore More: A Bag of Tricks to Keep Your Life on the Rails (Tekofsky, 2024)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uwmFSaDMprsFkpWet/explore-more-a-bag-of-tricks-to-keep-your-life-on-the-rails) 3. Success means being at the top 1% of what you do among others at your level, and you get there by never letting yourself work within silos: [Tips for Empirical Alignment Research (Perez, 2024)](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/dZFpEdKyb9Bf4xYn7/tips-for-empirical-alignment-research) 4. Anything I do, especially learning, should not be done passively: [Social Tinkering: Why Collaborative Curiosity Beats Vibe-Coding (Morris, 2025)](https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/social-tinkering-why-collaborative) 5. Taking time to process stuff isn't necessarily bad and could be a superpower if utilized correctly: [You're a Slow Thinker. Now What? (Hatta, 2025)](https://youtu.be/WsKi3DMqi2g) ## What I'm still learning I've always been a self-directed learner, but I'm learning that feedback loops and mentorship are force multipliers. If I want to grow, these are things I need to work on: - **Getting ideas to work quickly.** That means learning how to scope an idea in less than a day, and prototyping them within the next 24 hours. - A lot of my progress happened over the past month because of [ARENA 6.0](https://www.arena.education/). - So far, I'm still able to write a thousand words in ~1 hour, but I'm a humanities major so...that's not really impressive. BUT I'm getting better and better in prototyping experiments quicker. - A big reason why I think my learning rate accelerated was because I learned to have a system that I can follow when building prototypes (or at least relying on existing frameworks rather than reinventing the wheel. The other big part of it is *being* in a high-achieving environment. Since I work at [LISA](https://www.safeai.org.uk/) and I get bugged with "what are you working on?" and "how did you do X?" questions every lunch and dinner. That peer pressure somehow fixed my work ethic. - Generally though, I'm still a big comms person and still excel at comms-related work that is also useful in research (i.e., writing, building decks, generating visualizations, etc.). - **Shortening my feedback loop.** It has been brought to my attention that my problem is not that I don't have skills, it's the fact that I don't share what I'm doing. Since no one knows what I'm doing, no one is also able to give me feedback. Well, I'm changing that. Feel free to give me feedback [via a call](https://calendly.com/ramennaut/1-1) or [via this feedback form](https://bit.ly/FeedbackForLenz). Please have a low bar for reaching out. I need thoughts from human beings aside from myself.