Sneha Revanur

speaker

393 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Jul

Sneha Revanur’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #246 – Sneha Revanur on how a small team of activists helped pass America's landmark AI safety laws · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

For the right person, it's literally the coolest job in the world.

But I think I have a couple of pieces of advice that are also drawing on some of my own reflections from working on this.

I think the first thing, and this is a very specific challenge that comes with AI advocacy.

You are signing up to practice two opposite habits of mind at essentially the same time, and getting good at one really tends to erode the other, right?

So on the one hand, politics rewards fluency in persuasion.

You're building relationships and managing coalitions.

You are learning how to distill messages and make different audiences tick.

And there is one overdeveloped version of the scale where you can be the master of some message that you never actually stopped to ask yourself if you genuinely believe, right?

On the other hand, what's normally rewarded in AI safety circles is very different.

It's sharp, unsparing analytical thinking, very careful, sometimes even fastidious epistemics.

You'll sit down and you'll make an offhand comment and someone will be like,

I don't see why that would be true and like proceed to like really carefully interrogate what you said as if it were some like very important substantive claim.

And this is good because it's why the community has been so right about so many things when everyone else was wrong, but it doesn't automatically make things happen in the world, right?

are like failure modes to like both of these approaches and the challenge I think that I have navigated and that I have like been thinking a lot about recently over the past couple of months as well is is knowing you know when you're a soldier because like being as you're an advocate you were kind of playing the role of a soldier how do you also know you know when to be the scout and how do you know kind of like when to toggle between these two modes and I think that is someone who like went into that soldier mode from a very young age and was kind of like jumping into advocacy

advocacy from a very young age, I think it's been really helpful for me to sometimes take moments to step back and just take stock of, am I getting anything wrong here?

Because keep in mind, it took me a while to even realize that catastrophic risk was a big deal and I should be working on this.

And it only came from me taking that moment to step back and toggle into scout mode for a second and just ask myself if I was fundamentally wrong about things in the world.

And that was like,

game-changing and now is the unlock of everything that I've accomplished since then, right?

And so I think that knowing how to toggle between those two modes, knowing when you should step back, also kind of just like actively in the background of the work that you're doing, working to carefully build your knowledge base and like surround yourself with smart people who value

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